What it actually costs to run Pagecord (March 2026)

I thought it would be interesting to document the costs of running Pagecord, the product and the business. This isn't something that many indie developers share and it's pretty interesting to me, so here's the breakdown of what it costs to keep the lights on as of March 2026 (when Hetzner's prices go up).

Note that I take no salary or dividends, and any meagre profits stay in the business so I can call on them when needed.

A few more details

Pagecord lives in Hetzner, in Germany. I've found it's the most cost-effective hosting provider out there, and with Hatchbox handling custom domains (via Caddy), server config and one-click deployments, it's super-productive and I love it. I don't think it's possible to get this cost down other than buying a cheaper server which would be counter-productive.

Email is split across two providers which is a historic anomaly. I used to use Postmark for everything, but I found delivery times to be unstable so I switched to Mailpace for all transactional emails which has been much better. Postmark still handles inbound emails (it just works) as well as sending all the newsletters via their bulk sending feature which is very good. At some point I'll probably move everything to Resend, but their inbound email functionality isn't as slick as Postmark yet (early days) and, frankly, what I have right now works great so there's little incentive to move. It's actually handy having two providers since it gives me some redundancy should I need it.

Cloudflare R2 is where all the uploaded images, videos and other attachments live. It's great and better value than AWS S3. The data is all in the EU location. I use Cloudflare Images as an image proxy which I think is amazing. It resizes all the images from Pagecord blogs to an optimal size and serves them in webp format from edge locations across the world. That it only costs me $5/mo (for now, at least) blows my mind.

The accountancy and virtual office costs are due to setting up a UK limited company for Pagecord recently. I was increasingly uncomfortable running it as a sole trader and being liable for any trouble bad actors might be able to cause. More than happy with the increased cost for the peace of mind it brings.

What isn't on this list

Pagecord uses Sentry (error tracking) on the free plan, plus AppSignal (for observability) which doesn't cost me anything right now. Pagecord also uses AWS Cloudfront for caching Rails' static assets. I could probably move this to Cloudflare but what I have just works and costs less than $0.01/mo so I can't be bothered.

The bottom line

Someone emailed me today and complained about the upcoming price increase: "I don't understand how you can have so much costs for just hosting texts and some pictures?". Well, hopefully this post clears that up.

I think $165/month to host 700+ blogs (large portion being on free accounts btw – plz subscribe!) on a fast, reliable (🤞), monitored and backed-up blogging platform for a registered UK company is pretty reasonable. I can't see how I could reduce these costs in any meaningful way right now. It's about as lean as it gets without being dangerously underweight.

This post might not age well since costs change all the time, especially for a growing business, but hopefully it gives you some useful insight into how things run behind the scenes as of right now.