Cheap Self-Hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud
In this technical retrospective (2026), @victorbrink shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 16 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
I also run Kubernetes on Hetzner and created my nodes prior to two price hikes.
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
``` Even with the new prices, this is almost twice as cheap as Scaleway for comparable hardware.
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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,
I wanted to compare the prices to the current prices:
The cost for this same calculation has risen to €41,94 for the exact same configuration (3x CX23, 3x CX33).
lb11 is now €7,49 x 2 = €14,98
According to Hetzner's pricing page, this is now free on CX23, but costs an additional €0,50 on CX33.
€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.
When people are talking about 50 EUR per month or 100 EUR per month of server expenses, are these problems that do require Kubernetes or is K8s overkill at these levels?
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).
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.