What you bring & what we run

paasbox draws a clean line between the platform we operate and the infrastructure you own. You never run a control plane; we never resell you compute.

The split

We operate (paasbox)	You bring	You get
The Gardener control plane (the Garden)	A Hetzner Cloud project	A managed Kubernetes cluster
The seeds that run your cluster’s control plane	A Hetzner API token (read/write)	Worker nodes in your own Hetzner project (grandfathered + on-demand)
Node-pool management for your grandfathered servers	Your pre-increase servers to adopt	A real admin kubeconfig for day-2 ops
Observability and cost/savings reporting	A payment method	Metrics, availability, capacity & cost/savings views
The portal at console.paasbox.com		Managed lifecycle: upgrades, scaling, hibernation

How the cost splits

This is where the savings come from:

• Your worker nodes, load balancers, and volumes live in your Hetzner Cloud project, and Hetzner bills you for them directly — at your rate, which for adopted pre-increase servers is the grandfathered one.
• Your control plane runs as pods on our seed, and we absorb that cost under the flat €99 / $129 per-cluster fee.

So you pay Hetzner for the machines you’d be paying for anyway, and you pay paasbox one flat price to make them a managed Kubernetes cluster — without the extra nodes, load balancers, and operations a self-run control plane would add.

What stays yours

• Full cluster-admin. The kubeconfig we issue is a genuine admin credential for your cluster.
• Your workloads. Deploying and managing apps, namespaces, secrets, and in-cluster RBAC happens on the cluster, with your own tools. paasbox is a cluster-lifecycle, fleet, and billing console — not an in-cluster management UI, and not in your way.
• Your servers and your data. You own the Hetzner project and every machine in it. paasbox operates them as cluster nodes; it never resells or takes them over.