UpCloud Ltd. has introduced a new storage option that could send ripples through the market. The Finnish service promises to provide ultra-fast flash capacity at a fraction of the current cost.

The launch follows hot on the heels of UpCloud’s expansion into the U.S. with the opening of a Chicago data center. MaxIOPS, as the latest addition to its arsenal is known, holds the potential to garner more attention.

The homegrown technology powers a new storage option that UpCloud touts as significantly faster than alternatives on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other leading infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. To prove its point, the provider conducted an internal benchmark using the popular FIO testing tool that pitted a four-core virtual machine with 10 gigabytes of memory and 100 gigabytes of MaXIOPS storage with the closet available configurations from its top four competitors. Although controlled comparisons should be always be taken with a sizable grain of salt, the results were head-turning.

UpCloud said its instance achieved nearly 80,000 writes and 50,000 reads, which are 12 times faster than the AWS deployment. The test also put the firm comfortably ahead of the retail giant’s two closest rivals – Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure – although the IOPS gap narrowed by about half. Moreover, the results were achieved at between one-quarter and one-eighth of the cost billed of the other platforms, UpCloud said, although that doesn’t account for the fact that the rival deployments came with significantly more storage capacity.

Therein lies UpCloud’s edge. The firm imposes lower minimum limits on the amount of hardware resources users can buy than its web-scale competitors, which allows budget-strapped developers to fine-tune compute and storage consumption based on their specific demands for a better price-performance ratio. That is also the reason why the fourth contender in the benchmark, DigitalOcean Inc., came much closer to matching the Finnish firm’s record ratio than the other three.

DigitalOcean has grown to be the third largest cloud provider in under two years on the back of that developer-friendly model, which doesn’t attempt to compete with the economies of scale or functional breadth offered by the likes AWS. It’s impossible to determine whether MaxIOPS will enable UpCloud to set itself apart from DigitalOcean based on a single benchmark, but the Finnish firm is evidently confident enough its abilities to set up a data center right in its rival’s backyard.