When you pay for cloud hosting, you're not just paying for compute.
You're paying rent. And it adds up fast.
🏗️ What You Think You're Paying For
Let's say you need a small SaaS backend:
- 2 apps (API + worker)
- 1 Postgres database
- 1 Redis for caching
- A few gigs of storage
Pretty standard stack.
💸 What It Costs on AWS
- EC2 (2× t3.medium) → €50 / mo
- RDS Postgres (db.t3.small, 10GB) → €22 / mo
- ElastiCache Redis (cache.t3.micro) → €10 / mo
- EBS storage (100GB) → €10 / mo
- Data transfer (200GB egress) → €9 / mo
Total: ~€101 / mo
That’s without backups, monitoring, or any extras.
And without any “friendly” PaaS markup on top.
🏠 What It Costs on Bare Metal
Hetzner: 12 threads, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD → €44 / mo.
You could run dozens of those same apps + databases on one machine.
But if you don’t want to babysit it, you go through AWS — and suddenly you’re paying 2× more for the same outcome.
Of course, bare metal has risks too (datacenter failures, ops work).
But the price gap is still very real.
🧃 Add a Middleman
Now add a VC-backed PaaS that just resells AWS.
Nice UI, Heroku-like DX… but you’re paying another ×2 markup.
Your ~€100 stack just became €200–250 / mo.
That’s cloud rent: the difference between the infra you’re actually using and the layers of middlemen you’re forced to pay.
🌱 A Fairer Alternative
Here’s the same stack — 2 apps, Postgres, Redis, and a 50GB volume — running on my own PaaS, Hostim.dev:
- €34 / mo.
- Includes HTTPS, metrics, and logs baked in.
- No metering, no hidden costs.
You still get the convenience of a PaaS.
But without subsidizing investors, shareholders, or cloud landlords.
Just me, your humble wannabe hoster.
🚀 Try It Yourself
I recently shipped authless trials:
paste a docker-compose.yml, and you’ll see your app running in seconds — no signup needed.
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