Hosting & Infrastructure Cost Model
Infrastructure Strategy
Primary Provider: Hetzner (MVP & Default)
Why Hetzner for MVP:
- Best price-performance in Europe
- German company, data centers in Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki
- Excellent bare-metal and VM offerings
- GDPR-compliant by default
- No vendor lock-in
- Predictable pricing (no surprise bills)
Supported Providers (Roadmap)
| Provider | Phase | Use Case |
|---|
| Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated | MVP (Phase 1) | Default for all customers |
| Customer bare metal | Phase 2 | On-prem deployments |
| Azure AKS (imported) | Phase 3 | Customers with Azure commitment |
| GKE (imported) | Phase 3 | Customers with GCP commitment |
| Air-gapped / disconnected | Phase 7 | Regulated industries |
Management Platform Infrastructure
The management platform runs our core services (Rancher, ArgoCD, monitoring) and must be highly available.
Management Cluster — Production Setup
| Component | Specs | Quantity | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| Control Plane Nodes | AX41 (6C, 64GB, 2x512GB NVMe) | 3 | €133.23 |
| Worker Nodes | CPX41 (8 vCPU, 16GB, 240GB) | 3 | €45.87 |
| Load Balancer | Hetzner LB | 2 | €11.88 |
| Block Storage | 500GB | 3 | €25.05 |
| Floating IPs | IPv4 | 3 | €12.96 |
| Backup Storage | StorageBox 1TB | 1 | €3.81 |
| Total Management Infra | | | €232.80/mo |
Management Platform Software Stack Cost
| Service | Monthly Cost | Notes |
|---|
| Rancher | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| ArgoCD | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Prometheus + Grafana | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Loki | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Keycloak | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| cert-manager | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Velero | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Cilium | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Kyverno | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Falco | Free (open source) | Self-hosted |
| Total Software | €0/mo | 100% open source |
SaaS Tooling (Operations)
| Tool | Monthly Cost | Purpose |
|---|
| GitHub Organization | €21/user (Team) | Code, GitOps repos |
| PagerDuty / Opsgenie | €20/user | On-call management |
| Slack (Business+) | €12.50/user | Communication |
| 1Password Business | €8/user | Secrets management |
| Terraform Cloud | Free tier | IaC state management |
| Status page (Instatus) | €20 | Public status page |
| Domain + DNS (Cloudflare) | €20 | DNS management |
| Total SaaS (5 users) | ~€350/mo | |
Customer Cluster Infrastructure
Reference Architectures
Small Cluster (Dev/Staging)
3x CPX31 (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD)
1x Load Balancer
1x 100GB Block Storage
| Component | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| 3x CPX31 | €25.47 |
| Load Balancer | €5.94 |
| Block Storage 100GB | €4.18 |
| Floating IP | €4.32 |
| Total | €39.91/mo |
Medium Cluster (Small Production)
3x CPX41 (8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD) — control plane + worker
2x CPX31 (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD) — additional workers
1x Load Balancer
3x 100GB Block Storage
| Component | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| 3x CPX41 | €45.87 |
| 2x CPX31 | €16.98 |
| Load Balancer | €5.94 |
| 3x Block Storage 100GB | €12.54 |
| Floating IP | €4.32 |
| Total | €85.65/mo |
Large Cluster (Standard Production)
3x AX41 (6C/12T, 64GB RAM, 2x512GB NVMe) — dedicated control plane
3x CPX51 (16 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 360GB SSD) — workers
1x Load Balancer
Backup StorageBox 500GB
| Component | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| 3x AX41 | €133.23 |
| 3x CPX51 | €85.47 |
| Load Balancer | €5.94 |
| StorageBox 500GB | €3.81 |
| Floating IP | €4.32 |
| Total | €232.77/mo |
Enterprise Cluster (HA Production)
3x AX52 (6C/12T, 64GB RAM, 2x1TB NVMe) — dedicated control plane
5x AX41 (6C/12T, 64GB RAM, 2x512GB NVMe) — workers
2x Load Balancer
Backup StorageBox 2TB
| Component | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| 3x AX52 | €172.23 |
| 5x AX41 | €222.05 |
| 2x Load Balancer | €11.88 |
| StorageBox 2TB | €7.61 |
| 2x Floating IP | €8.64 |
| Total | €422.41/mo |
Infrastructure Cost Scaling Model
Cost per Customer (Infrastructure Only)
| Customer Size | Clusters | Monthly Infra Cost | Annual Infra Cost |
|---|
| Starter (1 prod + 1 dev) | 2 | €126 | €1,512 |
| Professional (2 prod + 1 staging + 1 dev) | 4 | €445 | €5,340 |
| Enterprise (3 prod + 2 staging + 2 dev) | 7 | €960 | €11,520 |
Platform Infrastructure Cost at Scale
| Metric | 10 Customers | 30 Customers | 60 Customers |
|---|
| Management cluster | €233/mo | €233/mo | €465/mo* |
| Customer clusters (avg) | €1,500/mo | €5,400/mo | €12,000/mo |
| Monitoring overhead | €50/mo | €150/mo | €350/mo |
| Backup storage | €40/mo | €120/mo | €280/mo |
| Total Infra | €1,823/mo | €5,903/mo | €13,095/mo |
| Per customer avg | €182/mo | €197/mo | €218/mo |
*Second management cluster for HA at 50+ customers
Bandwidth & Traffic
Hetzner includes generous traffic:
| Product | Included Traffic |
|---|
| Cloud VMs (CPX) | 20TB/month each |
| Dedicated (AX) | Unlimited |
| Load Balancer | Unlimited |
For most B2B workloads, traffic costs are negligible.
Infrastructure Margin Analysis
| Item | Customer Pays | Our Cost | Margin |
|---|
| Small dev cluster | €500/mo management | €40/mo infra | 92% on infra |
| Standard prod cluster | €1,800/mo management | €86/mo infra | 95% on infra |
| Large prod cluster | €2,500/mo management | €233/mo infra | 91% on infra |
| Infrastructure pass-through | Cost + 10% | Cost | 10% |
The management fee is where the margin lives. Infrastructure is nearly a rounding error.
Disaster Recovery Infrastructure
| Component | Purpose | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| Hetzner StorageBox (per customer) | Off-site backup | €3.81-15.24 |
| Secondary region replication | DR for management cluster | €233/mo |
| Warm standby cluster (enterprise) | Fast failover | Customer-specific |
Cost Optimization Strategies
- Reserved Hetzner servers: No reserved pricing model, but dedicated servers have fixed monthly costs
- Right-sizing: Regular review of cluster node sizes vs actual usage
- Spot/preemptible for dev: Hetzner doesn't offer spot, but dev clusters can use smaller VMs
- Storage tiering: Use StorageBox for cold backups, block storage for hot data
- Monitoring efficiency: Aggregate metrics at management cluster level, reduce per-cluster overhead