AWS vs Hetzner pricing in 2026: real monthly bills compared

Short answer: yes, Hetzner is cheaper than AWS for stable, EU-hosted workloads, even after Hetzner's June 2026 price rise. In the two SaaS setups priced below, the Hetzner bill comes out roughly 65–75% lower than the AWS one at list prices. The gap is no longer mostly in the servers: it comes from egress (20 TB included per Hetzner EU server vs $0.09/GB on AWS) and from running Postgres yourself instead of paying for RDS. AWS still wins on managed services, global regions and compliance paperwork.

All prices below are public list prices, excluding VAT, checked on 23 September 2026. AWS figures are on-demand Linux prices in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) at 730 hours a month. Hetzner figures are for Germany and Finland. Sources are listed at the end of the article.

Hetzner vs AWS pricing: equivalent instance types

AWS t3 instances are burstable (they run on CPU credits), and Hetzner CX and CPX servers share vCPUs with other customers. For steady load, compare AWS m6i with Hetzner CCX, where the vCPUs are dedicated.

AWS instance prices do not include disk (EBS is billed separately). Hetzner prices include the NVMe disk shown and 20 TB of monthly traffic per server in EU locations.

Egress, load balancer, managed database and support

Two typical SaaS workloads, priced

Workload 1: small B2B SaaS (1k MAU)

Next.js + PostgreSQL + Redis. Traffic: 50k requests/day, 500 GB egress a month. Redis runs on the app server in both setups.

Saving: roughly two-thirds at any EUR/USD rate between 1.10 and 1.20.

Workload 2: mid-tier SaaS (10k MAU)

Same stack at a larger scale: 4 app servers, a Postgres primary with a standby or replica, 5 TB egress a month.

Saving: roughly 70–73% at EUR/USD between 1.10 and 1.20. Traffic note: a Hetzner load balancer includes less traffic than a server (1–3 TB in DE/FI depending on size). If all 5 TB pass through it, serve static files and media through a CDN such as Cloudflare, or budget for the extra traffic.

Workload 3: heavy SaaS (100k MAU + ML inference)

Here it gets nuanced. AWS offers managed ML services (SageMaker, Bedrock) that simplify the ML side. On Hetzner you manage GPU servers yourself.

For pure CPU/IO workloads at scale, Hetzner usually stays well below AWS, for the same reasons as above: cheaper dedicated servers and included traffic. For ML workloads with burst spikes, AWS can be competitive via spot instances + Lambda.

Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?

For compute alone, the gap is smaller than it used to be. Hetzner raised prices for new orders and rescales on 15 June 2026: CX23 went from €3.99 to €5.49, CPX22 from €7.99 to €19.49 and CCX13 from €15.99 to €42.99 a month. A dedicated-vCPU CCX13 (€42.99) now costs roughly 55–62% of the comparable AWS m6i.large ($83.95). The bill still ends up far lower on Hetzner because traffic is included and a self-managed Postgres pair costs a fraction of RDS Multi-AZ. If your app sends little traffic and you would pay for managed databases anyway, the difference shrinks.

Hetzner load balancer pricing

Hetzner bills load balancers by the hour with a monthly cap. LB11 handles 5 services and 25 targets and includes 1 TB of traffic in Germany and Finland; LB21 (15 services, 75 targets) includes 2 TB and LB31 (30 services, 150 targets) includes 3 TB. After Hetzner's April 2026 adjustment, LB11 is reported at about €7.49 a month (confirm in the Hetzner console). The AWS Application Load Balancer costs $0.027 an hour in Frankfurt (about $19.71 a month) plus usage billed in LCU-hours, so the AWS figure grows with traffic and connections.

When AWS remains the right choice

1. Extensive managed services

Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions, SQS, SNS, Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB on-demand. On Hetzner you build these yourself (BullMQ + Redis for queues, Postgres for everything). If your team is small and you want zero ops, AWS saves developer time.

2. Native multi-region

Hetzner runs six locations: two in Germany, one in Finland, two in the US and one in Singapore. AWS has 30+ regions. If your audience is global or regulation requires a specific location, AWS is often the only option.

3. Enterprise compliance

SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI DSS: AWS has pre-existing certifications. On Hetzner you do compliance, which can cost more in audit than infrastructure savings.

4. Unpredictable traffic spikes

Black Friday 100x traffic spike? AWS auto-scaling solves in seconds. Hetzner requires manual planning.

5. Managed AI/ML (Bedrock, Vertex)

Bedrock with Claude/Anthropic, Amazon Q, Trainium for training. Hetzner doesn't offer managed AI services.

Hybrid strategy: best of both worlds

Many successful SaaS use a combination:

• Compute and Postgres on Hetzner (dedicated servers at roughly 55–62% of the price of comparable AWS m6i instances, traffic included)
• Cloudflare for CDN, DDoS, WAF (no egress fees)
• S3-compatible storage: Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 (zero egress)
• AWS / GCP only for: AI/ML, Lambda for sporadic workloads, managed services when time-to-market matters more than cost

For a broader comparison that also covers GCP and Azure, see our cloud provider decision guide for 2026.

Hetzner pitfalls

1. Self-managed: you need DevOps skills

Hetzner gives you a VPS, you do the rest: install Postgres, configure backups, monitoring, security hardening, OS updates. If your team lacks DevOps experience, the real cost (engineer hours) cancels out the savings. Our maintenance cost guide shows what that upkeep usually costs.

2. Traffic limits outside the EU and on load balancers

EU cloud servers include 20 TB a month, US servers 1 TB, and load balancers 1–3 TB. A good CDN keeps most apps well inside those limits; video or streaming SaaS can use them up fast.

3. Manual disaster recovery

Automated backup at Hetzner = €/month extra and must be configured. AWS RDS has it out-of-box.

4. Limited support

Email/ticket support ~24h response. AWS Business Support: 1h. For critical oncall, plan internal runbook.

Final recommendation

• MVP / pre-Series A startup: Hetzner. The savings go back into the product. Budget ranges for the build itself are in our SaaS MVP cost guide.
• EU B2B SaaS under 100k MAU: Hetzner default, AWS for specific services (queue, ML).
• Enterprise / global / compliance heavy: AWS or GCP.
• Managed AI/ML workloads: AWS Bedrock or GCP Vertex AI.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?

Yes, for stable workloads hosted in Europe. In our two example SaaS setups, the Hetzner bill is roughly 65–75% lower than AWS at list prices checked on 23 September 2026. Most of the gap comes from included traffic and self-managed Postgres, not from the servers alone.

How much does a Hetzner load balancer cost?

LB11 is reported at about €7.49 a month after Hetzner's April 2026 adjustment, with 5 services, 25 targets and 1 TB of traffic included in Germany and Finland. An AWS Application Load Balancer costs about $19.71 a month in Frankfurt plus LCU usage.

Does Hetzner charge for egress traffic?

Cloud servers in EU locations include 20 TB of traffic a month; US locations include 1 TB. AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB a month out of Frankfurt.

Did Hetzner raise prices in 2026?

Yes. From 15 June 2026, new orders and rescales pay higher prices, for example CPX22 €19.49 (was €7.99) and CCX13 €42.99 (was €15.99) a month in Germany and Finland.

When is AWS the better choice?

When you need managed services such as Lambda, SQS or Aurora, several regions, compliance certifications like SOC 2 or HIPAA, instant scaling for large spikes, or managed AI services.

Conclusion

"Everyone uses AWS" isn't an argument your budget cares about. For EU SaaS under 100k MAU, Hetzner cut the monthly bill by roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in both examples above, even at the June 2026 prices, and that money can go into development or marketing instead. A hybrid setup (Hetzner + Cloudflare + AWS for the handful of services that need it) is the current sweet spot. If you are planning a move, our pricing page lists cloud migration at €2,000–€10,000.

Sources, checked 23 September 2026: AWS public price list for EC2 on-demand, RDS for PostgreSQL, Elastic Load Balancing and data transfer (eu-central-1); Hetzner price adjustment notice (effective 15 June 2026), cloud server pages for specs and included traffic, and the load balancer page for limits. The LB11 price is the figure reported after Hetzner's April 2026 adjustment; confirm it in the Hetzner console before you budget.