A preview of what we’re building. Not a live service yet
schnapp.

YOUR IDEA, MEET YOUR HARDWARE.

A whole server.
A smaller leap.

Find a good-value dedicated server. Get it running. Go build the thing you actually came here to build.

Schnapp takes you from Hetzner’s server auction to a machine you can use—without becoming a bare-metal expert first.

See how it feels Why a whole server?
Your account.Your SSH keys.No middleman.
ONE MACHINE. ALL YOURS.FIG. 001
ROOM FOR YOUR NEXT PROJECTDE / FSN1
64GBmemory
8cores16 threads
1TBusable, mirrored
Illustrative monthly price€100 / mo

Not a live offer. Availability, tax and prices vary.

Less infrastructure homework.
More room to build.

BARE METAL.
WITHOUT THE GUESSWORK.

Real hardware, not shared vCPUsA bill you review before buyingA machine you can leave with

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMPUTE

Lots of machine.
Not lots of ceremony.

A dedicated server can give you serious CPU, memory and local storage for a surprisingly ordinary monthly bill.

Hetzner’s auction rents out previously used physical servers. You take the whole machine, at the listed price. It’s a particularly good fit for workloads that stay busy: sandboxes, build workers, development environments, and services that need room to grow.

Worth knowing This isn’t an instant, disposable cloud VM. Setup takes time, hardware can need repair, and backups are still your responsibility. Just trying something for ten minutes? A whole server may not be the right first step.

PICK THE HARDWARE. SEE THE TRADEOFF.

How much machine
does your budget buy?

Start with your minimums. Find a real auction listing, then price cloud instances with at least its capacity.

190 normalized auction listingsSnapshot: 2026-09-22 11:47 UTC26 sampled cloud SKUs
CPU class, disk type and billing assumptions

Thread counts are a sizing filter, not a speed rating. A cloud vCPU is not a physical core. Desktop chips may have a mix of performance and efficiency cores. For bare metal, you can filter by physical cores instead.

Cloud configurations are sized to the selected auction’s actual CPU count, RAM and mirrored disk capacity, not merely the minimums above.

Similar capacity. Different machines. Consumer CPUs, Xeons and cloud vCPUs have different single-thread performance, memory bandwidth and isolation. No benchmark equivalence or “times faster” claim is implied. Cloud bare metal means an actual metal instance type, not a dedicated-tenancy VM.
Where the numbers come from—and what they leave out

A dated catalog, not a live quote

Auction snapshot fetched 2026-09-22 11:47 UTC from Hetzner’s public feed. Prices and availability may have changed. We observed differences between feed prices and authenticated Robot quotes in our own purchase. The calculator uses unadjusted feed estimates, not a guaranteed final bill. Confirm IPv4, setup charges, tax and the actual monthly quote before buying.

We retain 190 normalized rows from 190 feed listings. Unknown CPU topologies and malformed rows are excluded. Only listings with at least two disks of one media type are eligible here. Mixed-media layouts are not ranked as a single sensible mirror.

Auction capacity is the smallest disk in an all-disk RAID1 mirror, converted from decimal GB to GiB. OS partitions and filesystem overhead reduce actual space. RAM uses the feed’s module capacity in MiB. Extra disks in RAID1 do not add capacity. RAID is not a backup.

Snapshots ship with this static site; there is no promise of automatic refresh. The refresh command rebuilds the auction catalog before deployment. A sold listing may remain visible until the next snapshot.

Cloud catalog checked 2026-09-22

We select the lowest modeled monthly cost among qualifying rows in this sampled catalog—not every product sold by each provider. AWS samples span c6i, m6i and r6i Linux on-demand instances in us-east-1, including metal. DigitalOcean samples cover General Purpose Regular; that catalog has VMs only.

AWS storage: gp3 at $0.08/GiB-month. DigitalOcean: volumes at $0.1/GiB-month, topping up included local SSD capacity. Network volumes and local RAID have different durability, latency and IOPS. No extra IOPS/throughput provisioned.

Cloud compute uses billed lifetime, not utilization; DigitalOcean must be destroyed, not just powered off, to stop billing. Retained storage stays billed for the full month. Auction rental is modeled as a full month. Annual figures repeat the same month twelve times; no annual discounts.

The default 1.15 USD/EUR is illustrative, not live FX. Excludes tax, traffic, separately billed IPv4, backups, support, labor, credits, Spot and commitment discounts. First-month auction setup fees are shown separately. Germany/Finland and US regions are not latency-equivalent.

Run it all month and bare metal can be compelling. For bursty jobs, change cloud hours in the assumptions. The best choice depends on how you use it—not just the sticker price.

FROM “WHERE DO I START?” TO SSH

Four steps.
No secret handshake.

You shouldn’t need to know what
“rescue mode” means to get started.

01

Find room for your project.

Start with a budget, memory and disk needs. Browse the auction without an account, compare a few good fits, and keep the ones worth a closer look.

02

Test the order. Spend nothing.

Link your account and run a cost-free test transaction. See the live hardware and price before deciding whether this is the machine for you.

03

Buy, then approve setup.

A purchase doesn’t authorize a disk wipe. Confirm the rental first, then separately approve erasing the disks and installing Linux with your SSH key.

04

SSH in. Take it from here.

Connect to the installed machine and bring your own workloads. It’s in your Hetzner account, ready for the tools you already use.

THE COMMANDS BEHIND THE JOURNEY

From a shortlist
to a shell.

Prefer the terminal? Here’s the same trip in concrete commands, with a clear line between looking, spending, and erasing.

These examples use the existing CLI syntax; the broader guided experience is still a concept. Replace every uppercase ID with your own listing, server, or saved run ID. Nothing on this page executes commands.

schnapp — CLI field guideEXAMPLES

1. Find candidates, no account needed

schnapp market --mem 64 --nvme \
  --dc FSN1 --max-price 100 \
  --sort price --limit 5 --no-browser

At least 64 GB RAM, NVMe, Falkenstein. This filters feed estimates, not a guaranteed final bill. Check the live Robot quote before buying.

2. Link your account, then test a listing

schnapp login
schnapp order --product-id PRODUCT_ID

Cost-free, not offline: this submits a test=true transaction to Hetzner Robot and prints the live quote. No server is purchased.

Prefer browsing interactively? Run schnapp with no arguments.

Illustrative commands · your IDs required · nothing runs here

A hiccup shouldn’t mean starting over.

Setup interrupted? Inspect the saved run and resume it. Purchase response lost? Reconcile the recorded transaction instead of submitting a second order. The next step starts with knowing what already happened.

MAKE THE STATE VISIBLE.
MAKE THE NEXT STEP SAFE.

A STARTING POINT. NOT A WALLED GARDEN.

Your server.
Your way from here.

Start guided. Stay in control.

YOUR WORKLOAD

Run what you came for.

Containers, build runners, your own apps, or bhatti sandboxes. Start with a Linux host and choose what goes on it—not a platform’s idea of what you should build.

Room for more than one thing.
YOUR TOOLKIT

Already have your tools?

Hand the SSH-ready host to Ansible, Nix, or your own scripts. Keep your deployment habits. Schnapp gets the machine ready; it doesn’t need to manage every package.

Good defaults. A clean handoff.
YOUR ACCOUNT

Easy to start. Free to leave.

The rental lives in your Hetzner account. Review its terms and cancellation date there when you no longer need it. There’s no Schnapp hosting account to untangle.

Your hardware relationship.

A FEW THINGS WORTH ASKING

Do I need to know Hetzner already?

No. The guided path explains the account and Robot API setup as you go. You’ll need your own Hetzner account, a payment method, and any account verification Hetzner requires. Schnapp can guide those steps, but can’t bypass them.

Who am I paying?

Hetzner, directly, for the server rental. Schnapp isn’t a hosting reseller. Review the live recurring price, setup charges, applicable tax and cancellation terms before you approve a purchase. The CLI’s price filters and caps are net, before tax.

What if a drive fails?

Hardware checks help identify missing devices and unhealthy mirrors. Repairs still go through Hetzner support; application recovery is yours to plan. Mirrored disks can protect against one drive failing, but they are not a backup.

Do I have to use a particular stack?

No. Stop at an SSH-ready Linux server and install what fits your workload. Application deployment, updates, monitoring and backups stay with you and your chosen tools.

Can I use it from a script or an agent?

Yes—the command examples above use the CLI’s market JSON output, explicit purchase and wipe flags, and saved operation IDs. Automation can inspect and resume work, but it still needs deliberate authorization to spend money or erase disks.

LESS YAK SHAVING. MORE BUILDING.

Your next project
could use some room.

This is a preview of the schnapp experience we want to ship—not a live download or a promise that every feature is available today.

Walk through it again