A flat price per Egg, without the hyperscaler bill you can never quite forecast
Microsoft Azure is an enormous, capable cloud, and Azure App Service is a solid way to run a web app inside it. The catch is the shape of the whole thing: pricing scales by App Service Plan tier, in USD, and the total tends to creep as costs accrue across the many services around your app. Ruust makes the opposite trade. One flat price per Egg per month in GBP, unmetered egress on every tier, and apps kept warm around the clock. For lots of small, always-on services, you will know the bill before the month begins.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Azure is a full hyperscale cloud and Ruust is a focused, flat-priced home for small always-on apps, so this is a deliberate contrast rather than a like-for-like swap. Here is how the two line up on the things that shape your bill and your day-to-day: pricing, egress, cold starts and how much platform you have to operate. Azure details describe its general model and can change, whilst Ruust's numbers are exact.
| Ruust | Microsoft Azure | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat GBP per Egg per month. Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. | Priced by App Service Plan tier and usage, in USD, with costs across many services on top. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No bandwidth bill, ever. Fair-use rate caps only. | Outbound data transfer is typically metered per GB beyond a modest allowance. |
| Cold starts | None. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7. No scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | Lower App Service tiers can idle out, and consumption-plan functions may cold start. |
| Currency | GBP, the same price in every region. No FX movement on a UK card. | Priced in USD, so UK teams also carry conversion and card charges. |
| Complexity | One dashboard, one flat line per Egg. Connect a repo and you are live. | Powerful but broad: the portal, roles and billing are enterprise-complex to navigate. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your Coop. | Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Cache for Redis and more, each billed separately. |
| Regions and reach | eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, Frankfurt and Singapore coming. | A vast global region footprint, a genuine strength Ruust does not try to match. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your Linux boxes, £2/Egg capped £20/host. | Managed cloud (with Azure Arc for hybrid), not a bring-your-own-host panel model. |
Microsoft Azure details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Microsoft Azure's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
One flat GBP price, not a hyperscaler estimate
Every Egg is a fixed monthly figure in pounds: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12 and Large £24, or a custom size on the slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB. It is the same in every region, with no seat or plan fee to start. There is no tier to model and no USD conversion to reconcile, so the number you agree to is the number you keep paying.
Unmetered egress, so traffic is never a line item
On Azure, outbound data transfer is usually metered per gigabyte beyond an allowance, and on a busy app that is often the charge that quietly grows. Ruust does not meter egress at all, on any tier. A launch day, a chunky download or a chatty API costs exactly the same as a quiet Tuesday. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps stop abuse, but there is no volume cap and no egress line on your invoice.
Always-on, so no cold starts
Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, with no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet night is as fast as the last. Lower App Service tiers can idle out and consumption-plan functions can cold start, which is fine for bursty work but awkward for the small, always-on services Ruust is built for.
One platform, not a portal to learn
Connect a git repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your own Dockerfile), pick a region and size, and you are live on HTTPS in about two minutes, with TLS issued in roughly ninety seconds and renewed automatically. Managed Postgres and Redis, private networking inside a Coop, custom domains, health checks, replicas and zero-downtime rolling deploys all sit under one dashboard, without stitching together separate cloud services first.
Where Microsoft Azure is the better fit.
Unmatched breadth and enterprise integration
Azure is a genuine hyperscaler with hundreds of services, and it integrates tightly with the wider Microsoft estate: Entra ID (Active Directory), Microsoft 365, Windows Server and enterprise identity and compliance tooling. If your organisation already runs on Microsoft, that integration and the certifications behind it are a real, hard-won advantage that a focused platform cannot replicate.
The strongest home for Windows and .NET
Azure App Service has first-class support for Windows and .NET, from classic ASP.NET to modern workloads, with deployment slots, tooling and Visual Studio integration built around them. If your stack is Windows-first or heavily .NET, Azure tends to be the smoothest and best-supported place to run it.
Depth for large, complex estates
For big applications that span many managed services, need a vast global region footprint, or lean on advanced networking, governance and hybrid options like Azure Arc, Azure's depth is exactly the point. If your requirements are broad and enterprise-shaped, that catalogue and its usage-based flexibility are genuine strengths.
Ruust vs Microsoft Azure, the common questions.
Is Ruust a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Azure?
Not exactly, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Azure is a full hyperscale cloud with hundreds of services; Ruust is a focused platform for running lots of small, always-on apps on flat GBP pricing. If your app runs from a git repo or a container and mainly needs to stay up with a database beside it, Ruust fits well. If you depend on Azure's deeper services or its Microsoft integrations, Azure remains the right home, and plenty of teams will happily use both.
How does Ruust avoid the surprise bills a big cloud can bring?
Two ways. First, pricing is flat: one fixed GBP price per Egg per month, the same in every region, rather than tiered usage that accrues across services. Second, egress is unmetered on every tier, so bandwidth never becomes a per-gigabyte line item. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but they never meter your egress volume, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.
What does Ruust cost compared with Azure App Service?
We will not invent Azure's numbers, since they vary by tier, region and the services around your app and are billed in USD. What we can state precisely is Ruust: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12 (most popular) and Large £24 per Egg per month, or a custom slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB, the same price everywhere with no plan fee to start. For many small, always-on apps, that flat figure is far easier to forecast than usage-based cloud pricing.
Do apps cold-start on Ruust like lower Azure tiers can?
No. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7 with no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet period is as quick as any other. Lower App Service tiers can idle out and consumption-plan functions can cold start; Ruust keeps everything running all the time on every paid tier, which is exactly what a small always-on service wants.