So the AI boom is resulting in a) fewer jobs, b) massive increases in hardware, and c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?).
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is:
Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier.
Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now.
The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.
Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
It seems like what's missing here is lower cost plans, because the existing plans had been fairly affordable, but now they're basically triple.
The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price?
I use to be a huge Hetzner fan but it doesn't appear they have launch any new hardware in the past 3-years.
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
(Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well)
EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line
Is there a lot of new enterprise server hardware coming out lately? Consumer stuff has been stagnant with all the ram cost issues so I could see servers running into similar issues.
it's not that bad, EX63 dedicated servers were a great deal until this week (especially with 192 GB ECC RAM upgrade) and it has a 2025 CPU, for example
They price hiked my existing CCX13 from 16€ to 43€ - that is a 2.6x price increase (!). Technically they didn't increase it yet, for as long as I don't order a new one or rescale (up/down) they let me use the old price. This is insane (it is a cloud server, with 2 dedicated cores and 8 GB RAM).
Yeah, I host three small-scale game servers for an indie-game, all out of pocket. 50-80 players hop on every day and the community is super nice. Its been possible because the price has been €16 per instance, but with these new prices, it will absolutely not be possible anymore. I imagine a lot of small game server communities will meet the same fate now, since Hetzner has been the go-to for this kind of stuff.
As a long term metal customer, I understood the need to raise prices for energy usage.... but for disk/ram I'm struggling to be sympathetic. The hardware I am using is already procured by them, and until such time there is a hardware failure I cannot support a price rise, because were is their justification for existing hardware?
An ongoing business that intends to remain ongoing has to charge current customers based on the replacement cost of consumable items used to service those customers.
That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while.
Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is.
Because in a free market, making rational choices about pricing in line with the industry allows you to build capital to further expand, which coincidentally also lets you buy more RAM.
Getting close to losing any point of them existing. They were the cheap one. You take that away and their unique offering vanishes and makes them pretty pointless to even consider as a provider. Really hope they can sort out something for their hardware sourcing as this isn't sustainable.
I just used Claude to convert my app to a serverless architecture and migrated to Cloudflare and their generous tiers. Not every app fits that model, but it's more than you'd think. Now I only pay when the app is used, not a penny more.
Little bit of number crunching shows that the median increase is 112%, so a 2.12x increase. Median for GER/FIN region is 120%, USA region is 157%, and Singapore is 71%.
Worst of all increases is the Euro pricing for USA plan CPX41 with a 209% increase, or 3.09x.
Raw number comparison for those interested:
Tried to format it to be readable but its
[Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change]
They are also becoming greedy. I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee. Whereas it was something like 60 euros a year ago.
We (company) do the same. Though in our case the setup cost was 80 Euros (I think), less than a year ago. As the GPU proved not really suitable for any serious server workloads (it's a workstation class card), we'll soon be ditching that machine anyways (now for sure). Maybe our other inventory at Hetzner too. Not even because of the price increases themselves, but rather because the way in which they've communicated those. Personally, I've been a loyal customer and avid advocate for Hetzner, for well over a decade. They sure knew how to nuke that in record time. They can spin their story any way they like, but I'd say their board better consider sending most of their management packing, without bonuses or severance pay.
Interesting over the price increase rollover now the setup fee is around 110 euros.
The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.
If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)
> I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee
Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234.
You are saying that like it's some kind of rag pull. This is situation of the market. The people who moved still saved the money and are still saving money because Hetzner is still cheaper and they are also paying the old prices.
It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp.
Hardware prices, especially RAM, have skyrocketed. Priced out new baremetal servers recently and prices were 3-6x what we paid 4 years ago for the newer equivalents.
AI seems to be ruining every single major thing that drove economic growth for the past 4 decades. PCs, the Web, software in general, high-capacity servers, Raspberry Pis and so on. The next thing to be affected will probably be smartphones. All of these things are foundations of profitable businesses right now and we are destroying them on the mere promise to get to some idiotic utopia in the future.
There are actually two separate pricing increases. One was introduced about 1-2 months ago. The one from today was announced at the end of May, without actually revealing new pricing then. The new levels were made public today or yesterday, I believe. And they are much bigger than before, some hikes are well above 200%.
So the AI boom is resulting in a) fewer jobs, b) massive increases in hardware, and c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?).
When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Do you know how many jobs there will be on Mars? Go west young man...
At least, Trillions+ I'd guess if I read the project right? :-D
They are are hiring AI Ethics Officers for robots deciding who gets the last potato.
Rovers of Wrath? East of Olympus Mons?
The next great American novels.
The upside is c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality
you know how many r are in strawberry
You can reply to emails faster and so have more time for hobbies. /s
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
This is likely mostly nullified by the consumerism hellscape that's being forced on us i.e. stuff lasts less time and we have to buy more often.
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now.
It's all a matter of perspective. 100 years ago, the middle class' purchasing power is far bigger.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
It is not.
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.
Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
> It's easier to enter the owner class.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
>Based on what?
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
Somebody will eventually know the difference.
And then you’re fired.
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
That’s not correction though, that’s perpetuation or acceleration of last 40 years‘ trend.
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
> When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
It seems like what's missing here is lower cost plans, because the existing plans had been fairly affordable, but now they're basically triple.
The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price?
It's wild how much more expensive they are in the US compared to Europe.
Salaries
My recollection is that Hetzner own all they DC in .de, self built, land incl. however .us and .sg are standard DC colo/rack
I use to be a huge Hetzner fan but it doesn't appear they have launch any new hardware in the past 3-years.
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
(Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well)
EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax102-u/
Is there a lot of new enterprise server hardware coming out lately? Consumer stuff has been stagnant with all the ram cost issues so I could see servers running into similar issues.
Proliant G12 was introduced end of 2024, and based on their previous lifecycle I guess they will at least last 3-5 years before a new line comes.
Hetzner is almost exclusively offering consumer-grade hardware.
They are attempting to refresh it now, it's just the worst possible time to do it. Prices are at a peak (hopefully).
it's not that bad, EX63 dedicated servers were a great deal until this week (especially with 192 GB ECC RAM upgrade) and it has a 2025 CPU, for example
They price hiked my existing CCX13 from 16€ to 43€ - that is a 2.6x price increase (!). Technically they didn't increase it yet, for as long as I don't order a new one or rescale (up/down) they let me use the old price. This is insane (it is a cloud server, with 2 dedicated cores and 8 GB RAM).
Yeah, I host three small-scale game servers for an indie-game, all out of pocket. 50-80 players hop on every day and the community is super nice. Its been possible because the price has been €16 per instance, but with these new prices, it will absolutely not be possible anymore. I imagine a lot of small game server communities will meet the same fate now, since Hetzner has been the go-to for this kind of stuff.
There's always lowendbox.com but Hetzner was more reliable than most of those vendors.
I built a new computer with lots of RAM and a nice NVMe drive about a year ago, and I feel like I hit the jackpot with timing.
But just like a low-interest rate mortgage, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for a long time, it seems.
As a long term metal customer, I understood the need to raise prices for energy usage.... but for disk/ram I'm struggling to be sympathetic. The hardware I am using is already procured by them, and until such time there is a hardware failure I cannot support a price rise, because were is their justification for existing hardware?
An ongoing business that intends to remain ongoing has to charge current customers based on the replacement cost of consumable items used to service those customers.
That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while.
Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is.
Because in a free market, making rational choices about pricing in line with the industry allows you to build capital to further expand, which coincidentally also lets you buy more RAM.
They will need to buy new hardware too I guess…
They are not raising prices for existing contracts, only new ones.
The last price increase was 5-10%. This one is a 150% increase. Goodbye Hetzner. The old version of you will be missed.
Where are you moving to?
Getting close to losing any point of them existing. They were the cheap one. You take that away and their unique offering vanishes and makes them pretty pointless to even consider as a provider. Really hope they can sort out something for their hardware sourcing as this isn't sustainable.
The above assumes that other providers will not do their own adjustments.
This is Hetzner's third increase this year. Not seeing any sort of similar levels of recurring price hikes from the other big vps providers.
There are large (x2, x3) price rises for US based servers but the German / Sweedish ones show much more reasonable increases ~30%
Hetzner dramatically increased prices for new and rescaled instances starting 15th of June, 2026; 8 AM CEST.
For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I just used Claude to convert my app to a serverless architecture and migrated to Cloudflare and their generous tiers. Not every app fits that model, but it's more than you'd think. Now I only pay when the app is used, not a penny more.
Little bit of number crunching shows that the median increase is 112%, so a 2.12x increase. Median for GER/FIN region is 120%, USA region is 157%, and Singapore is 71%. Worst of all increases is the Euro pricing for USA plan CPX41 with a 209% increase, or 3.09x.
Raw number comparison for those interested: Tried to format it to be readable but its [Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change]
They are also becoming greedy. I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee. Whereas it was something like 60 euros a year ago.
We (company) do the same. Though in our case the setup cost was 80 Euros (I think), less than a year ago. As the GPU proved not really suitable for any serious server workloads (it's a workstation class card), we'll soon be ditching that machine anyways (now for sure). Maybe our other inventory at Hetzner too. Not even because of the price increases themselves, but rather because the way in which they've communicated those. Personally, I've been a loyal customer and avid advocate for Hetzner, for well over a decade. They sure knew how to nuke that in record time. They can spin their story any way they like, but I'd say their board better consider sending most of their management packing, without bonuses or severance pay.
Interesting over the price increase rollover now the setup fee is around 110 euros.
The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.
If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)
> I rent their 20GB VRAM instance GEX44, for which they now ask a 500 euro one-time setup fee
Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234.
Buried multiple links and scrolling deep, but looks like they're tripling prices for cloud servers in the US.
What's the next best option now?
I say hello to every happy HN and twitter post “we moved to hetzner and saved 10X”.
I told ya about silent happiness…
You are saying that like it's some kind of rag pull. This is situation of the market. The people who moved still saved the money and are still saving money because Hetzner is still cheaper and they are also paying the old prices.
It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp.
they still save 3-5x
Anyone know why? Some of the tiers more than doubled in price, that's pretty insane.
Hardware prices, especially RAM, have skyrocketed. Priced out new baremetal servers recently and prices were 3-6x what we paid 4 years ago for the newer equivalents.
RAM prices, surely?
Was looking into a ram upgrade and the kit is 4x what it was even a year ago. I'm with you on this one
Previously discussed 18 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066
I believe the price changes themselves were not publicly announced by Hetzner back then. Just their intent to increase them once again.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307959
For example, their 'Regular Performance' cloud server tier has seen a 173% price increase.
AI seems to be ruining every single major thing that drove economic growth for the past 4 decades. PCs, the Web, software in general, high-capacity servers, Raspberry Pis and so on. The next thing to be affected will probably be smartphones. All of these things are foundations of profitable businesses right now and we are destroying them on the mere promise to get to some idiotic utopia in the future.
It's been a struggle to allocate cost-optimized VPS at them for months now (in some regions), they were very often out-of-stock.
Was this announced beforehand? How do you double prices for customers so abruptly with no transition period?
They announced it a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145
There are actually two separate pricing increases. One was introduced about 1-2 months ago. The one from today was announced at the end of May, without actually revealing new pricing then. The new levels were made public today or yesterday, I believe. And they are much bigger than before, some hikes are well above 200%.
I tried to sign up to Hetzner services once. They wanted photo of my government ID, and almost all my personal data, full dossier. So I abstained.
None of OVH, GCP, AWS, Azure wanted so much data about me, and I run my services in all of them successfully. Not in Hetzner.
Sorry Hetzner, you're too data-hungry. Nothing you say justifies that.
Wow this is a brutal price increase for a lot of plans, at least it appears old user instance prices are grandfathered unless you rescale them.
I wonder how this will affect their demand considering most people use them because they’re low cost
Well we are officially fucked. That's some increase, not angry against hetzner they might have been forced, but man is this sad.
I built a homelab before the crisis started which might allow me to survive this for the next few years.
But man am I sad about folks trying to build new projects.