Your $5 VPS Is More Powerful Than You Think

Look at what a $5 Hetzner box actually gives you: 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of NVMe storage, and 20 TB of monthly bandwidth. That’s a real machine. Now look at what cloud platforms charge for comparable resources.

The numbers

Here’s what ~$5-7/month gets you from a VPS provider:

And here’s what equivalent money gets you on a cloud platform:

Hetzner’s $6 box has 8x the RAM of Render’s $7 tier. Fly.io charges $2/month just for an IPv4 address — something every VPS includes for free. Railway’s $5 plan includes $5 of compute credit, which covers roughly a quarter-vCPU running continuously. You burn through it fast.

The VPS isn’t slightly cheaper. It’s a different category of value.

So why does anyone pay more?

Because compute was never the hard part. The hard part is everything around it:

• TLS certificates — setting up Let’s Encrypt, auto-renewal, wildcard domains
• Reverse proxy — routing traffic, handling multiple apps on one box
• Deployments — zero-downtime deploys, rollbacks, not SSH-and-pray
• Secrets — not committing .env files, encrypted storage, per-environment values
• Local dev — matching production behavior without a Docker Compose novel

Cloud platforms bundle all of this into their pricing. You’re not paying $25/month for 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM. You’re paying for the fact that deploys, routing, and TLS just work.

That’s a real tradeoff. But it doesn’t have to be.

What Tako handles

Tako runs on your VPS and handles the platform layer — the stuff between your code and the internet. One binary, no Docker, no Kubernetes.

tako deploy production

That command builds your app locally, uploads the artifact over SFTP, and performs a zero-downtime rolling update with health checks. If something goes wrong, tako releases rollback puts you back instantly.

Here’s what you get out of the box:

• Automatic TLS — Let’s Encrypt certificates issued and renewed for every route, including wildcards
• Routing — Exact domains, wildcard subdomains, path-based routes, static files — all via Pingora, Cloudflare’s proxy framework
• Secrets — Encrypted at rest, per-environment, injected via file descriptor (never touch disk on the server)
• Local dev — tako dev gives you real HTTPS at https://myapp.test with zero config
• Scale to zero — Apps sleep when idle and wake on the next request, so one VPS can host many projects
• Multi-server — Deploy across multiple servers and environments from a single tako.toml

Your tako.toml stays minimal:

[app]
name = "myapp"
preset = "nextjs"

[envs.production]
servers = ["hetzner-1"]
routes = ["myapp.com"]

The math

Say you’re running three small projects — a marketing site, an API, and a side project. On Render, that’s $21-75/month minimum. On Railway, you’d likely exceed the Hobby credit on project two.

On a single Hetzner CX22 with Tako, that’s ~$6/month total. All three apps get their own domains, TLS, and zero-downtime deploys. When traffic is low, idle apps scale to zero and free up resources for the ones that need them.

When you outgrow one box, add another server to your environment and deploy across both. Still cheaper than one Render Standard instance.

Your hardware, your rules

Cloud platforms are great products. If you want managed databases, built-in CI, and a team dashboard out of the box, they deliver real value.

But if you’re an indie dev watching costs, a VPS gives you dramatically more compute per dollar. The only thing missing is the platform layer — and that’s exactly what Tako is.

Your $5 VPS was always powerful enough. It just needed the right tools.