Grandfathered pricing, explained
This is the reason paasbox exists. Hetzner let you keep your old prices — but only if your servers are never deleted or rescaled. Normal Kubernetes deletes them constantly. paasbox doesn’t.
What happened on 15 June 2026
Section titled “What happened on 15 June 2026”Hetzner raised prices for new Cloud orders, effective 15 June 2026, 08:00 CEST. The increases are steep — the AMD CPX line rose 144–173%, dedicated CCX ~122%, and the Intel CX / Ampere CAX lines roughly 30%.
Crucially, the adjustment applies to new orders and to rescaling existing instances. A server you ordered before the cutoff keeps its old price — as long as that exact instance lives on.
Pets vs. cattle — why normal Kubernetes loses the rate
Section titled “Pets vs. cattle — why normal Kubernetes loses the rate”Grandfathering survives only while the server instance is never deleted or rescaled:
- Pets keep the price. Stop/start and rebuild (OS reinstall) all keep the same server, so the rate holds. Only deleting it — or resizing it — loses the rate.
- Cattle lose the price. Gardener and other Kubernetes managers replace worker nodes — delete and recreate — on every Kubernetes or image upgrade, every autoscale event, and every node-health failure. Each replacement is a brand-new order at the new price.
So an ordinary Kubernetes cluster re-orders its whole fleet at the new price within weeks. The grandfathered rate quietly evaporates.
How paasbox keeps it
Section titled “How paasbox keeps it”paasbox adopts the servers you want to keep into a pooled node pool that is rebuilt in place and never deleted. On every cluster operation — upgrades included — the instance is reused, not replaced. The server lives on, so its locked-in price lives on too.
(Under the hood: adopted servers are managed as never-delete pool members, with Hetzner delete-protection as a second guard. The on-demand “managed” pools you can add for burst behave like normal Kubernetes nodes, at current prices.)
What it’s worth
Section titled “What it’s worth”The figures below are Hetzner list prices, gross (incl. 19% VAT, excl. IPv4). “You’d lose / mo” is the increase you avoid on each server by keeping it grandfathered.
| Type | vCPU / RAM | old gross | new gross | you’d lose / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ccx43 | 16 ded / 64 | €148.74 | €328.43 | +€179.69 |
ccx33 | 8 ded / 32 | €74.36 | €164.80 | +€90.44 |
cpx42 | 8 / 16 | €30.33 | €82.69 | +€52.36 |
ccx13 | 2 ded / 8 | €19.03 | €51.16 | +€32.13 |
cpx32 | 4 / 8 | €16.65 | €42.23 | +€25.58 |
cpx22 | 3 / 4 | €9.51 | €23.19 | +€13.68 |
cax31 | 8 ARM / 16 | €19.03 | €24.98 | +€5.95 |
cx43 | 8 / 16 | €14.27 | €19.03 | +€4.76 |
A modest fleet of 4× cpx42 loses ~€209/mo the moment Kubernetes rolls those nodes at the new
price. paasbox keeps them grandfathered for €99 — net positive from the first month, before
counting the HA control plane (~€127/mo) you no longer run.
What would you save?
Tell us the pre-increase Hetzner servers you'd keep on their grandfathered rate.
Estimates in euro, gross (incl. 19% VAT), for one cluster. paasbox is €99 / cluster / month excl. VAT — VAT-registered businesses reclaim VAT, so net figures are roughly these ÷ 1.19. “Savings” is the price increase you avoid by keeping your servers on their grandfathered rate — not your total infrastructure cost. Your Hetzner bill for the nodes themselves is separate and paid to Hetzner, and an idle node still bills. Prices: Hetzner list, 2026-06-15.
An honest note
Section titled “An honest note”Grandfathering is not elastic cost-saving. You own the boxes, so an idle pooled node still bills Hetzner — keeping a server powered off preserves its price but doesn’t save money. The savings are real, but they come from three specific things:
- the grandfathered rate on servers you’d be running anyway,
- not paying for a control plane (nodes, load balancers, and the operations around them), and
- spilling spikes to on-demand nodes instead of over-provisioning a fixed fleet.
Your Hetzner bill for your own nodes is always separate, and paid directly to Hetzner.