A cheap VPS starts at about EUR 6 a month for the instance itself, but that is rarely the whole bill. Backups, a second location to hold them, transactional email, monitoring and your own time each add a line, and two published costings put the honest total anywhere from $10 to $125 a month depending on what you are actually running.
Checked 22 August 2026 against Hetzner's own price API, since its pricing page would not render the price widget in four separate attempts. The UserJot and Quackback figures below are theirs, quoted and attributed rather than independently verified.
Is there really a four dollar VPS?
Not one we can point to. "Four dollar VPS" is a number people repeat, but checked 22 August 2026 against Hetzner's own price API, their cheapest cloud instance is EUR 5.99 a month, or USD 7.09, hourly EUR 0.0096, running in Falkenstein, Nuremberg or Helsinki. The next size up is EUR 6.49, or USD 7.59. Whatever the four dollar figure once described, it is not a price we can verify today, and the API returns no VAT field, so we cannot say whether that figure includes it. Call it a cheap VPS and check the current price yourself before you commit.
What is actually on the invoice?
The instance is one line among several. Here is what a support centre on a VPS is really billed for, and what each line costs where a published figure exists.
| Line | What it actually costs |
|---|---|
| The instance | EUR 5.99 a month, USD 7.09, Hetzner's cheapest, checked 22 August 2026 |
| Backups | Most providers bill this as a percentage of the instance price; no fixed figure is published here |
| A second location for those backups | Needed, because a backup stored on the same VPS is not a backup; no fixed figure published |
| Transactional email | Free up to 3,000 emails a month, capped at 100 a day, on Resend's free tier; $10 to $35 a month once you outgrow it, UserJot's figure for a self-hosted Fider deployment |
| Monitoring and TLS | $20 to $30 a month, UserJot's figure |
| Your own time | About five hours a month once it is running, UserJot's figure |
Add the instance to UserJot's other four lines and their own total for this shape of deployment is $70 to $125 a month, before any engineering time. That is not our figure. It is the one a competitor publishes, arguing against self-hosting, and it is the most honest costing anyone in this category has put a number to.
Why do the published costings disagree so much?
Quackback, an open-source project making the opposite argument, prices the same idea at $10 to $20 a month on a VPS for a small team, rising to $50 to $100 for a larger one. Their own line is blunter still: a $20/month VPS can run a feedback platform that would cost $200+/month on a SaaS plan.
Both figures are probably right, because they describe different setups. UserJot's $70 to $125 assumes a managed Postgres instance, a separate host, a paid monitoring service and TLS handled properly, the shape of thing a team with an SLA would run. Quackback's $10 to $20 assumes one small VPS running everything, database included, where the VPS itself is also the backup strategy, and where nobody is paying separately for monitoring. Neither is wrong. They are pricing two different levels of seriousness about the same job.
What does the honest total look like next to a subscription?
Put both totals against the cheapest published subscriptions, checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 20 August 2026:
| Tool | Entry paid tier | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Frill.co | $22/mo billed yearly, $25 monthly | $264 |
| UserJot | $29/mo | $348 |
| Featurebase | $29/seat/mo billed yearly | $348 per seat |
| Nolt.io | $29/mo billed yearly, $39 monthly | $348 |
| Canny.io | $79/mo billed yearly, $99 monthly | $948 |
At Quackback's $10 to $20 a month, a VPS undercuts every one of those. At UserJot's $70 to $125, it does not, and it costs more than any of them except Canny.io at scale. The honest answer is that "cheap VPS" only stays cheap if you run the smaller, less formal setup, and the moment you add managed Postgres, real monitoring and a proper email provider, you have built something closer to what a subscription already includes.
One payment, no subscription, unlimited products.
Does a support centre actually need a VPS?
Not necessarily, and it is worth saying plainly: Docket does not need one. It is a static site plus two small endpoints, so there is no database to back up, no mail server to keep patched, and the free tier of a static host covers it. This whole page is partly an argument against a thing we do not sell, and that is deliberate. A reader who genuinely needs a VPS, for a database-backed tool like Fider, or for something entirely unrelated to a support centre, deserves the real numbers rather than a marketing shortcut, and those numbers are the ones above.
For the fuller picture on what self-hosting a feature request board costs beyond the server itself, see self-hosting a feature request board. The backup line in the table above is covered in more depth in backing up a feedback board, and the full monthly picture for a self-hosted support centre generally is in what a self-hosted support centre costs.
Frequently asked questions
Is there actually a four dollar VPS in 2026?
Not one we could verify. Checked 22 August 2026 against Hetzner's own price API, their cheapest cloud instance is EUR 5.99 a month, or USD 7.09. We have not priced every provider, so this is not a claim that nothing cheaper exists anywhere; it is that a four dollar figure is not one this page can stand behind.
What is the cheapest real VPS price right now?
EUR 5.99 a month, or USD 7.09, for Hetzner's smallest cloud instance, checked 22 August 2026 against their price API. Whether that includes VAT is not confirmed, since the API does not return a VAT field, so check at checkout.
Why do UserJot and Quackback publish such different totals?
They are pricing different setups. UserJot's $70 to $125 a month assumes managed Postgres, a separate host, paid monitoring and TLS: infrastructure suited to a team with an SLA. Quackback's $10 to $20 assumes one small VPS running everything, which is also its own backup strategy.
Does a cheap VPS beat a hosted subscription on price?
Sometimes. Against entry-tier subscriptions from $22 to $79 a month, a VPS run the lean way, at $10 to $20 a month, is cheaper. Run the fuller way, at $70 to $125 a month, it usually is not.
Does a support centre actually need a VPS at all?
Not if it is built as a static site. Docket runs as static files plus two small endpoints, with no database, mail server or backup rotation to run, which is why this page's own numbers do not apply to it.