Hetzner Cloud Pricing: How to Read the Bill Before You Buy

Hetzner Cloud pricing comes down to four things. The server, which has a price per hour and a monthly cap. Traffic, of which a generous amount is included. Add-ons, chiefly a public IPv4 address and backups. And VAT, which the published tables leave out.

The monthly cap is the friendliest rule. Hetzner's billing FAQ says a server's bill will never exceed its monthly price cap, and that if you delete a server before month end you pay only the hourly rate. The catch is in a different answer in the same FAQ, and it is the one that most people miss until the first invoice arrives.

Powering a server off saves nothing, because only deleting it stops the meter, so if you want to pause a project you should take a snapshot, delete the server and restore it later when you need it again.

Hetzner Cloud pricing splits by line. It sells shared-vCPU servers in three lines and dedicated-vCPU servers in a fourth. For a web app most people are choosing between CX (cost-optimised x86, Intel or AMD), CAX (cost-optimised Arm, Ampere) and CPX (regular performance). CCX is the dedicated line and starts at €42.99 a month for CCX13 in Germany and Finland, so it is a different budget conversation.

Read across rather than down, because CX is the cheapest at every size, CAX sits a little above it, and CPX costs roughly three to four times as much for the same vCPU and RAM but brings double the disk. Whether Arm is worth it is a separate argument, and Arm64 hosting: cheaper than CPX, dearer than CX works through it.

Hetzner Cloud pricing changed twice in 2026, and the two changes are easy to blur together. Hetzner announced on 23 February that prices would rise from 1 April 2026, for both existing products and new orders, citing dramatically higher costs to run its infrastructure and buy hardware. Then a second adjustment took effect on 15 June at 8am CEST, for new orders and for cloud server rescales.

We do not have a Hetzner table for the prices before 1 April, so the before column is the price immediately before 15 June. The practical lesson is about rescaling. Hetzner's billing FAQ lists rescaling, up or down, as a moment when a price adjustment applies. A server ordered in 2025 and resized in 2026 moves to the new price.

Traffic is the quiet part of Hetzner Cloud pricing. In the EU locations, the CX, CAX and CPX plans pages say servers include at least 20 TB of traffic. US locations include at least 1 TB. Only outgoing traffic is billed: incoming and internal traffic is free, and over-usage is billed in blocks of 100 MB.

Hetzner's own pages draw the per-TB overage rate in the browser rather than in static text, so we could not read it and have not quoted one. Read it from the console for your server type before you budget against it.

Worked example: a site serving pages that average 2.5 MB. Twenty terabytes is 20,000,000 MB, divided by 2.5, which is 8 million page views a month before any charge. A small business site will never see that. A video-heavy product on a US server, with 1 TB, could see it in a day.

• Public IPv4: €0.50 a month for a primary IP of type IPv4. IPv6 is free.
• Backups: a flat monthly price of 20 percent of the server price, with up to 7 backup slots per server.
• Snapshots: manual, kept until you delete them. Hetzner never deletes one for you, so old ones pile up. Check the snapshot price in the console before you keep many.
• VAT: added at checkout for your billing country, on top of the tables.

None of these extras in Hetzner Cloud pricing is large, but together they are the difference between the price on the plans page and the price on the invoice. A server price is also compute and disk only, so there is no managed database, no build pipeline and no certificate handling included in it.

monthly bill = server price + 0.50 (IPv4) + 0.20 x server price (backups) + snapshots + traffic over the allowance, then VAT

Worked example, with arithmetic you can check, to see Hetzner Cloud pricing as one bill. One 4 vCPU, 8 GB server runs a Next.js app and Postgres together, with backups on and one IPv4 address, in Germany, well inside the 20 TB. We price it on two lines, then set it beside our own Builder plan.

Our Builder plan is $12 a month, a minimum spend that includes Postgres, auth, storage, custom domains and daily backups kept for 7 days. It is a different currency and a different product, so please do not compare the digits as if they were the same thing. On paper the Hetzner server is cheaper. What the €10.69 does not include is the hours you spend patching the box, testing a restore and being the person who finds out the disk has filled. If those hours are free to you, run the server. If they are not, weigh them. Our Docker hosting explained covers the wider trade, and the pricing page shows what each plan includes.

1. 1Powering off instead of deletingA stopped server is billed as if it were running. Snapshot it and delete it if you are done for a while.
2. 2Defaulting to CPXCPX is priced three to four times CX at matching vCPU and RAM. Choose it for the disk or the performance, not by habit.
3. 3Rescaling old servers without checking the priceA rescale, up or down, applies the current price list to that server.
4. 4Ordering in the US and assuming EU trafficThe US plans include at least 1 TB, against at least 20 TB in the EU. Check the allowance for your location.
5. 5Trusting backups you have never restoredThey cost 20 percent of the server price whether or not they work. Restore one to a scratch server. Our Postgres backup and restore guide has the database-level version.