I wanted to compare the prices to the current prices:
> 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.
My experience with Hetzner VM pricing has turned me off of considering them for anything else. Maybe the experience in other world regions is not the same but this is what happened to us:
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.
You may have just caught the wrong end of it timing wise. They used to be super stable and cheap but being a low cost provider they have no real buffer to absorb even minor hikes let alone the shitshow we saw in ram/ssd.
This has been my experience too. I migrated a few dozen projects from DO to Hetzner, and my monthly bill went from about $80 to around $162. The only thing that changed was Hetzner's rate hikes.
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.
They're the first, I strongly doubt they'll be the last to adjust prices that much. The big cloud providers might have enough margins to eat the cost increases, especially since bare VMs are only a small part of their offer. But I don't see how the smaller, more VM-focused providers will be able to absorb the high hardware prices.
Yeah, RAM shortage has caught up with them. Send a thank you note to Anthropic and OpenAI.
I've been running k3 on a single bigger hetzner dedicated machine to power https://demo.opensuite.online, a work-in-progress open source replacement for Google Workspace, a distribution of what the Dutch government is trying to switch to but they seemingly don't care about UX at all so I wanted to try build on their foundations (which in turn are basically just nextcloud, element, and some others).
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.
> seemingly don't care about UX
That seems to be the case on every project with the folks that sign the checks or contracts for integrating other vendors.
I think Jobs was the rare exception there.
> Cheap
> Hetzner cloud
> published in December 2025
which means that it's twice as expensive now as it was when the article was published
So are computers
Went a slightly different angle - Rasp 4s aren't impressing anyone these days, but 3 of them make for a fine HA controlplane. Once you've got a stable HA controlplane its much easier to connect whatever hardware you have lying around
(Just don't use SD cards...use M10 optanes). Also...Talos not k3s.
Given 6 months have passed since this article has been published, would you also pick MicroOS? I'm currently setting up a single-node k8s cluster on Hetzner but I went with Talos. Curious about your takes, IaC and k8s is new terrain for me.
I developed a Karpenter provider for Hetzner recently. Might interesting for you to integrate.
Scaleway has a great managed kubernetes offering. They host the control plane and all you pay are the instances starting at 30-something € per instance-month.
Terraform has been such a delight in the age of LLMs.
"Cheap" in terms of money, ~30K in terms of lines of code that you eventually gonna need to bite the apple and read through and understand, 10K of which is HCL.
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.
For those interested in this I also recommend autobase, a set of ansible roles for a highly available postgres cluster on hetzner or other clouds: https://github.com/autobase-tech/autobase
You really put your admin credentials in a blog post. Lucky I can't seem to hit that IP.
Not familiar enough about GCP internal, but AWS prices are way higher than what's quoted in the article. You'll get billed for bandwidth, should you want any logs of your control plane you'll pay them at a premium so high* it will dwarf the cluster price and machine price combined. And for ~$70/month, you get the cluster API, not the EC2 compute required for worker nodes.
* 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)