Cheap cloud is often expensive for MSPs.
Not because the monthly VM price is high. Because the total cost of delivering service around that VM gets worse. The cheaper the infrastructure looks on paper, the more often MSPs end up paying through labor, billing confusion, reactive support, and awkward client conversations. At Raff Technologies, that distinction matters a lot because MSPs do not really buy infrastructure the way a solo developer does. They buy something they have to package, explain, defend, and operate repeatedly across multiple clients.
That is why I think many MSPs evaluate cloud pricing too narrowly. They compare the advertised server number and stop there. But a cloud platform is not only a line item. It is an operating model. If the platform introduces billing ambiguity, bandwidth anxiety, slow provisioning, or too much manual work, the invoice may look cheap while the service margin quietly erodes.
We have thought about this carefully at Raff Technologies. One reason we include unmetered bandwidth on every plan is that bandwidth overage billing creates the wrong behavior: teams become more hesitant, more defensive, and less confident about scaling or testing because they are designing around invoice uncertainty instead of actual workload needs. That is not only a developer problem. For MSPs, it becomes a packaging problem. When the underlying cost model is unpredictable, your service promise becomes harder to price cleanly too. That logic already shows up in Raff’s public positioning around unmetered bandwidth, transparent pricing, and simple VM economics. It is also why I think “cheap cloud” can be one of the most expensive decisions an MSP makes.
The Sticker Price Is Not the Operating Cost
This is the first thing I would want any MSP owner to separate clearly.
A low VM price is not the same thing as a low delivery cost.
If the platform is slow to provision, awkward to explain, difficult to standardize, or full of cost conditions your team has to remember, the infrastructure stops being “cheap” the moment service delivery begins. That is especially true for MSPs because they do not feel cloud cost only once. They feel it again and again in onboarding, templating, support, billing, recovery work, and client-facing expectation management.
That is why I do not think MSPs should ask only: “How much is the server?”
They should ask: “How much repeat work will this platform create around the server?”
That second question is usually more expensive.
Hidden Labor Is Where Cheap Cloud Starts to Fail
In my view, hidden labor is the biggest reason cheap cloud hurts MSPs.
A platform can undercut everyone on entry price and still cost more in real operations if your team has to keep solving the same avoidable problems:
- explaining unclear invoices
- tracking bandwidth assumptions
- cleaning up inconsistent deployments
- waiting too long for environments to be ready
- manually checking what is or is not included
- answering client questions that should never have existed in the first place
This is where “cheap” turns into drag.
MSPs win when they can repeat clean delivery. They lose margin when every client stack becomes a small exception. If provisioning is slow, billing is vague, or the platform requires too much interpretation, the team spends more time managing friction and less time delivering value.
That is why I think the real comparison is not cheap cloud versus expensive cloud. It is cheap-looking cloud versus low-friction cloud.
Those are very different things.
Unclear Billing Is a Margin Problem, Not Just an Annoyance
I think this is the most underestimated part of the whole conversation.
Unclear cloud billing does not just frustrate technical buyers. It damages packaging.
An MSP needs to turn infrastructure into a service that clients can understand. That means the pricing underneath matters. If the base cost changes unpredictably, or if bandwidth, snapshots, traffic behavior, or usage edge cases create surprise charges, the MSP has two bad options:
either absorb the uncertainty, or pass it on and make the client relationship harder.
Neither is attractive.
This is why transparent pricing matters much more in MSP environments than in one-off developer experiments. A developer might tolerate a slightly confusing invoice once. An MSP has to build a repeatable service model on top of it. If the cloud provider’s bill is hard to interpret, the MSP’s own pricing becomes harder to defend.
Raff’s public pricing and product pages are strong on exactly this point: published VM tiers, unlimited bandwidth, and straightforward entry pricing starting from $3.99/month on the public pricing page. That is not just a positioning line. It changes how easily a provider can package, quote, and standardize a service. For MSPs, pricing clarity is operational clarity. (pricing, Raff VM)
Bandwidth Surprises Change Behavior in the Worst Way
This is one of the easiest cloud costs to underestimate and one of the worst for MSP confidence.
Bandwidth pricing changes behavior before it even changes the bill.
Teams test less confidently. They plan more defensively. They hesitate before launching something public. They worry that a successful month will cost more than expected.
That is a bad mindset for any infrastructure team. It is even worse for an MSP, because your client is paying you for confidence, not hesitation.
If every growth event, traffic spike, file delivery pattern, or client success story might trigger an uncomfortable cost discussion, the platform is quietly undermining your service model. That is why I think unmetered bandwidth is more than a feature bullet. It is a commercial simplifier.
Raff’s current public product pages explicitly position unlimited bandwidth across the VM offering, and Raff has already made the public argument that bandwidth overage billing encourages the wrong operating behavior. I think that point is especially true for MSPs. Predictable transfer economics make it easier to quote, easier to sell, and easier to support. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}
Slow Provisioning Is More Expensive Than People Admit
A slow provisioning flow is one of those costs that rarely shows up in cloud comparison charts, but MSPs feel it immediately.
The more clients you manage, the more expensive delay becomes.
If standing up a clean environment takes too long, if standard builds do not feel repeatable, or if new workloads require too much manual work before they are usable, then your platform is consuming one of the most valuable things an MSP has: team attention.
This is why fast deployment matters more than it looks.
It affects:
- onboarding speed
- migration turnaround
- recovery readiness
- how quickly you can spin up a replacement environment
- how confidently you can standardize templates across clients
Raff’s public product and pricing pages currently position VM deployment as happening in seconds and, on the Linux product page, under 60 seconds. That kind of speed matters because it helps MSPs preserve momentum during onboarding, support, and recovery situations instead of turning basic infrastructure creation into a ticket queue. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
A cheap VM that takes too much organizational effort to turn into a working client environment is not actually cheap.
Cheap Cloud Gets Worse When You Sell Backup and Recovery
This is where the problem becomes more serious.
An MSP is not only selling compute. It is often selling support, continuity, backup confidence, and some version of operational trust. The more unclear the underlying infrastructure becomes, the harder it is to sell those promises cleanly.
If your team already has to explain variable billing, interpret transfer costs, and work around slow provisioning, then backup and recovery design become harder to package too. You cannot build a clean service promise on top of a messy cost foundation.
This is why I think MSPs should evaluate cloud platforms based on how well they support standardization around:
- predictable monthly quoting
- fast repeat deployments
- low-friction backup posture
- simple upgrade paths
- fewer support-triggering surprises
That is also why this topic fits naturally into Raff’s broader backup and recovery content. If you are packaging managed services, the next useful reads are Cloud Server Backup Strategies: Snapshots, RPO, and Recovery Planning and High Availability vs Disaster Recovery: What Small Teams Actually Need. Cheap infrastructure is not helpful if it makes recoverability harder to price and operate.
What Good Cloud Economics Actually Look Like for MSPs
For MSPs, good cloud economics usually look less dramatic than people expect.
It is not about chasing the lowest visible price. It is about reducing the number of expensive unknowns.
That means the better platform is often the one that gives you:
- predictable billing
- fewer edge-case charges
- repeatable deployments
- cleaner internal packaging
- fast spin-up for new and replacement environments
- lower support burden around infrastructure basics
This is exactly where a simpler cloud model becomes valuable. Raff’s public pricing currently starts at $3.99/month, includes NVMe storage, and positions unlimited bandwidth, fast deployment, and a 14-day money-back guarantee. That combination is useful because it lowers both technical and commercial friction. The point is not that every MSP should buy the absolute cheapest VM. The point is that a provider with simpler economics can make the MSP’s own business model healthier. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}
What This Means for You
If you run an MSP, I would stop asking only: “Which cloud is cheaper?”
I would ask: “Which cloud is cheaper to operate repeatedly across clients?”
That is the more useful question.
If the platform introduces billing confusion, bandwidth anxiety, slow provisioning, or too much manual work, your margin will feel that before your finance sheet does. Cheap cloud becomes expensive the moment your team has to keep compensating for it.
If you are evaluating that trade-off right now, start with Raff pricing, look at Raff VM as the base infrastructure layer, and then review whether your service packaging around backup, recovery, and client onboarding would get simpler or harder on top of it. In my view, that is the real economics test.
Because MSPs do not win by buying the lowest advertised VM.
They win by delivering infrastructure with the least unnecessary friction.