The Carpathian Architecture
Discover why Carpathian built its entire cloud infrastructure from scratch instead of relying on AWS or Azure. Learn about our approach to ownership.
Discover why Carpathian built its entire cloud infrastructure from scratch instead of relying on AWS or Azure. Learn about our approach to ownership.
We are committed to user transparency, so this provides an account of our response to a third-party security vulnerability regarding Vercel React.
Fine-tuning teaches behavior, RAG supplies knowledge, prompting shapes both. What the published comparisons found, and how to pick without burning a GPU budget.
Why AI chat can be free, what happens to what you type, and the short checklist worth running before anything from work goes into a chat box.
When owning your hardware beats renting a virtual machine, when it does not, and the questions to ask a colocation facility before you commit to anything.
Object storage explained: how it differs from a server disk, what it is good and bad at, and the signs that tell you it is time to use a bucket.
The cloud was supposed to make things easier. For most businesses, it's done the opposite.
After nearly a decade working in tech, from enterprise environments to small business IT, two problems kept showing up everywhere: cloud hosting costs too much, and it's way more complicated than it needs to be. These weren't edge cases. They were the norm. That frustration is exactly why Carpathian exists, and why we decided to build our own tech stack from the ground up instead of reselling someone else's infrastructure.
Let's talk numbers, because that's where the pain starts.
The average small business spends between $1,000 and $10,000 per month on cloud services from major providers. Mid-sized companies? That figure jumps to $50,000 or more. And here's the part that doesn't show up in the marketing materials: those costs are unpredictable. Data transfer fees, API calls, storage overages. The bill at the end of the month rarely matches what you budgeted.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have built empires on complexity. Their pricing calculators require engineering degrees to navigate. And that's not an accident. Confusing pricing benefits the provider, not the customer.
The sticker price for cloud compute is just the beginning. Here's what actually drives costs up:
Egress charges hit hardest. Every byte of data leaving a major cloud provider costs money. Need to migrate to a different provider? Prepare to pay for every gigabyte on the way out. This is vendor lock-in by design.
Storage tiers sound economical until you need to actually access archived data. Retrieval fees on "cold storage" can exceed the cost of just keeping data in standard storage from the start.
Support costs often surprise new customers. Basic support is included. Anything resembling actual help when something breaks? That's an additional percentage of your monthly spend.
Here's the scenario that plays out constantly: A business builds their entire application stack on proprietary cloud services. Custom database engines, serverless functions tied to specific platforms, managed services that don't exist anywhere else. Two years later, costs have tripled, but migration would require rebuilding everything.
The major cloud providers have every incentive to make leaving difficult. They offer "free tier" services that hook startups early, knowing that once infrastructure dependencies are established, switching costs become prohibitive.
Beyond the direct financial impact, vendor lock-in creates operational risks that rarely get discussed until it's too late:
Pricing changes happen unilaterally. When a cloud provider decides to increase costs on a service your business depends on, your options are limited to paying more or undertaking a major migration project.
This update brings a fully redesigned website, Veritate AI, free threat intel feeds, Spark snapshots/restores, and billing.
Service deprecation is real. Cloud providers regularly sunset products with minimal notice. If your architecture depends on a service that gets discontinued, that's your problem to solve on their timeline.
Compliance complications multiply when your data sits in infrastructure you don't control. Regulatory requirements around data residency, access controls, and audit trails become harder to guarantee when you're dependent on a third party's interpretation of those rules.
Enterprise companies have entire teams dedicated to managing cloud infrastructure. They employ certified architects, hire consultants, and build internal tools just to keep track of what they're running and what it costs.
Small businesses don't have that luxury. A five-person company doesn't have a DevOps team. They have someone wearing six hats who needs hosting to just work.
The complexity of modern cloud platforms creates a barrier that pushes smaller organizations toward either overpaying for managed services or making do with solutions that don't fit their needs. Neither outcome helps them compete.
Talk to any small business owner who's tried to set up their own cloud infrastructure, and you'll hear the same stories:
Invoices that don't make sense. Support tickets that go nowhere. Documentation written for engineers, not business owners. Surprise bills from services they didn't know were running. Hours lost trying to figure out why something stopped working after an automatic update they didn't ask for.
This isn't about technical competence. These are smart people running real businesses. The platforms are designed in ways that assume unlimited time and expertise that most organizations simply don't have.
Given all of this, we had a choice: resell existing cloud services with a friendlier interface, or build something fundamentally different.
We chose to build.
Carpathian's infrastructure runs on hardware we own and operate in Des Moines, Iowa. No reselling AWS with a markup. No rebranding someone else's platform. Actual servers, actual data centers, actual control over the entire stack.
Our pricing model is built on a simple principle: you should know what you're going to pay before you pay it.
No egress fees. No surprise charges for API calls. No complex tier structures that require a spreadsheet to understand. Flat, predictable pricing that lets businesses actually budget for their infrastructure costs.
We build for the companies that the major cloud providers treat as an afterthought: small and mid-sized businesses, nonprofits, churches, local organizations. The ones that need enterprise-grade infrastructure without enterprise-grade complexity.
That means support from actual humans in the Midwest who understand your business. Documentation written in plain language. Interfaces designed for people who have better things to do than become cloud certification experts.
Beyond cost and complexity, there's another problem with the current cloud landscape that doesn't get enough attention: the environmental impact.
Massive data centers consume enormous amounts of energy. The carbon footprint of cloud computing is staggering and growing. At Carpathian, we're building infrastructure with sustainability as a core principle, not an afterthought PR initiative.
The cloud industry wants you to believe there are only a few options. That you need to choose between AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and accept whatever terms they dictate.
That's not true.
Independent infrastructure providers offer a real alternative. Better pricing, actual support, and freedom from the lock-in that makes switching feel impossible.
Carpathian exists because small businesses deserve better than being an afterthought in someone else's growth strategy. They deserve infrastructure partners who actually care whether their costs are predictable and their operations are sustainable.
If you're evaluating your current cloud setup, here are the questions worth asking:
What are you actually paying? Not the sticker price, but the real total including all fees, overages, and support costs.
How dependent are you on proprietary services? Could you move to a different provider if you needed to, or have you built on foundations that only exist in one place?
Is your infrastructure sustainable? Both financially and environmentally?
Does your provider actually support you? When something breaks, do you get help, or do you get a knowledge base article?
The answers might confirm that your current setup works. Or they might reveal that it's time to explore alternatives.
Carpathian isn't trying to compete with AWS on scale. We're not interested in being the biggest. We're interested in being better for the businesses we serve.
That means building infrastructure that lasts. Relationships with customers that matter. A tech stack designed around actual needs rather than maximum revenue extraction.
Nearly a decade of watching businesses struggle with cloud hosting led to a simple conclusion: someone needed to build something different. That's what we're doing.
Carpathian provides cloud hosting, custom software development, and technology services for small and mid-sized businesses from Des Moines, Iowa. [Learn more about our approach to sustainable, affordable cloud infrastructure.]