Principles
- Path before price. Name the traffic shape — who pulls, which network edge, which SKU — before any rate. See path template.
- Unknown until verified. Cells without a dated provider cite stay Unknown until verified. No invented list prices.
- No scorecrowns. We do not crown a winner from partial public pages or marketing slides.
- No guaranteed savings. Estimators are synthetic education, not commitments or procurement advice.
- As-of dating. Pair shown rates with retrieval date and region when a human verifies a cell.
Preferred sources
- Provider official pricing / calculator pages (region-qualified).
- Public pricing APIs only when documented and versioned.
- Customer invoices (anonymized lessons) — never scraped private consoles.
Each compare spoke ends with dated source footnotes under its path matrix. Verified docs may drop the Unknown badge; pricing pages usually keep it until a human re-checks the SKU for the reader’s region.
Worked Unknown example
Suppose a reader wants Internet egress for “object store → public client” at 5,000 GB. The matrix lists the path class and links to the provider pricing URL with an as-of date, but the $/GB cell stays Unknown until verified because PipeToll has not pasted a region-qualified figure into the package. The reader opens calculator Mode A, pastes the rate they verified, and keeps the Unknown badge in their own notes until that paste is dated. That is the intended FinOps-lite loop — not a silent default that pretends to be a quote.
A second path: NAT processing plus Internet DT-out. Model hours and GB as separate meters in Mode B. If hourly or processing rates are not cited to today’s provider page for that AZ footprint, leave them Unknown — do not average three blogs into a fake precision.
A third path: CDN origin fill. Estimate fill with CHR in Mode C, then apply the origin provider’s dated $/GB. Edge bandwidth and origin egress remain separate bill lines. Miss-heavy APIs often look “cheap on CDN” until origin fill is named.
Path examples we refuse to invent rates for
- NAT Gateway vs Internet Gateway — triple-charge stack; verify hourly + processing + Internet separately.
- Cross-AZ vs cross-region — HA chatter is not Internet egress; keep meters apart.
- S3 vs R2 and CDN origin fill — free-tier cliffs and CHR dominate more than a single blog $/GB.
Out of scope
Committed-use discounts, private credits, and unpublished enterprise schedules are out of scope for public matrices. We also refuse scorecrowns that blend storage, requests, and egress into one “winner.”
How to contribute a cite
Email founder@masterengine.ai with provider URL, region, SKU name, as-of date, and the path template the rate applies to. We will either date-stamp a cell or keep Unknown — never invent.
Educational only. Contact founder@masterengine.ai. See the glossary for shared vocabulary.