The hidden costs of managed platforms: what the pricing page leaves out

The pricing page says $20 per user per month. The invoice in month four says $890. Nobody lied to you — the gap lives in the dimensions the pricing page does not lead with, and they are broadly the same six dimensions at every vendor.

We went through a year of invoices across six managed platforms. Here is what to check before you migrate, not after.

1. Egress

The single most common surprise. Bandwidth out of the platform is metered, the allowance sounds generous, and then someone puts a video on the marketing site or a customer starts polling your API every second.

Check: what is the included allowance, what is the per-GB rate above it, and does traffic to your own CDN count as egress? That last question has a surprising answer more often than it should.

2. Build minutes and compute time

CI minutes, build minutes, function execution duration, container seconds. These are cheap per unit and unbounded by default, which is a combination that generates invoices.

The pattern to watch for: a platform that bills function duration rather than invocations. A route handler that waits 400ms on a slow upstream costs four times one that waits 100ms, for identical work. Optimising a slow dependency becomes a billing decision.

3. Image and asset transformation

On-the-fly image optimisation is billed per source image, per transformation, or per GB processed, depending on the vendor. If your images are user-generated and unbounded, so is this line item. This is the source of most of the viral “my hosting bill was $5,000” stories.

Check whether there is a spend cap. Set it.

4. Seats you did not think were seats

Read-only users. Contractors. Your designer who logs in twice a month. The CI service account. Several platforms bill all of these as full seats, and a 30-person engineering team turns out to have 47 billable identities.

5. The support plan

The free tier’s support is a community forum. The moment you have production traffic, someone will ask what happens when it breaks at 2am, and the answer is a support plan priced as a percentage of spend — commonly 3–10%, sometimes with a floor of several hundred dollars a month.

Budget it from day one. You will buy it eventually.

6. The engineer-hours

The line item that never appears on any invoice and usually dominates the others. A managed platform that needs one engineer at 20% time to operate costs you roughly $30,000 a year before you pay the vendor anything.

This cuts both ways, and it is the strongest argument for managed platforms: the self-hosted alternative that costs $200/month in compute may cost $80,000/year in attention.

How to price a migration properly

Take last month’s real usage — not your estimate, the actual numbers from your current platform — and run it through the candidate’s pricing calculator. Then:

• Add 40% for growth over the contract period.
• Add the support plan.
• Add every non-engineer who will need a login.
• Add an engineer-hours estimate, honestly, with the person who will do the work in the room.

If the result still wins, migrate. If it only wins on the headline number, you have found the gap this article is about.

The ask

Vendors: put egress, function duration and image transformation rates on the pricing page, above the fold, with a calculator. The teams who would be annoyed by that clarity are not the ones you want signing annual contracts anyway.