Disclosure: funding and price sources

How the site is funded

RackRate.dev is built to be funded by affiliate commissions: if you sign up with a provider that runs an affiliate programme after clicking “View offer”, that provider may pay us a commission. This does not change the price you pay. There is no other income: no ad slots, no paid placements, no paid listings.

As of this build, none of the 32 listed providers has an affiliate programme on file; the links are ordinary links and RackRate.dev currently earns nothing.

All links to providers go through /go/… and carry rel="sponsored", whether or not a commission is paid in the individual case.

What commissions do not affect

• The order: by default the table is sorted by price, lowest first, otherwise by the criterion you pick. Whether a provider has an affiliate programme is not an input to any sort or filter.
• The prices: we show the provider’s list price, net, in euros. Commissions are not part of the price calculation.
• The selection: providers without an affiliate programme are listed exactly like those with one.

Where the prices come from

Every offer carries an origin and a check date; both are shown on the product page. As of this build there are 25,134 offers:

• 13,601 from a provider’s pricing API (vendor-api).
• 11,521 from a provider’s pricing page (vendor-page).
• 12 carried over from the earlier prototype and not yet verified with the provider (legacy-import). They are marked as unverified on the product page; their date is the date of the import, not of a check.

During automated reconciliation a price is only overwritten if plan and specifications match the source and — where the provider lists in euros — the price does not jump by more than 25%. Otherwise the old value stays, with its old date; the next section says what follows from that.

Prices in other currencies are converted at the European Central Bank’s euro reference rate. Where a provider bills disk or IPv4 address separately, the product page shows the composed price and its parts.

Despite all care, prices can be outdated or wrong. The offer on the provider’s website is always the binding one.

When a source breaks

Every price here has a source at the provider: a pricing API or a pricing page. Sources break, in three ways. The source is unreachable or turns our requests away — several providers protect their pages with a gate that blocks automated access, temporarily or for good. The page structure changes and the mapped plan can no longer be found. Or the figures stop matching: the plan suddenly carries different specifications (vCPU, RAM, storage), or the price jumps by more than 25% — the plausibility band.

In each of these cases the reconciliation writes nothing. It only writes what it can substantiate; otherwise the existing price stays, with its existing check date, and the run records the skipped plan together with the reason. One broken source does not hold up the others: the remaining providers are reconciled in the same run. The worst possible outcome is therefore a price that visibly ages — not a price that is wrong.

How often the reconciliation runs is something this page deliberately does not promise: there is currently no fixed schedule, a run is triggered. What every offer carries instead is its check date — the day this price last stood at the source. Until a new run has gone through, that date stays where it is.

So that an old price is not left lying around unnoticed, a script checks the age of every offer before each build:

Older than 45 days

The check flags the price as old. The build still goes ahead; the ageing is visible in the offer’s check date.

Older than 120 days

The same check fails. The website is then not built at all — a state with prices that old cannot go online.

As of this build the oldest check date on file is 19 Sep 2026; no product is past 45 days.

What you may conclude from this: an old check date does not mean the price is wrong, and it is not a fault of this site either. It means that nobody has looked since that day — either no reconciliation has run since, or it did not get through at that source. The older the date, the more it is worth looking at the provider’s page; the offer there is the binding one in any case.