We didn't plan
to build a cloud.
We just needed a cheaper one.
RAW started as a migration script. We were spending $7,370/month on Fly.io and Vercel to run a financial data platform. We moved to bare metal. The savings were obscene. The process was painful. So we productized the pain away.
The Eulerpool Migration
Eulerpool is a financial data platform — stock prices, fundamentals, ETF data, served to millions of users. By early 2026, we were running across Fly.io (databases, application servers) and Vercel (frontend, edge functions).
The stack worked. The bills didn't. Fly.io charged $4,044/month. Vercel charged $3,326/month. Our PostgreSQL database was at 80% of Fly's 500GB hard limit. We were about to hit a wall — and pay more to hit it.
We migrated everything to dedicated Hetzner servers. Same workload. Same traffic. Same uptime — actually better. The monthly bill dropped from $7,370 to $460. That's a 94% reduction.
Every pain point became a feature
The migration took weeks. Not because the technology was hard, but because the tooling around bare metal is stuck in 2005. Setting up streaming replication required reading three different docs. Firewall rules were error-prone and imperative. NVMe RAID decisions required trawling forum posts.
That thought — repeated dozens of times during the migration — is why RAW exists.
We kept a running list of every moment where we thought "this should be one command." Database provisioning. Firewall rules. SSL certificates. Backups. Monitoring. Replication. Every item on that list became a RAW CLI command.
Timeline
The Costco of Cloud
AWS has a 60%+ gross margin. That's not a technology premium — it's a convenience tax. The actual hardware costs pennies on the dollar compared to what you pay. RAW is what happens when you strip out the margin and pass the savings through.
Our pricing model is simple: source hardware at the best possible price, automate everything, pass the savings through. Like Costco. Like Aldi. Like Cloudflare's pricing philosophy. High volume, low overhead, happy customers.
We're not trying to compete with AWS on features. We're competing on economics. If you need 47 managed services and a compliance matrix, use AWS. If you need servers that work and bills that don't make you wince, use RAW.