Cloud pricing pages love their acronyms - IaaS, PaaS, BaaS, VPS - and they all quietly assume you already know the difference. Most explanations make it worse by defining each one with more jargon. So here's the whole topic reduced to the only question that actually matters: how much of the server do you want to manage yourself?
Everything below is the same computer in a data center. What you're really choosing is where the line sits between "your job" and "their job" - and how much you pay to move that line.
The pizza test
The classic analogy, because it works: think about the ways you can get pizza for dinner.
- IaaS is buying ingredients. Cheapest per slice, total control, and dinner takes three hours.
- VPS is a meal kit. The ingredients arrive measured and ready - you still do the cooking.
- PaaS is delivery. You just say what you want; it shows up hot.
- BaaS is a restaurant. You sit down and eat - someone else even does the dishes.
Now the same four, in server terms.
VPS - a slice of a server, yours to run
A Virtual Private Server is exactly what it sounds like: a virtual computer you rent by the month. You get an empty Linux machine with an IP address. Installing your app, setting up the web server, applying security patches, restarting it at 2am - all you.
Why bother? Price and freedom. A Hetzner VPS with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM runs about $4.50/mo; a DigitalOcean Droplet starts at $6/mo. Nothing else on this list touches that price-per-gigabyte, and you can run absolutely anything on it.
Pick a VPS when: you're comfortable with a terminal, you want the cheapest always-on server, or you're running something unusual that platforms don't support.
PaaS - you push code, the platform does the rest
A Platform as a Service hides the server entirely. You connect your GitHub repo, and the platform builds, deploys, restarts, patches, and scales your app. No SSH, no nginx, no 2am.
Render (web services from $7/mo, with a free tier), Fly.io, and Railway are the general-purpose picks; Vercel and Netlify are the same idea specialized for frontends. The trade: you pay roughly 2-3× more per unit of RAM than a VPS, and you accept the platform's way of doing things.
Pick a PaaS when: your time is worth more than the markup - which, for most solo developers and small teams, it is. This is also the fastest way to get a project off localhost: one git push and it has a public URL.
IaaS - the raw building blocks
Infrastructure as a Service is the big-cloud version of renting compute: AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine, Azure. Technically a VPS is IaaS too - the practical difference is scope and pricing style. IaaS clouds sell you hundreds of à-la-carte services (compute, storage, queues, databases, networking) with usage-based pricing that's powerful and famously hard to predict. A VPS is one flat monthly number.
Pick IaaS when: you need the ecosystem - autoscaling groups, managed queues, IAM policies, compliance certifications - or your company already lives there. For a single app, it's usually overkill, and surprise bills are a real genre of developer horror story.
BaaS - a backend you never write
Backend as a Service answers a different question. The other three host code you wrote; BaaS means not writing that code at all. Database, user accounts, file storage, and APIs come ready-made - you build a frontend and call them.
Supabase is the open-source flagship (generous free tier, Pro at $25/mo): sign up, get a Postgres database, auth, and storage with APIs already attached. Google's Firebase is the older proprietary equivalent. Pair a BaaS with a frontend on Vercel or Netlify and you've shipped a full app while managing zero servers.
Pick a BaaS when: your app is mostly a frontend plus standard backend needs - users, data, file uploads. You'll trade some flexibility for shipping weeks faster.
The whole thing in one table
| You manage | They manage | Starts around | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, app, scaling, architecture | Physical hardware, network | Usage-based (varies) | Companies needing the full ecosystem |
| VPS | OS, app, updates | Hardware, virtualization | $4.50-6/mo | Devs who want cheap, total control |
| PaaS | Just your code | Everything else | $0-7/mo | Shipping fast with zero ops |
| BaaS | Just your frontend | The entire backend | $0-25/mo | Frontend-first apps with standard needs |
Prices as tracked on July 4, 2026. These move - the Compute marketplace has the live numbers, re-checked automatically.
So which one do you need?
- "I have an app on localhost and just want it online." PaaS. Render or Fly.io, connected to your repo. You'll be live today.
- "I want the cheapest possible always-on server and I know Linux." VPS. Hetzner if EU-friendly, DigitalOcean or Vultr otherwise.
- "I'm building a React/Next.js app with logins and a database." BaaS (Supabase) + a frontend host (Vercel). Possibly $0/mo until you have real users.
- "My company needs queues, compliance, and fine-grained permissions." IaaS - and budget time for the learning curve.
- "I don't code at all." None of these - you want a website builder or no-code tool. That's the No-Code marketplace.
Still not sure? That's literally what the AI stack planner is for - describe the project in a sentence and it assembles the stack, with prices, from every provider we track.