I left my job earlier this year after watching companies get crushed by cloud bills for workloads that didn't need hyperscaler complexity. Some examples from my previous life: - $1k/month for a basic 16 vCPU VM - $50k/month for a high-RAM instance - Over $1k/month for notebook platform start-stop execution
We built Carolina Cloud for data scientists and small teams who need serious compute without the sticker shock. Our sweet spot: if you're running VMs, notebooks, or RStudio and not deeply tied to AWS/Azure/GCP service ecosystems, we can save you a lot of money.
What we offer: - Standard Ubuntu VMs - One-click Marimo notebooks - One-click RStudio Server and Shiny hosting - S3-compatible object storage (launching soon) - Prepay discounts for commitments as short as 2 weeks - SOC2-certified, HIPAA-compliant datacenter in Charlotte, NC
Simple pricing: $0.005/vCPU/hr, $0.005/GiB RAM/hr, and $0.0001/GiB of hot storage/hr on AMD EPYC Turin processors. A 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM instance runs ~$240/month vs $800+ on AWS.
We're not trying to replicate every AWS service - if you need Lambda + Secrets Manager + S3 with pre-signed URLs, stick with AWS. But if you're a hedge fund running backtests, a biotech team analyzing genomics data, or a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price.
Check us out at console.carolinacloud.io - happy to answer questions about our infrastructure, pricing, or why we think there's room for regional clouds built on owned hardware.
brudgers•4d ago
How will you provide high quality service and reliability while competing on price with the scale and financial might of AWS?
Because in B2B, those things tend to have a higher value than initial cost. Or to put it another way, your customers will be making long term investments by choosing you.
Successfully competing on price in a commodity market requires cheaper access to resources and because price is the easiest way to segment a market, low prices attract price sensitive customers...they are the least desirable customers. Good luck.
bojangleslover•2d ago
Similarly for a mom-and-pop bakery (contrived example) hosting a website for $60/mo, going down to $20/mo (just to keep the 1/3 ratio) also is probably not worth it.
But some of our customers are not like that. For example a hedge fund we have been working with needs 512G RAM and 256 vCPUs for a mortgage model. The data size is not too big and once they get their results they rip it back to on-prem. The complexity is low, ie they just ssh in and do their models. Often they let them run over the weekend.
And these guys are very price-sensitive. In their industry, saving money means more carry for partners and bigger bonuses for quants. These guys are counting nickels.
So I think you're totally right for the large part of the market that we're not really for, and we're not really competing for those types of customers. But we're not really providing much managed service, we're providing a commodity that, assuming you don't need the high-complexity ecosystem surrounding it, can be very nice for customers who are price-sensitive.
jammo•1h ago