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PaaS Tax Calculator - Compare Deployment Costs

What Is the PaaS Tax?

The "PaaS tax" is the markup you pay on top of raw infrastructure costs when using managed deployment platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or Railway. A $5–10/month VPS running on Hetzner can host the same Next.js application that costs $100–$500/month on Vercel Pro once you factor in per-seat pricing ($20/seat/month), bandwidth overages ($40 per 100 GB after the first TB), serverless compute ($0.128/CPU-hour), and add-on services like Postgres, blob storage, and KV cache billed separately.

For a five-person team at moderate traffic, the gap between managed PaaS and self-hosting is often 5–20× on a per-resource basis. This calculator makes that gap concrete so you can decide whether the operational convenience of a PaaS is worth the premium for your specific workload.

How to Use This Calculator

Simple mode — enter your team size, monthly bandwidth in GB, and serverless function GB-hours. The calculator immediately shows your estimated Vercel Pro bill and the equivalent self-hosted cost on a Hetzner VPS running Temps.

Advanced mode — model your full stack by selecting app types (Next.js SSR, SPA, Node.js API, background workers), database tiers (dev, staging, production), database storage, blob storage, KV request volume, and analytics event volume. The calculator recommends the smallest Hetzner server tier that fits your workload and shows a line-by-line cost breakdown for both options.

Use the preset buttons — Solo Dev, Startup, Scale-up, Enterprise — to jump to realistic configurations, then adjust sliders to match your actual usage. The Share button generates a URL with your exact configuration encoded so you can send it to a teammate or bookmark it.

What Self-Hosting Costs Include

The self-hosted estimate uses current Hetzner Cloud VPS pricing (CX23 at $6.26/month through CPX51 at $62.39/month). Every tier includes 20 TB of outbound bandwidth, which covers the vast majority of web applications. Temps — the self-hosted PaaS running on the VPS — provides git-push deployments, automatic HTTPS, preview environments, built-in PostgreSQL, Redis/KV storage, analytics, error tracking, and session replay at no additional cost per feature.

Team seats are unlimited on all Temps plans. There are no per-user fees, no function invocation charges, and no bandwidth billing within the included 20 TB. For most teams under 1M monthly active users, self-hosting on a single $10–$30/month VPS covers the entire stack that would cost $300–$800/month on managed PaaS.

Common Cost Surprises on Managed PaaS

  • Per-seat fees accumulate faster than traffic costs. A 10-person engineering team on Vercel Pro pays $200/month before a single user visits the site.
  • Bandwidth overages are front-loaded. After 1 TB, Vercel charges $40 per additional 100 GB — $400/TB compared to effectively $0.05/TB on Hetzner.
  • Each database is billed separately. Vercel Postgres charges $20/month per database instance plus $0.30/GB storage, so a dev + staging + prod setup adds $60/month minimum before storage.
  • Analytics and error tracking are add-ons. Tools like Datadog, Sentry, and Plausible each add $9–$31/month. Temps bundles all three into the base VPS cost.