> That puts us up to €26,97 a month on our six machines so far.
The cost for this same calculation has risen to €41,94 for the exact same configuration (3x CX23, 3x CX33).
> These two additional load balancers (lb11) bump up the price with €5.39/mo.
lb11 is now €7,49 x 2 = €14,98
> A public IP address costs €1,70/mo which adds an additional €10,20
According to Hetzner's pricing page, this is now free on CX23, but costs an additional €0,50 on CX33.
> ...making our total €47,95/mo pre-VAT
€41,94 + €14,98 + €1,50 = €58,42, or roughly a 22% increase. Still over €10 cheaper than the prices the article quotes for a managed cluster on AWS/GCP, but as someone that does this for a living, €10-15 extra is a very negligible price to pay to avoid the amount of headaches you'll get by having to manage and upgrade the cluster yourself.
* Because vended logs to s3 are not supported (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/AWS..., https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/1141)
Anyway can definitely recommend, it feels like a real cluster but it's all on a single piece of hardware which makes snapshots etc super simple.
All of that with considerably easier to understand and debug mechanisms in my experience than doing it with old school configuration management or, even worse, manually.
One use case is a custom ACME cert broker and DNS server. Another is their storage boxes split up into sub accounts for my and friends backups and music.
I've moved all my web stuff over to exe.dev, but I also turn my Hetzer box into a similar "Agent Computer" by dropping in a binary with `claude` setup and a chat server:
> Hetzner cloud
> published in December 2025
which means that it's twice as expensive now as it was when the article was published
(Just don't use SD cards...use M10 optanes). Also...Talos not k3s.
Install proxmox onto each, create talos VM(s) on each for kubernetes nodes, and you are off to races.
I doubt it matter much either way tbh. K8S is inherently resilient.
I did have the rasps on hand though...not sure I'd go and specifically buy them just to achieve said segregation.
Here's how expenses look and would look if I recreated it today:
Control Plane 3xCX23 @ €3.99 = €11.97 @ €6.49 = €19.47
Worker nodes 3xCX33 @ €6.49 = €19.47 @ €9.99 = €29.97
NAT gateway 1xCPX22 @ €7.99 = €7.99 @ €30.99 = €30.99
Load Balancers 2xLB11 @ €7.49 = €14.98 @ €9.36 = €18.72
Hetzner Volumes 240GB @ €0.044 = €10.56 @ €0.044 = €10.56
------------------------------------------------------------
Total per month €64.97 €109.71
---
Only the NAT gateway and the LBs have public IPv4 addresses.
The CPX22 NAT gateway is a little overkill, but I was experimenting with making it both the NAT gateway and the load balancer, and I figured I needed dedicated CPU cores to handle inbound traffic. It was an attempt to cut the cost of Hetzner's own LBs, if it proved to scale. I haven't got around to that part, but today the economics wouldn't add up: LBs are cheaper and less work.
This is Talos Linux: https://talos.dev
Talos can be upgraded via talosctl, so even less maintenance than k3s.
The NAT gateway effectively is a bastion host and would serve fine as a VPN gateway.
The nodes themselves can join a tailnet,
[^1]: https://cloudfleet.ai/
End cost seems to be ~60 EUR/month for a cluster of machines, which isn't too bad. Still, I suppose once you're even dealing with such small amounts, even thinking about distributed architecture or similar things feels a bit too early.
A very good friend of mine runs 1400 pods but his company (by that I mean the company he owns) spends something like 10 K EUR / month in servers. It's all Kubernetes and Talos (which another poster mentioned already) etc.
But at 50 to 100 EUR per month!?
Don't get me wrong: I'm excited to see people using Kubernetes with such low server budgets... I'm into VMs and containers, but haven't tried Kubernetes yet (despite my friend trying hard to convince me it's really not that complicated).
Of course then there's the maintenance - updating operators, Kubernetes, whatever else you have, but you don't have to do it and if you want to do keep up with recent versions then it's just as much work as on Ubuntu or any other distro. The upside with k8s is that you can definitely roll back (I'm just assuming you're using GitOps).
Besides, you'll probably want to add all of that Kubernetes functionality at some point anyway - eg you may just at first deploy your server/app via ClickOps, have some issue, decide GitOps is the way to go, then decide that you really need to have automatic certs, then decide that DB backups would be good to have. With Kubernetes you just keep extending it and never really have to "rethink" the approach cos it's really difficult to shoot yourself in the foot unless you really want to and have a shred of understanding (and to clarify I'm speaking about small deployments), and of course because you're using it yourself your knowledge grows meaning that your expertise grows.
At this point, I have a 64GB server on Hetzner that has declaratively configured HTTPS with lets encrypt, postgresql databases, storage management, and all of that including running potentially conflicting packages.
Could I run it on plain docker? Sure. But I would have to wire it up myself, or deal with various missing pieces. Instead I have k3s where I just need to remember to update the internal certificate once a year.
I started to use Hetzner's VM options in the Virginia, US datacenter. They had a great performance to cost ratio when I compared them to Linode/Akamai and Digital Ocean about a year ago. At that time, 4vcpu / 8GB server cost $24.99 per month.
Now, to get a VM like it, it's quoted $73.49 a month. Almost a 3x change.
I understand data center economics are changing due to LLM usage. But the Hetzner jump has not been mirrored by their competitors. I'm disappointed I made the switch from Linode. We still have some older VMs there and we'll likely continue to use them instead of Hetzner moving forward.
Now I'm in a weird spot. I could downgrade some servers, but changing them would immediately move me onto the new pricing. So I either pay more for less hardware, or pay a lot, lot more if I ever need to scale back up.