All the always-on you need, none of the surprise bill
AWS can run almost anything, and that breadth comes with usage-based billing across nearly every dimension, egress included. Ruust takes the opposite bet: one flat price per Egg, per month, in GBP, with unmetered egress and no cold starts. If you just want small apps that stay up, the maths is a lot kinder here.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
A fair, side-by-side look at how the two platforms handle pricing, egress, always-on workloads and day-to-day deploys. AWS details describe their general model, not fixed figures, since those tend to change.
| Ruust | AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat per Egg, per month, in GBP. Presets from £3 to £24, or a custom slider. | Usage-based across most services, typically metered by the minute or hour, in USD. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. | Egress is usually metered and billed by volume beyond an allowance. |
| Cost predictability | You know the monthly figure before you deploy, and it does not move with traffic. | Powerful, but cost can be hard to forecast when many dimensions bill separately. |
| Cold starts | Every Egg is kept warm 24/7. No scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | Serverless and scale-to-zero options can spin down and cold-start on the next request. |
| Time to first deploy | Connect a repo, pick region and size, live on HTTPS in about two minutes. | Highly capable, but standing up an always-on app tends to need more moving parts. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs on a persistent volume, private to your Coop. | Deep managed database catalogue (RDS and more), also usage-based. |
| Breadth of services | Focused on running always-on apps and their databases well. | Hundreds of services covering almost every cloud need imaginable. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source agent on your Linux boxes, £2 per Egg (capped £20 per host). | Outposts and similar exist, though they sit within the wider usage-based model. |
AWS details are as we understand them and can change. Always check AWS's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
One flat price, in pounds, that does not chase your traffic
Ruust charges a fixed monthly fee per Egg in GBP: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24, or a custom slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB. It is the same price in every region, with no seat or plan fee to start. AWS bills by usage across most dimensions, which is flexible but far harder to predict.
Unmetered egress kills the surprise bandwidth bill
Bandwidth out is unmetered on every Ruust tier, so a traffic spike never becomes an invoice shock. There is a per-Egg fair-use rate cap to stop abuse, but no metering or cap on volume. On usage-based clouds, egress usually meters beyond an allowance, and it is one of the easiest lines to underestimate.
Always-on by default, so no cold starts
Every Egg is kept warm around the clock. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet spell is as fast as the last. Serverless and scale-to-zero options elsewhere can spin down when idle and cold-start on the next hit, which is a poor fit for small apps that simply need to stay up.
Live in about two minutes, without assembling the plumbing
Connect a git repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your own Dockerfile), choose a region and size, and you are on HTTPS in roughly two minutes, with TLS issued in about 90 seconds and renewed automatically. You also get custom domains, health checks, zero-downtime rolling deploys, replicas, private networking in a Coop, a CLI and a dashboard, without wiring services together yourself.
Where AWS is the better fit.
Unmatched breadth and depth
AWS offers hundreds of services spanning compute, storage, networking, machine learning, analytics and much more. If your needs go well beyond running always-on apps, or you want every primitive under one roof, that catalogue is genuinely hard to rival and Ruust does not try to.
Scale and global reach
AWS operates at enormous scale across many regions and availability zones worldwide, with a mature ecosystem of tooling, partners and expertise. For very large, complex or globally distributed systems, that depth is a real strength.
Fine-grained control and pay-for-what-you-use
The usage-based model that makes small always-on apps hard to forecast is also a genuine advantage for spiky or short-lived workloads. If your usage is bursty or occasional, paying only for what you consume, and tuning almost every knob, can work out both cheaper and more precise.
Ruust vs AWS, the common questions.
Is Ruust actually cheaper than AWS?
It depends on your workload. For small, always-on apps with steady or bursty traffic, a flat GBP price per Egg with unmetered egress is usually easier to predict and often cheaper overall, because nothing scales with your bandwidth. For spiky or occasional workloads, AWS pay-for-what-you-use can win. Ruust's advantage is a bill you can name in advance.
What does unmetered egress really mean?
It means we never bill you for outbound bandwidth on any tier, and there is no volume cap. A traffic spike will not produce an egress charge. We do keep a per-Egg fair-use rate cap to prevent abuse, but that is about rate, not a metered allowance you pay to exceed.
Do Ruust apps cold-start like some AWS options?
No. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag. The first request after a quiet period is served as quickly as any other. That is a deliberate contrast with serverless and scale-to-zero options that can spin down when idle.
Can I move an existing AWS app to Ruust?
Usually, yes, if it runs as a container. Connect your git repo and Ruust builds it with Nixpacks or your own Dockerfile, then serves it on HTTPS. You can use managed Postgres and Redis Eggs, or keep an external Postgres or MySQL by connection string whilst you migrate. Regions are eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia), with more coming.