Worked example · AWS
A small AWS account: EC2, RDS, S3 and the usual trimmings.
Eleven services on a three-thousand-dollar bill, with reserved instances, a Multi-AZ database and a Marketplace firewall. The kind of account where engineer time decides the answer. Read through the way the calculator reads it: the bill, what it becomes on Hetzner, the verdict, and what would change it.
The bill
$3,011 a month across 11 services after setting aside support plan, marketplace, tax, credit. The six largest lines:
| Service | Grade | Today | On Hetzner | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 | Easy | $1,435 | $317 | saves $1,118 |
| S3 | Easy | $476 | $91 | saves $385 |
| RDS | Moderate | $461 | $116 | saves $344 |
| CloudFront | Moderate | $255 | ~$38 | saves $217 |
| CloudWatch | Moderate | $150 | ~$45 | saves $105 |
| DynamoDB | Hard | $90 | ~$45 | saves $45 |
~ marks a rule-of-thumb ratio; the rest is priced from usage in the file.
What it becomes on Hetzner
- 11 servers: 1× AX42-1, 4× CX33, 3× CX23, 1× CX33, 2× CX43
- $704/mo for servers, storage and traffic
- 56 h/mo of engineer time, $4,163
- $26,520 one-off, no payback at this net
Extra cost per year
$22,271
Not worth moving at this size. Hetzner costs more once someone is paid 56 hours a month to run it.
Grow first: at this size the hours decide, not the hardware. 4 of your 11 services move easily; 1 is hard. 74% of the Hetzner figure is priced from your usage; the rest is ratio-priced services and engineer time, which is where the range comes from.
Likely range $6,188 more to $377 less a month. Hetzner list prices of 17 Oct 2026, default assumptions.
The same file on nine destinations
Net per year after engineer time, best first. No destination pays for this account; Hetzner loses least.
| Hetzner | −$22,271 over |
| OVHcloud | −$28,440 over |
| Scaleway | −$30,081 over |
| Hetzner (US) | −$30,963 over |
| Vultr | −$31,776 over |
| Akamai (Linode) | −$32,262 over |
| DigitalOcean | −$32,869 over |
| UpCloud | −$35,633 over |
| Exoscale | −$40,265 over |
What would change the answer
- Engineer time. 56 hours a month at $75/h is $4,163, 86% of the destination figure. Halve the rate or fold the work into an existing team and the verdict moves first.
- Scale. Engineer time grows slowly with the number of servers; hardware grows with the bill. The same mix at three times the size usually flips a marginal answer.
- Moving only part of it. The first wave (foundation: storage, traffic, edge) is S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53: $405/mo for about 1 engineer days, with the databases left where they are.
- The hard services. DynamoDB has no equivalent at the destination; keeping them on AWS removes their engineer time and their risk from the plan.
Every one of these is a setting in the report. Open the example and change them.