ProfitBricks Drops Prices, Makes Big Claims About AWS And Its High Costs

Cloud provider ProfitBricks has dropped the price of its CPU cores and RAM by 50 percent, making the claim that essentially it is far cheaper to use its service over Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I’m not sure if I should be impressed or not with their analysis, which looks at a variety of factors, ranging from AWS requirements for temporary storage to the different pricing plans they offer. They cite AWS lack of flexibility with its instance sizes. The list goes on.

In the end I’m impressed with ProfitBricks, but not for its claims of how much cheaper they are or how much more AWS could actually drop its own prices. More so, it’s the power of its platform and how the company is approaching the market that is most impressive. Here’s what I wrote about the service a few months ago:

ProfitBricks raised $19.5 million in March and now has a total of $38.3 million in funding. Founders Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger built 1&1 Internet, one of the world’s largest web-hosting providers with 70,000 servers and 10 million customers. The company has some muscle not only in funding, but also what it can offer in terms of scaling out and up. Scaling up allows for new apps to be deployed in an environment similar to AWS and means building out vertically to one stack with up to 62 cores.

ProfitBricks charges only for compute and storage, and customers pay for what they consume, which speaks to the company’s pricing claims. They strive to be a pure-play service with InfiniBand networking, which makes their offering super fast.

But AWS is valued for exactly what ProfitBricks derides. AWS has a wide selection of pricing and a correlating list of services that customers value.

So in the end, ProfitBricks is trying to exploit AWS pricing models, claiming in comparison they have a superior, fast and flexible service. I can dig that. But it by no means seems to affect the reasons why people choose AWS. They’re not using AWS just because of its pricing but because of everything about it, including cost, its community and its scrolling list of services and features.