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SIAX vs AWS: small vendor, broad cloud
AWS is the cloud where the answer to almost every question is yes. Over 200 services, regions on every continent with multiple physically separate availability zones per region, and a maturity in the primitives that no one matches. S3 is, in practice, the industry's definition of durable object storage. IAM is hard to learn but unmatched once you actually need fine-grained permissions per resource and condition. The Graviton instances deliver genuinely good price-per-performance at the higher end of scale.
The ecosystem matters at least as much as the services. The largest talent pool, the most ready-made Terraform modules, the most documentation, the most consultants, and a marketplace that makes purchasing easy for large organizations. Need multi-region failover, availability zones as standard, or a managed service for something niche — a queue, a stream, a graph database, an HSM — it already exists, and someone has already run it in production.
We don't compete with that breadth, and we're not going to claim otherwise. We compete on the price level for ordinary workloads, on an invoice that can be predicted, and on the fact that everything we run is open source in the EU. Be honest about what you're actually using: if you're running a handful of containers, a PostgreSQL database, and a bucket of files, AWS's breadth is something you're paying for without using. If you're running Lambda-based event architectures, DynamoDB, and Kinesis, it's the opposite — then a move here isn't a move but a rebuilding project.
Where SIAX is stronger
- The price level for normal workloads. An app plus managed PostgreSQL costs 188 kr/month with us. The equivalent on AWS with a small instance and RDS typically runs several times higher. Prices change, but the ratio holds.
- A predictable invoice. Fixed price per service, no surprises from traffic spikes, NAT gateways, cross-zone data transfer, or forgotten resources.
- No egress fee that explodes on you. Outbound traffic is included in the plan instead of being one of the biggest line items on the invoice.
- Simplicity. You don't need someone fluent in IAM policy language, VPC peering, and cost allocation just to get up and running. Two people are enough to understand the whole setup.
- Open source and EU residency. Containers, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible storage, and Git — everything can be run elsewhere, all data sits in the EU, with a Swedish company.
Where AWS is stronger
- The breadth. Over 200 services, from the obvious to the highly niche. Almost every need already has a managed service, and it's battle-tested.
- Regional coverage and redundancy. Multiple availability zones per region, multi-region failover as a product feature, and an operational track record at a scale we can't match.
- The ecosystem: the most consultants, the most Terraform modules, the most documentation, and a marketplace built for large purchasing organizations.
- Certifications and compliance evidence for practically every industry and regulatory requirement, plus support agreements with guaranteed response times.
Side by side
| SIAX | AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Price for a small production app | App Hosting 99 kr/month plus Managed Postgres 89 kr/month = 188 kr/month, fixed price. | A small instance plus RDS plus a load balancer typically lands several times higher per month, and the load balancer alone is often bigger than our entire invoice. Prices change. |
| Outbound traffic | Included in the plan. No line item that grows with traffic. | A limited free amount per month, then per GB. Historically the most common surprise on the invoice, along with NAT gateway and cross-zone traffic. |
| Service breadth | About ten services: hosting, Postgres, object storage, backup, domains, email, git and CI, monitoring, AI gateway. | Over 200 services. Almost everything exists, and most of it is mature. |
| Regions and redundancy | EU data centers in Germany and Finland. Redundancy across multiple locations is built manually and costs extra. | Regions worldwide with multiple availability zones. Multi-region failover exists as a product feature. |
| Permissions model | A simple role and team model. Enough for most, but not for fine-grained per-resource policy. | IAM is hard to learn but unmatched: policies per resource, per condition, per session attribute. |
| Certifications | None. Neither ISO 27001, SOC 2, nor PCI-DSS. GDPR compliance, a data processing agreement, EU residency, and open source as auditability. | Practically every relevant certification and industry framework, with ready-made evidence packages for audits. |
| Talent and ecosystem | Standard tools: Docker, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible API, Git. But few consultants know our specific platform. | The largest talent pool, the most ready-made modules, the most documentation. Easy to hire for. |
| Lock-in | Everything is open source. You can leave us without rewriting your code. | DynamoDB, Lambda-based event architectures, Cognito, Kinesis, and Aurora features have no self-hosted equivalents. Moving means rebuilding. |
| Invoice and support | Fixed monthly price, under ten lines, support in Swedish included. | Usage-based invoice with hundreds of line items. Technical support with a response-time SLA is priced separately. |
Choose AWS if…
Choose AWS if you need something we don't have, and that's more often than you'd think. If you need to run across multiple regions with automatic failover, meet requirements for availability zones, or use managed services like DynamoDB, Kinesis, Aurora, or SQS as load-bearing parts of the architecture — then AWS is right and we're wrong. Choose AWS if you have a fast-growing product where load can go from zero to very large in a day, if you already have a team that knows the platform and a Terraform base that works, or if your procurement process requires certifications from the vendor. We have neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2, and we won't imply that GDPR compliance is the same thing. Also expect that migrating away from an AWS-native architecture is a lot of work: Lambda chains, Cognito, IAM policies, and DynamoDB data models don't move over as-is, and a database migration with minimal downtime requires planning and a maintenance window.
Choose SIAX if…
Choose SIAX if you're using AWS as an expensive Linux hosting provider. That's the most common situation we run into: a few containers, an RDS instance, an S3 bucket, a CloudFront distribution, and an invoice for tens of thousands of kronor a month that no one can really explain line by line. We run that same workload for a fraction of the cost, with the same protocols and formats, in the EU, with an invoice under ten lines long. You also get an operating model two people can hold in their heads, support in Swedish, and a stack made of open source you could keep running yourselves. Feel free to keep S3 for archiving or Route 53 for DNS during the transition — we believe in a gradual move, not one big, risky cutover date.
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