Skip to content
PAASBOXPAASBOXPAASBOX

About paasbox

paasbox is a managed Kubernetes platform for your own Hetzner Cloud account: it provisions and operates the control plane, you bring your own nodes — and keep your grandfathered pricing. It grew directly out of running my own apps, and out of the problem the rest of this site is about.

Status (as of 2026-07-09): the console at console.paasbox.com is open — you can sign up, connect a Hetzner project, and start a cluster today. If anything is unclear or you just want to talk it through first, contact me directly.

Why I built it

Section titled “Why I built it”

I build and run small SaaS apps on the side. After trying Dokku, Rancher with RKE, k3s, and Talos, I landed on Gardener on Hetzner Cloud — and to my surprise it was by far the best experience. With newer models like Claude Opus and Fable doing the tedious YAML work, mature fleet-grade Kubernetes became genuinely doable for one person on the side.

Then Hetzner raised prices on 15 June 2026, and the catch became obvious: Kubernetes treats worker nodes as cattle — it deletes and recreates them on every upgrade and autoscale — so a normal cluster re-orders every node at the new price within weeks, and the grandfathered rate you were promised silently disappears. I’d already built the piece that fixes it for my own clusters: adopt the servers you want to keep, rebuild them in place, and never delete them, so the price holds. paasbox is that, plus an automated control plane — delivered entirely as software.

Why Gardener

Section titled “Why Gardener”

Gardener is “Kubernetes that runs Kubernetes”, and it’s battle-tested at a scale most platforms never reach — it powers SAP’s own Kubernetes service, STACKIT’s cloud, and T-Systems’ sovereign cloud, run by people who have operated fleets of thousands of clusters for years. Counterintuitively, the design that lets a platform team run hundreds of clusters cheaply and uniformly is exactly what makes a managed Kubernetes platform viable — and affordable — for a single team. That’s the leverage paasbox passes on to you.

About me

Section titled “About me”

I’m Mitja Martini, a long-time cloud managed-services solution designer at T-Systems International. I’ve been building and running small apps on the side for years, and got pulled into agentic, spec-driven development in 2025. In early 2026 I realized I could build a small SaaS app end to end in a day or two — and shipping, not building, became the bottleneck. Auth, DNS, transactional email, payments, monitoring, deployment: the work around the app. Kubernetes turned out to be a great orchestrator for all of it, and Gardener automates Kubernetes itself. paasbox is how I make that available to other people in the same spot.

paasbox is deliberately small and focused. I run it the way I’d want a tool I depend on to be run: honestly, conservatively, and without overselling what it does.

Contact

Section titled “Contact”

The contact page has all the channels. The short version: