Canner vs. AWS (ca-central-1)
AWS has a Montreal region. Amazon is still a US corporation.
ca-central-1 keeps your bytes in Canada. It does not keep them out of reach of a US court: the CLOUD Act binds the company, not the building — so a Canadian AWS region still triggers a Transfer Impact Assessment under Law 25. Canner removes that exposure because the company itself is Canadian.
- AWS ca-central-1 (Montreal) gives you Canadian data residency and the deepest service catalogue on the planet. For pure residency at hyperscale, it's a legitimate choice.
- Where Canner differs: it is 100% Canadian-owned with no US affiliate, so it is not subject to the US CLOUD Act — residency AND sovereignty, not just residency.
- Because Amazon is US-controlled, a Canadian AWS region still triggers a Law 25 Transfer Impact Assessment. On Canner there is no foreign transfer to assess.
- AWS is an IaaS platform you assemble (IAM, VPC, RDS, ECS…). Canner is drop-and-deploy: push a repo or a folder, get a live HTTPS URL in ~30 seconds, Postgres included.
| Feature | Canner | AWS (ca-central-1) |
|---|---|---|
| Data location | Montreal, Quebec — sole region | ca-central-1 (Montreal) — 1 of ~34 global regions |
| Canadian region | Yes (sole, Montreal) | Yes (ca-central-1, must be selected) |
| Company jurisdiction | 100% Canadian-owned | Amazon.com, Inc. — US corporation (Washington/Delaware) |
| CLOUD Act exposure | Not subject | Subject — US-controlled parent, regardless of region |
| Law 25 Transfer Impact Assessment | Not triggered — no foreign transfer | Triggered — foreign-controlled processor |
| What you deploy into | A managed platform — push and it's live | IaaS building blocks you assemble (IAM, VPC, RDS, ECS/Fargate, ALB…) |
| Time to a live URL | ~30 seconds | Hours to days (account, networking, IAM, CI) |
| Managed Postgres | Included per project, every tier | RDS / Aurora — separate service, USD, self-configured |
| Custom domains with auto-TLS | Included on Live and Dedicated | ACM + CloudFront / ALB, self-configured |
| Pricing model | Flat CAD per account | Per-service, metered, USD — hard to predict |
| Currency | CAD | USD |
| Compliance paperwork | Canadian-law DPA + residency attestation, built for PIPEDA / Law 25 | AWS DPA under its own (foreign) contracting entity |
| Built-in analytics | Cookieless analytics included — no consent banner | Assemble CloudWatch / Kinesis / QuickSight |
| Best fit | Sovereign app + tool hosting for Canadian teams | Hyperscale infrastructure with hundreds of services |
When Canner is the right call
You need Canadian sovereignty, not just Canadian residency — a hospital, credit union, law firm, or public body whose buyer asks specifically about the CLOUD Act and Law 25. On AWS, the honest answer is that ca-central-1 keeps the data in Montreal but Amazon can still be compelled by a US court; that answer fails a strict sovereignty review. On Canner there is no US parent to compel and no foreign transfer to assess, and you get a Canadian-law DPA and residency attestation for the file. It's also simply faster to ship: a form, a portal, an AI tool goes live in about 30 seconds with Postgres included — no IAM, VPC, or RDS to stand up first.
When AWS still makes sense
AWS is unmatched in breadth. If you need hundreds of managed services, global multi-region deployment, hyperscale autoscaling, or you're already deep in the AWS ecosystem with a team that runs it well, ca-central-1 is a serious platform — and for many workloads Canadian residency is genuinely all that's required. Canner isn't trying to replace AWS as infrastructure; it replaces the specific job of hosting Canadian apps and internal tools where sovereignty (not just residency) is the bar, without the assembly.
Ready to give it a try?
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