Startup Infrastructure for 6 Euros a Month

The other day I was picking the architecture and platform for my sandbox. I wanted to stop just storing projects on GitHub and start shipping them to the world.

The Economics

European providers offer really attractive economics for getting started right now. Hetzner covers the basic needs of a sandbox for six dollars a month. 4 cores, 16 gigs of RAM, fast disks. Need more power - scale up for pennies.

The imarch.dev domain cost ten dollars a year. I deployed an Astro site on Cloudflare Pages with auto-deploy straight from GitHub. Content lives in markdown files, and I caught myself thinking that the need for heavyweight solutions like WordPress just vanishes. Too clunky for rapid hypothesis testing.

The Cloud

After the dashboard posts, it became clear that a local environment wasn’t enough. Time to move to the cloud. I added subdomains, basic security, separated environments, and got a space where I can calmly test hypotheses and ship demos externally.

Launching my own R&D environment cost a domain plus a cheap virtual machine.

The Twist

The most expensive part of my stack is a Claude Pro subscription. 100 dollars a month. Sixteen times more than the entire infrastructure.

I spent more on an assistant that helps me write code and automate busywork than on all the infrastructure where that code runs. And that’s fine - you used to need a team for this. With Claude Code, I built in two days what would have taken months before.

The technical side of a startup stopped being expensive. What’s expensive now is time. And the AI platform is selling exactly that.

If you’ve had a startup idea living in your head for a while - the technical barrier to entry isn’t as scary as it seemed. Infrastructure costs less than dinner for two. And AI makes you a one-person team.