Infrastructure price changes in 2026: the dated ledger

KEY FINDING. Ten vendors have published eleven dated price notices in 2026 for the things a small self-hosted stack runs on, and ten of the eleven are increases. The smallest is Scaleway’s roughly 2% on compute from 1 June. The largest single line is Hetzner’s CCX13, €15.99 to €42.99 (+169%) from 15 June. Three more are already on the calendar: OVHcloud bills local disk and IPv4 separately from 1 October, every .com costs $0.71 more at wholesale from 1 November, and every paid Gemini 3.x Flash rate doubles on 1 January 2027. Each row below carries the vendor’s own old and new figure, the date, who it applies to and the cheapest way around it, with the notice linked.

This is the running ledger behind our individual change notes. One row per vendor notice, ordered by the date the price actually changes rather than the date it was announced. A row goes in only when the vendor’s own page states the change; press reports and forum threads are not enough, and where we could only observe a change on a plan page we say so in a separate section further down. Every figure was read on screen on 7 September 2026 and is the vendor’s, excluding VAT. Where we wrote a full note with the arithmetic, the row links to it. The page will keep growing; the verified date at the top is the date every row was last checked.

The ledger, by effective date

Effective	Vendor and notice	Old to new, in the vendor’s units	Who is affected	Cheapest way around
19 Mar 2026 (new orders) and 1 May 2026 (existing contracts) announced 19 Mar 2026	netcup price adjustment	“Prices for new orders from March 19 onwards will increase by 24.33%.” “Prices for existing hosting contracts will increase by 18.51%, effective at the start of the next billing period from May 1, 2026.” Storage Space and Local Block Storage add-ons “will increase uniformly by 21.52% on 01.05.2026.”	VPS, VPS ARM, VPS Lite, Root Server, web hosting, vGPU and managed private server; new orders at once, existing contracts from the first billing period after 1 May	None stated. The existing-contract rate is lower than the new-order rate, so keeping a contract beats cancelling and reordering
April 2026 announced 5 Mar 2026	OVHcloud pricing evolution (the year’s first round)	Public Cloud, Bare Metal and VPS list prices “between 9% and 11%” on average for 2026 to 2028 infrastructure, “2% to 6%” on pre-2025 lines	New orders and renewals; existing customers at the end of the current commitment. Renewals at the old rate were allowed up to two years ahead before the date	Already past; the early-renewal window closed with the change
1 May 2026 announced 17 Mar 2026	Backblaze B2 pricing update	Storage “from $6/TB to $6.95/TB” a month (+15.8%). Same date: “we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers.” Egress unchanged at three times stored volume free	All B2 customers	None for the storage line. The free egress allowance and the first 10 GB free are unchanged, so a small offsite backup still costs nothing (our running-costs note)
1 Jun 2026 announced 27 Apr 2026	Scaleway pricing update	Compute about +2% (DEV1-S €0.0088 to €0.00898 an hour, PRO2-XXS €0.055 to €0.0561); flexible IPv4 €0.004 to €0.005 an hour (+25%, about €2.92 to €3.65 a month); Block Storage SSD €0.000118 to €0.00013 per GB-hour (+10%); STARDUST1-S €0.00015 to €0.0006 an hour (four times); Dedibox Core-10-S €199.99 to €229.99 a month	New and existing customers. Products not in Scaleway’s table are unchanged	Release flexible IPv4 addresses that nothing uses; each now costs about €3.65 a month whether attached or not. STARDUST at four times the price is the line to re-examine
15 Jun 2026 announced 27 May 2026	Hetzner price adjustment · our note	Cloud servers, the second adjustment of the year (the first took effect 1 April; figures here are the pre-15-June price to the current price): CX23 €3.99 to €5.49 (+38%), CAX11 €4.49 to €5.99 (+33%), CX33 €6.49 to €8.49 (+31%), CPX22 €7.99 to €19.49 (+144%), CCX13 €15.99 to €42.99 (+169%), CCX63 €374.49 to €853.49 (+128%)	“new orders and cloud instance rescales”; a running server keeps its price until it is rescaled	Do not rescale a server you want to keep at the old price. For new capacity, price the destinations first (Hetzner alternatives)
24 Jun 2026 announced 24 Jun 2026	Bunny DNS is free	DNS query fees removed: “we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.” Free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account; the account-level $1 a month minimum spend stays. The previous per-query fee is not restated in the post	All Bunny accounts	Nothing to avoid. This is the year’s one decrease
1 Jul 2026 announced 11 May 2026	Wasabi May 2026 pricing	Pay-Go hot storage “$7.99/USD/TB/Mo” in every region; Reserved Capacity Storage “based on the $7.99 USD/TB/Mo price” for new and renewed terms. The notice does not state the previous price	All Pay-Go accounts from 1 July; RCS on new or renewed contracts	None in the notice. Below 1 TB the bill is $7.99 regardless because of the 1 TB monthly minimum (our backup pricing note)
21 Jul 2026 announced 21 Jul 2026	Amazon SES pricing plans · our note	New accounts, and accounts with no SES activity since 1 June 2025, start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails instead of à la carte $0.10 (+60%). The SES-specific free tier (3,000 messages a month for 12 months) closed to new customers. Pro is $0.22 plus $105 a month, Enterprise $0.23 plus $500 a month	New SES accounts and dormant ones. Accounts that sent email on or after 1 June 2025 stay on $0.10	In the console, open the Pricing plan page and choose Cancel plan. For an account that was defaulted onto Essentials, the first cancellation “takes effect immediately”
1 Oct 2026 announced 25 Aug 2026	OVHcloud pricing changes as of October 1 · our note	On B3, C3 and R3 instances the local NVMe disk and the public IPv4 become separate lines: disk €0.0001458 per GB per hour (about €0.11 per GB a month), IPv4 €0.0027 per hour (about €1.97 a month, billed while unattached too). The instance price does not change. Same configuration “from 1.4% to 21.9%” more: b3-8 €37 to €45, c3-4 €33 to €41, r3-16 €48 to €56 a month	Gen 3 instances, pay-as-you-go and Savings Plan alike; a plan bought before the change keeps its compute discount but pays the new disk and IP lines. B2, C2 and R2 keep the disk included	Release IPv4 addresses that instances do not need. Use flex instances with the fixed 50 GB disk: a b3-64 rises 2.3% as a flex against 14.9% as a standard instance
1 Nov 2026 announced 23 Apr 2026 by Verisign	.com: Verisign notice and Porkbun’s page	Registry wholesale “from $10.26 to $10.97” a year (+6.9%) for every new and renewal .com registration. Porkbun’s retail price goes “to approximately $11.81” from the $11.08 it charged on our 5 September check	Every .com registration and renewal on or after 1 November, at every registrar	Renew before 1 November for the years you intend to keep the name. Porkbun allows up to 10 years and says so: “lock in today’s prices by renewing for years ahead”
1 Jan 2027 no announcement found; dated cells on the pricing page	Gemini API pricing page · our note	Gemini 3.8, 3.7 and 3.6 Flash, paid tier: every per-token rate doubles. Standard $0.75 / $3.75 to $1.50 / $7.50 per million input / output tokens; Batch and Flex $0.375 / $1.875 to $0.75 / $3.75; Priority $1.35 / $6.75 to $2.70 / $13.50; context caching $0.075 to $0.15. The free tier reads “Free of charge” with no date; 3.5 Flash ($1.50 / $9.00) and 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30 / $2.50) are unchanged	Paid-tier users of the three Flash models	Move non-interactive work to Batch: Batch after 1 January costs what Standard costs today

Two reading notes. The percentages in the third column are the vendor’s where the vendor gave one and our arithmetic on the vendor’s two prices where it did not; both are marked by the figures beside them. And “who is affected” is taken from the notice, not from experience: netcup’s 18.51% for existing contracts and Hetzner’s “rescales” clause are the vendor’s own scoping, quoted so you can check them against your account.

Four dates still ahead, and what to do before each

Date	What changes	What to do before it
1 October 2026	OVHcloud bills local disk and IPv4 separately on B3, C3 and R3	List your instances and their public IPv4 addresses; each unattached address costs about €1.97 a month from that date. Decide standard against flex before the first October invoice
1 November 2026	.com wholesale $10.26 to $10.97; Porkbun retail about $11.81	Count the .com names you will keep and renew them for those years in October. At Porkbun that is $11.08 a year now against about $11.81 after, up to 10 years ahead
21 November 2026	OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol “promotional pricing is available at least through November 21, 2026” at $4 in / $20 out per million tokens; what follows is unstated (pricing page)	Nothing to lock. Note the date on any budget that assumes $4 / $20. This is a floor on a promotion, not a scheduled change, which is why it is in this table and not the ledger
1 January 2027	Gemini 3.8 / 3.7 / 3.6 Flash paid rates double	Move non-interactive calls to Batch. A workflow making 1,000 calls a day at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out goes from $101.25 to $202.50 a month on Standard; on Batch after 1 January it is $101.25

What the year costs one small stack

Take a stack that appears in most of our notes: one small Hetzner server, one .com, transactional email through SES, a terabyte of offsite backup in B2, and an automation that calls an LLM. The ledger prices each line of that stack as follows, using the vendor figures above and nothing else.

Line	Change	Extra per year	Avoidable?
Hetzner CX23, ordered new after 15 June	€3.99 to €5.49 a month	€18.00 (about $21)	Only by not ordering or rescaling; a server bought before 15 June keeps €3.99
One .com at Porkbun, renewed after 1 November	$11.08 to about $11.81	$0.73	Yes, for up to 10 years, by renewing in October
Amazon SES on a new account, 2,000 emails a month, left on the default plan	$0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000	$1.44	Yes, entirely, with one Cancel plan click
1 TB in Backblaze B2	$6.00 to $6.95 a month	$11.40	No; API calls became free on the same date, which offsets part of it for busy buckets
Gemini 3.8 Flash, 1,000 calls a day, left on Standard after 1 January	$101.25 to $202.50 a month	$1,215.00	Yes, for non-interactive work, by moving to Batch

The four infrastructure lines together add about $35 a year. The one LLM line adds $1,215, roughly thirty-five times the rest of the list combined, and it is also the one with the cleanest escape. If you read only one row of this ledger before January, read the Gemini row. If you read only one before November, renew the domain.

Observed on plan pages, not announced

Not every change comes with a notice. On 2 September 2026 every plan on Hetzner’s cost-optimized page (the CX and CAX lines, including the CX23 above) showed a “not available” badge with the Create button disabled, while the CPX line was orderable. That is an availability observation with a timestamp, not a price notice, so it is not a ledger row. It matters to the ledger anyway: the lowest-priced Hetzner cloud server you could actually order that day was CPX12 at €11.99, not the €5.49 CX23 the price table shows. The plan-by-plan record is in Hetzner CX and CAX are not available.

Notices we have read but not yet entered

A row needs an old figure and a new figure. These notices give one but not the other, or give the rule without the number, so they wait here until we can complete the line from the vendor’s own pages.

• Namecheap shared hosting renewals from 19 May 2026: Stellar $55.88, Stellar Plus $85.44, Stellar Business $128.88 a year. The notice does not restate the previous renewal prices.
• Tailscale pricing v4, 8 April 2026: the free Personal plan “now supports up to six users.” The previous limit is not in the post.
• Cloudflare D1 free-tier enforcement from 1 September 2026: queries “will fail when an account exceeds the daily row read or row write limits.” The numeric limits sit on a separate page we have not entered.
• OpenAI’s pre-promotional GPT-5.6 Sol rate ($5 in / $30 out) is press-reported, not on an OpenAI page, so the 21 November entry above carries only the promotional floor.

How this ledger is maintained

A script on our own server fetches 35 vendor pricing and announcement pages once a day, reduces each to text and diffs it against the previous day’s copy. The daily summary is public at /data/pricewatch.txt, line counts only. A diff is a prompt to go and read the page; nothing enters the ledger from the diff alone. A row is added when the vendor’s page states the effective date, the old and new figure in the vendor’s units, and who it applies to, and we can name the cheapest way around it or say that there is none. Where the arithmetic matters to the people who read this site, we write the full note within 48 hours of finding the notice and link it from the row.

The managed-hosting price table behind our cost calculator is published as dated JSON at /data/managed-hosting-prices-latest.json with a README; reuse it freely with a link. If a vendor has published a dated change that is missing here, or a figure above no longer matches the vendor’s page, the contact page reaches us and the row will carry the correction date.

Sources, read on screen 7 September 2026

• netcup, 19 March 2026: Price adjustment (24.33% new orders, 18.51% existing contracts, 21.52% storage add-ons)
• OVHcloud, 5 March 2026: Pricing evolution of Public Cloud, Bare Metal and VPS (“between 9% and 11%”, “2% to 6%”)
• Backblaze, 17 March 2026: Pricing and product updates (“from $6/TB to $6.95/TB”, API calls free, effective 1 May)
• Scaleway, 27 April 2026: A transparent update on Scaleway pricing (per-product table, effective 1 June)
• Hetzner, 27 May 2026: Price adjustment (“new orders and cloud instance rescales”, 15 June) and the press release
• Bunny.net, 24 June 2026: We’re making Bunny DNS free (500 domains, $1 minimum spend)
• Wasabi, 11 May 2026: May 2026 Wasabi pricing ($7.99 Pay-Go, RCS base, effective 1 July)
• AWS, 21 July 2026: Introducing Amazon SES pricing plans, SES pricing and the developer guide (Cancel plan)
• OVHcloud, 25 August 2026: Public Cloud pricing changes as of October 1, 2026 and the end of the all-in-one plan
• Verisign, 23 April 2026: .com wholesale fee notice ($10.26 to $10.97, 1 November); Porkbun: Why did .com prices go up (about $11.81, 10-year renewals)
• Google: Gemini Developer API pricing (“through December 31, 2026” and “starting January 1, 2027” cells); OpenAI: API pricing (“at least through November 21, 2026”)
• Our own notes linked from the rows: Hetzner, Amazon SES, OVHcloud, Gemini Flash, Hetzner availability, backup pricing