[jd_mongodb]

I did manage to approach his costs by running a sharded cluster with our largest configuration (M600 nodes with 640GB RAM. 4TB storage and 3.8m IOPS).

That is priced quite clearly on the bottom page at 102.49 USD an hour.

[NohatCoder]

Depending on exact specifications that is like $10k of hardware, so 4 days of rent pays the machine in full.

So in this service the actual cost of the hardware is a rounding error. It also needs power, cooling, a roof and some maintenance crew, but that still doesn't come close to the rental price. So what are customers actually paying for?

[vitaly_il]

Obviously we cannot launch such 3node cluster in Azure/AWS for $800/month :-)