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Insights, analysis, and updates from the AI agent economy. Browse by tag · Browse the archive.
The Egress Tax: Why the Same 500 GB Costs $0 or $60 Depending on the Logo on Your Invoice
A 500 GB/month image-heavy workload costs $0 on Cloudflare R2, $8 on Fly.io North America, $36 on AWS S3, and $56 on Fly Africa — same bytes, 127x spread. A line-by-line recompute across seven providers, sensitivity at 50 GB to 20 TB, and why zero egress still leaves a self-hosted S3 as the honest hedge.
Hetzner Raised Prices Three Times in 2026 — The RAM Shortage Behind Your Next Bill
Hetzner repriced cloud servers three times in 2026 — 30% in April, then 113–175% on dedicated vCPU in June — driven by a DRAM shortage as HBM for AI accelerators crowds out DDR5. Here is the timeline, the wafer math behind it, and what it does to a Cluster API fleet's real bill.
Docker Hub Raised Prices 80 Percent, Then Cancelled Rate Limits — Why Your CI Still Needs a Mirror
Docker Hub raised Pro 80 percent and Team 67 percent, then cancelled planned pull charges — but 100 pulls per 6 hours still blocks burst CI. A line-by-line cost and failure-mode comparison of paying Docker, riding free-tier limits, or running Harbor as a pull-through cache on hardware you already own.
Railway vs Render vs Fly.io on July 19, 2026: Same Stack, Three Bills, and Where the Meter Moves First
Techsy re-audited Railway, Render, and Fly.io on July 19, 2026 after all three shuffled plan names — here is a line-by-line recompute of an identical Node.js+Postgres workload, where per-service multiplication and egress tilt the cheapest-to-most-expensive gap, and what the bill collapses to on a flat Hetzner CX22.
Railway's $5 Hobby vs. a €10 Hetzner Box: What a Solo Dev Actually Pays for an API and a Worker
Railway's $5 Hobby plan covers one tiny service — add a background worker and the same always-on workload costs $40.50 in metered RAM, vCPU, and egress against €10 flat on a Hetzner box, but per-minute billing still wins when average utilization drops below 30%.
Railway's $5 vs Fly.io's $2: What the Cheapest Always-On Service Really Costs
Railway advertises $5 with $5 credit, Fly.io a $2 shared-CPU box. Add a 10GB volume and 50GB egress and the cheapest always-on bill tells a different story — with a line-by-line recompute against a €3.79 Hetzner box.
R2 at $0, B2 at $0.01, S3 at $0.09: What Egress Really Costs Your Object Store
The same 500 GB of object storage costs $7.50 on R2, $3.48 on B2, and $11.50 on S3 — but egress flips the bill from $0 to $441 at 10x read volume. A line-by-line recompute across R2, B2, S3, and self-hosted MinIO, plus where a PaaS should draw the line.
Plex Paywalled Your Own Movies: Three Self-Hosting Rug-Pulls and the Apache 2.0 Test That Catches the Next One
Plex paywalled remote streaming, MinIO stripped its admin console, and NocoDB gated new features behind Enterprise — three self-hosted tools that moved free features behind a paywall in 18 months, and the license checklist that separates Apache 2.0 from open-core risk.
NocoDB's Enterprise Gate Is the Third Warning: How to Vet a Self-Hosted Platform's License Before It Vets You
NocoDB gated Calendar Sync and Image Annotations behind Enterprise in July 2026 — after Plex paywalled remote streaming and MinIO stripped its admin console. Three moves, one pattern, and a five-question checklist to tell Apache-2.0 from open-core before you build on it.
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