method
How we work these numbers out
This site asks you to spend money on its advice. So here is where each figure comes from, which ones are measured, which ones are estimated — and what we get out of it.
the numbers this page is made of
- machinesin the catalogue, and how many carry a checked price
- 18 of 18 priced
- oldest pricethe least recently checked entry in the catalogue
- 2026-07-27
- electricityEuropean average, overridable with your own rate in the builder
- €0.25 per kWh
- hours per monthrunning around the clock, or only in the evening
- 730 h, or 243 h
- per spinning driveadded to the machine's idle draw for each mechanical disk
- 5 W
- memory for the systemreserved before any service is counted
- 2 GB
- drive lifetimeused for the replacement reserve, not a warranty
- 5 years
These are read from the live settings as this page renders, not written into it. Change a setting in the back office and this page changes with the engine — a method page with frozen numbers drifts from the tool it describes, which is the worst kind of untruth since it exists to be trusted.
prices
Every hardware price is read from a merchant page, by hand, and carries the date it was read. Nothing is scraped and nothing is averaged: a wrong price that looks precise is worse than no price at all.
A price with no date says so on the page. If you ever see a figure without one, treat it as an order of magnitude — and tell us.
Drives are priced as real products from the catalogue, not multiplied from a rate per terabyte. On a build with bays they are more than half the basket; estimating them would mean estimating the total.
what is estimated, and why
Idle power is the least grounded figure on this site, and we would rather say it than hide it. Manufacturers publish a maximum, reviewers measure under load, and almost nobody publishes what a machine draws doing nothing. Our values come from reviews and from comparable hardware.
It matters because idle power is what produces the monthly cost — the number people repeat. If you own a plug meter, the builder lets you type your own figure, and it beats any average we could pick.
On a machine you already own, processor capacity is estimated too, from the kind of machine you picked. The screen says so where the number appears.
sizing the processor
Every service carries a load figure, and every machine a capacity. Both are orders of magnitude, not benchmarks: they answer “will this hold” rather than “how many frames per second”.
Measured across the catalogue, a core is worth between 1.5 and 4.5 points depending on the architecture — a Raspberry Pi core and a recent Ryzen core do not carry the same thing. That is why we ask what kind of machine you have rather than deducing it from the core count.
why Ubuntu and Docker, always
We used to recommend four systems depending on your declared level and whether the machine had bays. Each was defensible; together they made four sites in one — four sets of guides to write, four ways to mount a volume, four answers to the same forum question.
Ubuntu LTS because it is the most documented elsewhere. On a machine you administer alone on a Sunday, the value of a system is measured by how many people have already had your problem.
what we earn
Some links are affiliate links: as an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra.
The engine does not know these links exist. It receives a catalogue and a set of weights, and it has no field for commission — which is why a machine with no affiliate link wins as often as one with.
Links to a project's repository or a manufacturer's page earn nothing and are marked differently in the page's own markup.
what this site will not tell you
What you would save. A savings figure only exists if you declare what you pay today — one more question, about an amount you know better than we do, for a result every competitor inflates. We tell you what it costs; the comparison is yours to make.
That it will pay for itself by a given month. Same reason.
That a machine is enough when it is not. On hardware you already own, the answer is sometimes “yes, buy nothing” — and sometimes “this will not carry it”, which is the answer nobody funded by affiliate links likes to give.