"Go cloud-native" is the advice you hear at every conference, every podcast, every blog post. But the people giving that advice are usually engineers working at large scale on AWS, not SME owners.
A Real Cost Comparison
For a SaaS application with 5,000 active users:
Hetzner VPS (CPX21) + Coolify:
- VPS: €8/month (~$9)
- Coolify (self-hosted PaaS): Free
- PostgreSQL (same VPS): Included
- Total: ~$9/month
AWS (minimal setup):
- EC2 t3.small: ~$17/month
- RDS PostgreSQL db.t3.micro: ~$25/month
- ALB (load balancer): ~$20/month
- Total: ~$62/month
Annual difference: ~$636. Over 3 years: ~$1,900.
AWS's managed services (RDS, ECS, etc.) deliver real value: automated backups, failover, scaling. The comparison can look "unfair." But the vast majority of SMEs don't actually need the SLA these managed services provide.
When Do You Actually Need AWS?
Three real scenarios:
1. Spiky, unpredictable traffic: A product that goes viral on social media, big sale days, campaign periods. Absorbing sudden traffic spikes on a VPS is hard.
2. Multi-region requirements: If your users are spread across continents and latency is critical, you need CloudFront and global infrastructure; that's AWS territory.
3. Compliance (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2): Certain compliance standards may require AWS's certifications.
If none of these three apply: consider self-hosting.
KELD's Default Recommendation
When starting a new project, our default stack is: Hetzner + Coolify + GitHub Actions
- Coolify: A Heroku-like PaaS experience, on your own server. Docker containers, automatic SSL, git push to deploy.
- GitHub Actions: Free CI/CD for public repos, and very affordable for private ones too.
- Hetzner: German data centers, GDPR-compliant, geographically close to Turkey, leading price/performance ratio.
With this stack, you can run an average SaaS application on a $15-30/month budget.
What Do You Do When You Outgrow It?
When you hit the limits of a VPS (which, for most SMEs, means you've reached profitable growth), your options are:
- A bigger VPS (vertical scaling on Hetzner takes minutes)
- Multiple VPS instances + a Coolify cluster
- At this point, moving to AWS finally makes financial sense
The key point: don't spend money on cloud costs before you have the revenue or the scale that requires it.
Conclusion
Self-hosting isn't "old-fashioned"; it's a deliberate choice. We're not dismissing AWS's power or its managed services. But paying $80/month for an application that could run for $9/month means over $1,000 a year in hosting costs before you've even acquired your first 3-5 customers. For a startup, that's a real difference.