Hyperscaler or Polish cloud? The comparison you only see on the invoice

WebDisk Blog · category: Public cloud · reading time: ~9 minutes

In short:- The virtual machine price list is the least important part of the comparison – the real cost is decided by items you do not see in the configurator: outbound transfer, billing currency and paid support.- At the hyperscalers, outbound transfer above the free 100 GB per month costs about USD 0.09 per GB (as of August 2026). At WebDisk, bandwidth usage is not a separate line on the invoice.- There is no single right answer – below you will find 6 decision criteria and an honest list of situations in which a hyperscaler will be the better choice.

A twenty-person company is choosing a cloud for its online store. The global provider's configurator shows a machine for a few dozen dollars a month – it looks comparable to the Polish operator's offer, and the decision seems to be a matter of taste. Three months later the invoice is twice as high as planned. Nobody cheated anyone – the comparison simply covered one line of the bill, and the bill has a dozen or so of them.

This article puts in order what really distinguishes a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) from a Polish cloud – with numbers where numbers can be verified, and without pretending that one answer fits every company. We are writing it from the perspective of a Polish cloud provider, so we treated the section "when the hyperscaler is better" with particular care – it is the honesty test of the whole text.

The machine price list is where the bill starts, not where it ends

Comparing "an instance with them vs a machine with us" is a natural reflex – and the most common mistake. At a hyperscaler, the price of compute is typically only part of the monthly cost. The rest is added by items that are easy to overlook in the configurator: outbound transfer, public IP addresses, snapshots, NAT gateways, load balancers, monitoring and, finally, the support plan. Each of them is priced separately at the global providers – and each grows separately.

The practical advice is simple: do not compare price list to price list, but scenario to scenario. Describe your workload (how many vCPU and how much RAM, how much data on disk, how much outbound traffic per month, whether you need support) and calculate a full month on both sides. Only then do the differences become visible – and they can be surprisingly large in both directions.

Outbound transfer: the line item that grows quietly

The hyperscalers' model is asymmetric: data going into the cloud enters free of charge, data going out of the cloud is charged per gigabyte. In AWS the first 100 GB per month is free (in total, for the whole account), and above that threshold transfer to the internet costs USD 0.09 per GB in the first tier – as of August 2026, Frankfurt region.

What does that mean in practice? An application that serves its users 2 TB per month (a multimedia service, a file exchange system, a popular online store) will pay about USD 170 per month for the transfer alone – several hundred zlotys, depending on the exchange rate, and often more than the compute costs. And outbound traffic is the component that grows together with the product's success – and that cannot be "optimized" without restricting users' access to their own data.

At WebDisk we adopted a different model, written explicitly into the price list: "We do not meter the usage of purchased resources (including bandwidth)". You pay for the resources you buy – vCPU, RAM, storage – not for every gigabyte served to the internet. To be fair: this does not mean an infinite pipe; it means that bandwidth usage does not generate a separate, growing line on the invoice. For workloads with heavy outbound traffic – backup, media, hosting – this one difference can settle the entire comparison.

Billing currency: exchange-rate risk on your invoice

The invoice from a hyperscaler arrives in dollars or euros. The company's budget is in Polish zloty. This mismatch has two consequences. The first is an accounting one: settling a foreign invoice (VAT reverse charge, exchange-rate differences) is extra work at every month-end close. The second is financial: with a bill of USD 4,000 per month, a change of PLN 0.20 in the exchange rate means about PLN 800 of difference – every month, without any change on the infrastructure side. Planning the annual IT budget then requires forecasting currency rates – a discipline nobody ordered along with the cloud.

At WebDisk, prices are in Polish zloty (net) and do not move with the exchange rate: Cloud PAYG Small is PLN 28, Medium PLN 36 and Large PLN 73 per month (2, 4 and 8 vCPU respectively, 4–16 GB RAM, 50 GB NVMe and a public IP address in every variant; as of August 2026). A Polish VAT invoice closes the accounting topic in five minutes.

Support: an engineer included, or a plan priced as a share of the bill

At the global providers, technical assistance is a product: support plans are paid, usually billed as a percentage of the monthly bill with minimum fees, and the free tier is limited to documentation and forums. It is a model consistent with their scale – and completely unsuited to a company that has one administrator and needs an answer today.

At WebDisk, support in Polish is part of the service, not a separate item on the price list – you talk to an engineer who can see your environment, and in data protection matters you have direct contact with the Data Protection Officer (iod@webdisk.io). An honest counterpoint: the hyperscaler, in turn, has documentation, a community and a wealth of answers on Stack Overflow that no local provider can compete with. If your team solves everything on its own anyway, in English – this point weighs less.

Jurisdiction and GDPR: a region is not the same as the law

Formal compliance with GDPR can be achieved with any large provider – standard contractual clauses and EU regions exist for a reason, and we are not claiming otherwise. The difference lies elsewhere: in the length of the chain that has to be documented. A provider headquartered outside the European Economic Area is subject to the law of its own country regardless of where the region physically sits – so assessing the risk of data transfers after the Schrems II ruling requires an analysis that has to be carried out, defended and kept up to date.

A Polish provider shortens that chain to the minimum: WebDisk is an entity under Polish law (Mazura sp. z o.o.), the data is processed in Europe, and the data processing agreement and all the documentation exist in Polish. For public procurement, healthcare or finance this often means the difference between weeks and days of compliance analysis – not because GDPR somehow "does not apply" somewhere, but because demonstrating compliance costs less work.

Leaving the cloud costs money too: two kinds of lock-in

We devoted a separate article to vendor lock-in – here, just the arithmetic. Lock-in comes in a technical form (an application built on services specific to one provider needs rewriting) and an economic one: getting your data out is outbound transfer, charged per gigabyte. Moving 50 TB out of AWS at August 2026 rates is an expense in the range of USD 4,000–4,500 – a one-off "tax on changing your mind" that is worth knowing before you enter, not on the way out.

The best insurance is standards: virtual machines with portable images, S3-compatible object storage, Kubernetes. At WebDisk this is the foundation of the offer – we described the migration from VMware step by step, and leaving us is just as standard as joining. The incentive is meant to come from the bill and the quality, not from the cost of parting ways.

When the hyperscaler is the better choice

This section is the honesty test of this article, so no dodging – choose a global provider when:

• you need reach in many regions at once – an application with users on several continents requires edge infrastructure that a local operator will not build;
• your architecture stands on high-level managed services – data warehouses, AI pipelines, GPU on demand, globally distributed databases; some of them have no local equivalents;
• your load spikes on a scale of minutes – scaling by the second and the spot instance market are strengths of the hyperscalers;
• you are a startup with credits from a provider or an accelerator – free resources change the arithmetic at the start;
• you require certifications specific to markets that only a global player serves.

The Polish cloud wins with a steady or predictable load, a budget run in Polish zloty, heavy outbound traffic, the need for support in Polish and jurisdictional requirements – that is, the profile that describes most Polish SMEs.

Frequently asked questions

How much does data transfer cost at WebDisk? Bandwidth usage is not billed separately – the price list says it outright: "We do not meter the usage of purchased resources (including bandwidth)". You pay for the machine resources you purchase, not for gigabytes of traffic.

Is migration from a hyperscaler to a Polish cloud difficult? The standard layer – virtual machines, S3 storage, Kubernetes – moves routinely. The cost is a one-off outbound transfer at your current provider plus rewriting the elements built on services specific to it alone. A good plan starts with an inventory of those dependencies.

Do AWS or Azure violate GDPR? No – formal compliance mechanisms exist at all the large providers. The difference concerns the cost of demonstrating compliance: a shorter chain of entities and Polish jurisdiction simplify the documentation, the risk assessment and the conversation with the auditor.

At what scale does a hyperscaler "pay off"? There is no monetary threshold. What decides is the load profile: variability, geographic reach and dependence on managed services – not the size of the bill. There are small projects for which a hyperscaler is justified, and large ones that overpay out of sheer momentum.

Can the two approaches be combined? Yes – and it is often the most sensible model: the steady workload and the data in a Polish cloud, the specialist services at a hyperscaler. Plus a backup copy following the 3-2-1 rule at a different provider than production.

Calculate your own scenario

Comparing clouds is not a contest of ideologies but a spreadsheet with six rows: compute, transfer, currency, support, compliance, exit cost. Fill it in with your workload – and if you like, describe your scenario to us or go straight to the configurations and prices of the WebDisk public cloud. We will calculate it honestly, including the items the configurator does not show.