Hetzner Cloud pricing explained

Hetzner Cloud pricing is an hourly price per server type with a monthly cap, a traffic allowance per server in terabytes, volumes and snapshots per gigabyte, backups as a share of the server price, and separate items for primary IPs, floating IPs, load balancers and object storage. On the bill, servers that run all month and therefore pay their monthly cap almost always dominate; traffic appears only once a server has passed its 20 TB allowance.

Pricing dimensions

Hetzner keeps an hourly and a monthly price for every server type. It bills the lower of hours times the hourly price and the monthly price, rounds hours up, and charges a server for as long as it exists, switched off included. The types split into shared vCPUs (CX on Intel or AMD, CPX on AMD, CAX on Ampere ARM) and dedicated vCPUs (CCX); the product pages price them per location group, for Europe Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki.

The cap is the trait that shapes every bill. A CX23 costs EUR 0.0096 per hour and at most EUR 5.99 per month; after 624 hours the cap is reached and the remaining hours of the month cost nothing. Whoever creates servers for hours or days pays the hours; whoever leaves them running pays the monthly price. The product pages show the monthly prices "incl. IPv4", while the documentation prices the primary IPv4 at EUR 0.50 per month as its own invoice line, which is also charged for an address assigned to no server.

Traffic is inside the server price: 20 TB outbound per month per server at the European locations for the CX, CPX and CAX types, 20 to 60 TB for the dedicated CCX types by size. Only outbound traffic counts; inbound and internal traffic, including traffic to dedicated Hetzner servers in the same network zone, is free. Above the allowance Hetzner charges EUR 1.00 per TB in Europe, billed in blocks of 100 MB; the US locations include 1 to 8 TB, Singapore 0.5 to 8 TB with EUR 7.40 per further TB. What separates this model from metered egress is the subject of included traffic and flat pricing models.

Volumes cost per GB and month, billed hourly and capped as well; snapshots pay for the compressed size, so a snapshot of a 40 GB disk is 40 GB or less, pro rata for the part of the month it exists. Backups are a flat 20 percent of the server price for seven daily slots; on a server at EUR 3.29 per month that is EUR 0.658. The per-GB prices of volumes and snapshots sit in the configurator on the cloud page and in the Cloud Console, not in the documentation.

Object storage is billed per account, not per bucket: a base price of EUR 6.49 per month, charged hourly at EUR 0.0104 and capped, includes up to 744 TB-hours of storage and 1 TB of egress in a 31-day month; beyond that storage costs EUR 0.0087 per TB-hour and egress EUR 1.00 per TB, requests are free, and every hour with at least one bucket is billed. Dedicated servers are ordered through the Robot interface at a monthly price; they follow rules of their own and matter here only in that internal traffic to them is free.

Invoices, exports and APIs

Hetzner bills after use: one invoice per month per customer account, on an individual billing date that has been set per customer since 2026-10-01 and can be read in the account administration. Amounts under EUR 10 are carried forward and invoiced after three months at the latest. The PDF invoice summarises by product category and interface (Hetzner Console for the cloud, Robot for dedicated servers, konsoleH for web hosting) and lists the items; individual consumption values are not in the PDF but in a separate consumption statement that opens in the browser or downloads as CSV, reached through the QR code and link on the invoice or through Invoices and Overview in the account administration. The Cloud Console shows usage for the current month only; the previous month appears with its invoice, which can be issued up to 28 days after the month ends.

Primary IPs and servers are separate items, so an invoice with two primary IPv4 addresses and one server carries three lines. Projects in the Cloud Console each carry their own currency, EUR or USD, and a server moved from a EUR project to a USD project is billed in dollars from the move on. VAT is added to net prices by the account's country; the pricing page carries a country selector for it, and how the reverse charge works on cloud invoices is in VAT and reverse charge. Payment is by SEPA direct debit or credit card; there are no annual invoices.

The Cloud API has a price endpoint, GET /pricing, which returns every price on the platform, net and gross, in the currency and at the VAT rate of the project owner, per location as hourly and monthly prices for server types, load balancer types, volumes, images, backups, primary and floating IPs and traffic. The Cloud API has no usage or invoice endpoint; the 152 paths of its specification on the read date hold, beside the prices, only metrics per server and load balancer. Cost data per resource and hour therefore comes from the monthly invoice CSV, the API's resource lists and the price endpoint, not from a usage export of the provider; what that means for collection is in collecting cost data from European providers.

Levers

Configuration

The server type is the largest lever, because the price grows with vCPU and RAM and the dedicated CCX types cost a multiple of the shared ones; rightsizing here means choosing between CX, CPX, CAX and CCX and within the range. Deleting instead of switching off ends the billing, because a switched-off server keeps paying; a snapshot and a later recreation are often cheaper than a standing server, as the billing FAQ itself calculates. Unassigned primary and floating IPs and volumes without a server are classic idle cost and belong deleted; idle and orphaned resources describes the search.

Purchase option

Hetzner offers no reservations, savings plans or volume discounts for the cloud; the monthly cap is the commitment, and a server that runs all month pays it. The decision is therefore between hourly operation for short workloads and the cap for permanent ones, and between the cloud and dedicated servers at a monthly price for workloads large and stable enough.

Architecture

The traffic allowance per server makes many small servers cheaper than a few large ones when outbound traffic is high, because every server brings 20 TB; conversely, object storage with 1 TB of egress in its base price is the wrong place for terabyte-scale delivery when a server can carry the traffic. A load balancer brings its own 20 TB. Internal traffic over private networks is free, so connecting services within a network zone over the private network rather than public IPs pays; the mechanics are in data transfer and egress.

Where it goes wrong

• The server is off, the bill runs. Symptom: a switched-off server stays on the invoice at its monthly price. Cause: Hetzner bills every server until deletion whatever its state; only deleting, after a snapshot where needed, ends the line.
• An hour for a few minutes. Symptom: a briefly created test server costs a full hour. Cause: Hetzner rounds hours up; many short-lived servers add up.
• IP addresses without servers. Symptom: more primary IPv4 lines than servers. Cause: every primary IPv4 whose creation finished is billed, assigned or not; a floating IP likewise.
• Traffic above the allowance. Symptom: a traffic line in terabytes beside a single server. Cause: a server with heavy egress has passed its 20 TB; the allowance is per server, not per account, and is not shared between servers.
• Object storage without data. Symptom: EUR 6.49 per month on an account with hardly any storage. Cause: the base price accrues in every hour in which a bucket exists, empty included.
• Two currencies in one account. Symptom: projects of the same account appear in EUR and USD. Cause: the currency is a property of the project; a moved server changes currency.
• Last month's usage is missing. Symptom: the console shows the current month only. Cause: the previous month arrives with its invoice, up to 28 days later; the consumption CSV is the source for the month-end close.

Example

List prices for the European locations Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, EUR excluding VAT, read on 2026-10-21: a CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic) costs EUR 0.0096 per hour and at most EUR 5.99 per month; a CPX32 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 160 GB) EUR 0.0577 per hour and EUR 35.99 per month; a CCX23 with 4 dedicated vCPU and 16 GB EUR 0.1386 per hour and EUR 86.49 per month with 20 TB. A load balancer LB11 costs EUR 7.49 per month, object storage EUR 6.49 as its base price, an additional TB of traffic EUR 1.00, a primary IPv4 EUR 0.50 and a floating IPv4 EUR 3.00 per month. The figures show that a CX23 reaches its cap after 5.99 divided by 0.0096, that is 624 hours, and runs the remaining 120 hours of a 31-day month for nothing, that a full month of CCX23 costs almost fifteen times a CX23, and that the 20 TB of egress which a metered model would bill as a line of its own sit inside the server price here.

Sources

Read on 2026-10-21. Prices: Cloud Cost-Optimized, Cloud Regular Performance, Cloud General Purpose, Load Balancer, Object Storage, IP pricing. Billing: Cloud billing FAQ, Billing system at Hetzner, Cloud API specification with the GET /pricing endpoint. Service: Servers overview, Volumes, Backups and snapshots, Object Storage overview.