My SaaS Ran on €12 a Month (April 2026). Here's the Full Stack.

Update — 3 September 2026. This is the stack as it stood in April 2026, and the hosting line has since changed. Production moved off Hetzner in July 2026 and now runs on a VPS with Pointer (pointer.gr), in Athens — still one box, still Docker Compose, still the EU. So the Hetzner rows below, and the snapshot-retention row with them, are historical: €11.49 is Hetzner's price, not what we pay today. What we pay today is €22.20 a month for the Pointer Gold VPS — the figure on the renewal invoice dated 6 August 2026, covering 15 August to 15 September 2026. Everything else — the container layout, the free tiers, the reasoning about when this stops working — still holds.

The current provider, country and backup arrangement are listed on our trust page, and that page is the one to believe if it ever disagrees with this one.

We have left the original figures in the table rather than quietly restating them. A cost post that edits its own numbers after the fact is not worth reading.

People assume you need hundreds of dollars in cloud bills to run a SaaS. Here's what Datanika actually costs to operate, line by line, with no hand-waving.

The Bill

Item	Monthly cost	What it does
Hetzner CPX31 (Nuremberg)	€11.49	4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe — runs the entire platform
Hetzner snapshot retention	€0.20	Weekly snapshots, 30-day retention
Aweb VPS (landing site)	€0 marginal	Sits on a shared server I already pay for
Cloudflare DNS + CDN + SSL	€0	Free tier covers everything
Resend (transactional email)	€0	Free tier (3,000 emails/month)
Paddle (billing)	€0	Pre-revenue. 5% + $0.50 per transaction once we're not
Operational total	€11.69	What hits my card every month
Porkbun domains (3 × ~€10/year)	€2.50 amortized	datanika.io, datanika.cloud, datanika.pro
All-in total	~€14.20	Including amortized one-time costs

The "12 euros" headline is the operational number — compute and bandwidth. Domains are a once-a-year purchase amortized into a monthly figure. I'm calling that out because most "cheap stack" posts conveniently leave it out, then someone notices in the comments and the post loses credibility.

What Runs on the €11.49 Box

The Hetzner CPX31 runs eight Docker containers via a single docker-compose.yml:

Container	Purpose
datanika-app	Reflex frontend + Starlette backend (ports 3000 / 8000)
datanika-celery	Background task worker for pipeline runs
datanika-postgres	PostgreSQL 16 — app metadata + pipeline data
datanika-redis	Celery broker + APScheduler job store + session cache
datanika-grafana	Internal-only monitoring dashboards
datanika-prometheus	Metrics scraper
datanika-cadvisor	Per-container resource metrics
datanika-node-exporter	Host-level metrics (CPU, disk, network)

That's roughly 2 GB resident, leaving 6 GB headroom for query workloads, build cache, and Celery task spikes. The box is dramatically over-provisioned for current usage — but the next size down is half the RAM and the savings would be ~€5/month, not worth the migration friction.

No managed Postgres. No managed Redis. No Kubernetes. No CDN paid tier. Just Docker Compose, nginx as reverse proxy, and Cloudflare in front.

The Landing Site Costs Nothing Extra

The marketing site at datanika.io sits on a separate VPS (Aweb) that I already pay for, hosting other unrelated projects. Adding the Datanika landing site to that box was zero marginal cost — nginx serves a static Astro build from /var/www/datanika.io/. If I had to spin up a dedicated VPS, it'd add maybe €5/mo. Currently it doesn't.

I'm being deliberate about saying "marginal cost" instead of "free". Free implies no underlying cost exists. Marginal cost reflects the fact that adding one more static site to an already-running nginx is genuinely zero new spending — but the box itself is real.

DNS and SSL: Cloudflare Free Tier

Three domains (datanika.io, datanika.cloud, datanika.pro) on Porkbun with Cloudflare DNS. Redirect rules handle the routing between them:

• datanika.io → landing site on Aweb
• app.datanika.io → SaaS app on Hetzner
• datanika.cloud → 301 redirects to app.datanika.io (and legal pages redirect to datanika.io)

SSL via Cloudflare Origin Certificates on both servers. Full strict mode. Zero cost, zero maintenance.

Why This Works (And When It Will Stop)

The trick is not overengineering early. No Kubernetes orchestration, no managed database, no Redis cluster, no Datadog, no PagerDuty. One VPS, Docker Compose, and a monitoring stack that runs on the same box it's monitoring.

Yes, that's a single point of failure. Yes, if Hetzner Nuremberg goes down, so does the SaaS. The probability is low and the alternative — multi-region active-active — would 5x the cost for an app with zero paying customers.

When the bottleneck becomes infrastructure rather than users, here's what gets added (in order):

1. Managed Postgres (~€15/mo) — when point-in-time recovery becomes a real need
2. Separate Celery worker (~€11/mo) — when one box can't run pipelines and serve UI on the same cores
3. Read replica (~€11/mo) — when SQL Editor queries start blocking app traffic
4. Cloudflare paid tier (~€20/mo) — only if image optimization or edge caching becomes load-bearing

That's ~€50/mo of growth headroom, all deferred until usage justifies it. Right now the bottleneck is users, not infrastructure. Every euro saved on hosting is one more month of runway.

What's Not on the Bill

A few things I get for free that would otherwise cost money:

• GitHub — free for public repos. The open-source core lives there
• GitHub Actions — free CI minutes for public repos
• Error tracking — none. Errors go to docker logs and Grafana. Will add Sentry's free tier when I outgrow tail-the-logs debugging
• Staging server — none. The deploy pipeline runs build + tests in CI before touching production

If I were spending €200/month with no paying users, every one of those services would feel "necessary". At €12/mo, the discipline of "buy nothing until it hurts" stays sharp.

The Self-Hosting Story

Because the infrastructure is this simple, self-hosting is genuinely straightforward. The same docker-compose.yml that runs production runs your self-hosted instance:

git clone https://github.com/datanika-io/datanika-core.git
cd datanika-core
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d

That's it. App on port 3000, no Kubernetes, no cloud provider lock-in. The self-hosting guide covers configuration, backups, and upgrades.

Once the containers are up, the fastest way to verify everything works is the CSV to DuckDB template — zero credentials, zero cloud accounts, first rows loaded in two minutes. No egress fees to trip over, no service-account JSON to provision.

The open-core architecture means self-hosted gets all features — the billing plugin simply doesn't load. No crippled "community edition".

If You're Launching

If you're launching a SaaS and spending more than €20/mo on infrastructure before you have paying users, ask yourself why. Most "what stack should I use" discussions get answered with whatever's trending on Hacker News. The boring answer — one VPS, one database, Docker Compose, Cloudflare — works for an enormous range of indie SaaS scale. It'll get you to your first 100 paying customers without rearchitecting anything.

Building in public. What does your SaaS infrastructure cost you each month? Open a discussion on GitHub — I'm collecting cost breakdowns.

Related

• How I Split Open-Source Core From Paid Cloud — the architecture that lets self-hosted users run the full platform for free
• Self-Hosting Guide — Docker Compose setup, environment variables, and upgrade flow
• Pricing — what the cloud edition adds on top (Free / Pro / Enterprise)
• I Built an ETL Platform Solo — how scope control kept the infrastructure this simple