Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026 and its whole shared-vCPU line is unavailable. Compare free-tier alternatives: DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud.

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Hetzner Alternatives After April 2026 Price Increase

Hetzner raised cloud and dedicated server prices twice in 2026, driven by surging DRAM costs (+171% YoY) from AI infrastructure demand. The April 1 round applied to all regions and all customers; the June 15 round applies to new orders and rescales only, and renamed the lineup. All 8 shared-vCPU plans are now listed as not available, so the cheapest plan you can order is CPX12 at €11.99/mo (1 vCPU, 2 GB), read from hetzner.com on 2026-09-04. See our full pricing analysis.

If you're looking for budget-friendly alternatives with generous free tiers or credits, here are the best options across VPS/cloud providers, managed platforms, and serverless offerings.

Pricing Restructured

Cloud & dedicated server prices increasing 30-50%. Entry-level CX23: €2.99→€3.99/mo (+33%). Applies to new and existing customers. Driven by DRAM (+171% YoY) and NVMe SSD cost surges from AI infrastructure demand. Superseded 2026-06-15: Hetzner ran a second adjustment across all cloud and dedicated lines, applying to new orders and rescales only. Read from hetzner.com on 2026-09-03: CX23 is €5.99 and is marked "not available", as is every other shared-vCPU plan, and the cheapest orderable plan is CPX12 at €11.99/mo. Source ↗

Before: Lower cloud server pricing across Germany, Finland, US, and Singapore data centers (e.g., CX23 at €2.99/mo)
After: 30-37% increase on cloud servers, up to 50% on select dedicated/storage products. All regions and all customers (new and existing) affected. Announced Feb 23, 2026

Top Alternatives

Render Hobby caution discovered 2026-09-02 restructured

Free web services (512 MB RAM, less than 1 CPU), free PostgreSQL (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry), free Redis (25 MB). 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB, 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, 2 environments per project. Auto-deploy from Git

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Cloudflare Workers Free stable

Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. R2: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A ops/month, 10M Class B ops/month. Durable Objects: 100K requests/day. Queues: 10K operations/day. Vectorize: 30M queried vector dimensions/month, 5M stored. Includes cron triggers, WebSockets, and service bindings. Dynamic Workers (beta, paid plan): spawn new Workers at runtime with AI-generated code via V8 isolates. Students: upgrade to 10M requests/month free for 12 months via Workers for Students program (.edu email required)

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Railway Free stable

Free plan: $0/month with one-time $5 credit (30-day trial), 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 project, 3 services max ($1/month minimum after trial). Hobby plan: $5/month with $5 resource credit included, 48 vCPU, 48 GB RAM, 5 GB volume storage, up to 5 replicas at 8 vCPU/8 GB RAM each

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🔗 $20 in Railway credits (disclosure)
Fly.io Legacy Free

Pay-as-you-go only — no free tier for new accounts (since Oct 2024). Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs (256 MB RAM), 3 GB volume storage, 100 GB transfer/month. Volume snapshots: first 10 GB free, then $0.08/GB/month.

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DigitalOcean Credits

$200 credit for 60 days for new accounts. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD — 20% price cut Jan 2026). Per-second billing (min 60s or $0.01). App Platform: 3 free static sites (1 GiB outbound/mo each). Functions: 25,000 GiB-seconds/mo free. Spaces: 250 GB + 1 TB transfer for $5/mo. Managed databases start at $15/mo (not free). No perpetual free compute tier

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Oracle Cloud Always Free stable

Always Free includes 2 AMD VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB each), up to 4 Arm VMs (24 GB total), 200 GB block volumes, 20 GB object storage, 2 Autonomous Databases, Load Balancer

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Google Cloud Startup Program

Scale: up to $200,000 over 2 years for equity-funded startups. Scale AI: up to $350,000 over 2 years ($250K Y1 + $100K Y2) for AI-first startups (pre-seed to Series A). Includes $10K Model Garden credits, $12K support credits, Google Workspace, and dedicated Startup Success Manager

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DigitalOcean Hatch

Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, digitalocean.com/startups reads: DigitalOcean Startups core credits do not cover GPU Droplet usage. Participants generally are entitled to a $10,000 monthly limit. As of May 13, 2026, you may use your credits on any DigitalOcean services, except NVIDIA H100 GPU Droplets, Kubernetes Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference, Serverless Inference, Third-party AI models hosted outside of DigitalOcean Infrastructure. We are not publishing our stored DigitalOcean terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓

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Google Cloud Run Always Free stable

Always Free: 2M requests/month, 360K GB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds compute, 1 GB North America egress. Fully managed serverless containers

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Google Compute Engine Always Free stable

Always Free: 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM (us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk, 1 GB North America egress. GPUs/TPUs excluded

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OVHcloud Credits

Public Cloud free trial: €200 credit for 60 days. VPS from €7.60/mo (Starter: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD NVMe, 250 Mbps unlimited). Discovery instances (d2-2) from ~€5/mo. Object Storage (S3-compatible). Managed Kubernetes (free control plane). 40+ regions across Europe, NA, APAC. April 2026 price increases: VPS +55-67% (VPS-1 €4.90→€7.60, VPS-4 €26→€43.50), Public Cloud/Bare Metal +9-11%. Driven by AI DRAM/NVMe cost surge

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OVHcloud Paid

Dedicated servers starting from ~€55/mo (Rise line: Intel Xeon, 32 GB RAM, 2×480 GB SSD). Kimsufi budget line discontinued, replaced by Eco range from ~€30/mo. Game line with DDoS protection and high-frequency CPU. Storage line for NAS/backup from ~€40/mo. All include unmetered bandwidth (500 Mbps-1 Gbps depending on range). Post-April 2026: Bare Metal prices increased 9-11% for new deployments

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Quick Comparison

Tool Free Tier Details Stability
Render Hobby Free web services (512 MB RAM, less than 1 CPU), free PostgreSQL (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry), free Redis (25 MB). 5 GB b... caution
discovered 2026-09-02 restructured
Cloudflare Workers Free Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: ... stable
Railway Free Free plan: $0/month with one-time $5 credit (30-day trial), 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 pro... stable
Fly.io Legacy Free Pay-as-you-go only — no free tier for new accounts (since Oct 2024). Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: ... —
DigitalOcean Credits $200 credit for 60 days for new accounts. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD — 20% price cut Jan 2... —
Oracle Cloud Always Free Always Free includes 2 AMD VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB each), up to 4 Arm VMs (24 GB total), 200 GB block volumes, 20 GB object ... stable
Google Cloud Startup Program Scale: up to $200,000 over 2 years for equity-funded startups. Scale AI: up to $350,000 over 2 years ($250K Y1 + $100K Y... —
DigitalOcean Hatch As of 2026-08-28, digitalocean.com/startups reads: DigitalOcean Startups core credits do not cover GPU Droplet usage… Our stored DigitalOcean terms are superseded and withheld. —
Google Cloud Run Always Free Always Free: 2M requests/month, 360K GB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds compute, 1 GB North America egress. Fully mana... stable
Google Compute Engine Always Free Always Free: 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM (us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk, 1 GB No... stable
OVHcloud Credits Public Cloud free trial: €200 credit for 60 days. VPS from €7.60/mo (Starter: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD NVMe, 250 Mbps... —
OVHcloud Paid Dedicated servers starting from ~€55/mo (Rise line: Intel Xeon, 32 GB RAM, 2×480 GB SSD). Kimsufi budget line discontinu... —

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