I refreshed my personal comparison of small virtual server pricing in Finland and Europe for August 2026. This is not a pricing survey of any kind — just the options I keep an eye on for my own use — but this time Claude Code did the legwork, so the comparison covers more than last year. Thank you, Claude.
Each provider’s smallest tier is now listed alongside the 2 vCPU class, and where the public IPv4 address or storage is billed separately — increasingly common: Hetzner, Netcup, and Scaleway all started doing it — each plan is shown as an itemised block with a total, so the offers compare without arithmetic. Every figure was verified against a live source during the update, and a second agent with no context from the first re-fetched the sources and cross-checked the numbers before I accepted them.
The pleasant surprise was how much of this data is available in machine-readable form. Linode publishes prices, specs, and per-region overrides as public JSON with no authentication, and the AWS Price List bulk files are equally open, if enormous. The ECB daily reference rates handled the currency conversion. I wish every provider made pricing available like this.
It does not even take an API. DigitalOcean embeds the complete droplet size data as JSON in its static pricing page, Google’s disk and network pricing pages carry full all-region price tables in the HTML, and Hetzner’s pricing matrix renders from a static JSON file that is a plain fetch away.