A 64 GB auction server at €72 a month, 70% sold, with no oversell, has to earn €1.61 from each gigabyte that actually has a customer. Same box at 30% sold, and each of those gigabytes is carrying €3.75. The invoice is the same one. You just have fewer guests paying it.
LowEndTalk's margin thread from March 2021 is still the only public argument about what a box provider keeps. Forty-four people voted. About 23% said 5 to 10% margin, and about 39% said the answer was complicated. In the replies, someone wrote that buyers wanted a dollar per gigabyte per month while RAM itself cost about $4 a gigabyte. That $4 was what the module cost to buy. A lot of plans are still written at a dollar a month.
Monthly rent, divided by the gigabytes you have actually sold. Empty RAM stays in the numerator, because the host still bills you for it. The earlier piece on this, an empty node is a bill with no revenue, stops at that shape.
Auction listings move every day. Read the live page before you wire any of this into a plan you publish.
The $4 figure was a purchase price
The $4 a gigabyte in that thread was the cost of the module, not a monthly rent. Catalogue medians for server memory sit somewhere else. A 64 GB DDR4 RDIMM had a median around $939, which is $14.66 a gigabyte, and two 32 GB DDR4 modules, the cheaper way to build the same 64 GB, were about $11.20 a gigabyte. A 64 GB DDR5 RDIMM had a median around $3,287, $51.36 a gigabyte. The cheapest new module in that size was about $2,245, $35 a gigabyte. Those are Memory Clearance and DataCenterDisk catalogue medians, not a quote a distributor will honor on a Tuesday.
Spread a $939 DDR4 module over 36 months and the RAM alone is about $26 a month. The $3,287 DDR5 module is about $91 a month before a motherboard. Colo listings the same week were €40 to €79 for the rack, the power allowance, and remote hands. The chassis that goes in that rack is a separate invoice. I do not have a chassis price, so colo stays off the chart.
Three rents for a 64 GB node
These three are complete machines. Someone else owns the chassis, and you pay monthly. The auction rows are from servermarket.dev. The new row is Hetzner's 15 June 2026 price sheet. Confirm the AX42-1 still ships with 64 GB before you use that row. Listings get revised.
| How you get 64 GB | Up front | Monthly rent | Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auction, i7-7700, 64 GB, 2x 512 GB NVMe | €0 | €72 | €1.70 for the primary IPv4 on that listing |
| Auction, Ryzen 7 7700, 64 GB | €0 | €104 | same €1.70 if Hetzner bills the primary the same way |
| New AX42-1 | €49 setup | €97.30 | read the current price page, do not inherit this cell |
Amsterdam 1U colo on the sheets checked the same week ran about €40 to €59, with 0.5 A or 150 kWh included. Frankfurt ran about €59 to €79, with a power cap around 120 W. Power past the allowance was about €0.28 to €0.30 per kWh. A node inside its included watts adds €0 there. Past the cap, price it from the meter on that listing.
Transit is the other line left at zero. None of the €1.61 below includes a gigabyte of traffic, or an hour of your time.
The €72 figure in the rest of this post is rent only. The €1.70 address is extra, and so is every address after the first.
Each sold gigabyte, at four occupancy levels
Divide the rent by 64 × fraction sold. The first four price columns are that division, with no oversell. The last column is the €72 rent again, with the gigabytes multiplied by 1.25.
| Sold | GB at 1.0 oversell | €72 auction | €97.30 new | €104 Ryzen auction | €72 at 1.25 oversell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% | 19.2 GB | €3.75 | €5.07 | €5.42 | €3.00 (24 GB) |
| 50% | 32 GB | €2.25 | €3.04 | €3.25 | €1.80 (40 GB) |
| 70% | 44.8 GB | €1.61 | €2.17 | €2.32 | €1.29 (56 GB) |
| 90% | 57.6 GB | €1.25 | €1.69 | €1.81 | €1.00 (72 GB) |
The last column sells 1.25 times the stick on the €72 box. At 70% occupied that is €72 / 56 GB, which is €1.29, and it holds only while the guests stay off each other's RAM. I have not load-tested that on these CPUs, so €1.29 is the division and nothing else.
A dollar per gigabyte is already short of the rent
On the €72 box at 70% sold, the gigabyte has to bring in €1.61 before an address, power over the allowance, or an hour of your time. A plan priced at $1 per gigabyte is already short of that at parity. A slightly stronger dollar still leaves the plan under the rent.
If you charge the card yourself, Stripe's published US rate is 2.9% plus $0.30. On a $1 charge that is $0.33, and $0.67 is left. On $2, about $1.64 is left. On $5, about $4.55. European cards on the published EEA rate (1.5% plus €0.25) are the same shape. The fixed $0.30 or €0.25 is what eats a one-dollar plan. A $5 plan can carry it. A $1 plan cannot.
Marketplace sales on NodeRings Community are a different line. The subscription is $0. The commission is 15% of the plan price, taken from your side. The customer still pays the listed price. The billing page walks a $100 sale down to an $85 payout. The same rule on a $5 plan is $0.75 to the platform and $4.25 to you. A $1 plan leaves $0.85. That 15% is marketplace revenue. A customer you invoice yourself stays on the Stripe line above. The public billing page stops after the 15%, so this column has no second card-fee line under it. Re-read the billing page the week you publish a price. The rate lives there.
Put €1.61 next to those leftovers and a $1 plan has nothing left for the node. The $5 plan, on a marketplace sale, still has a few dollars left per gigabyte after the 15%, on this one box, at 70% sold, before addresses.
The first six months are the expensive ones
The €72 leaves every month while the node fills. Suppose it takes six months to go from empty to 70% sold, in a straight line. The average over those six months is 35% sold. That is 134.4 gigabyte-months. The rent for the six months is €432. €432 / 134.4 is €3.21 per sold gigabyte-month, almost twice the €1.61 you get once the node sits at 70%.
Hold 70% for the next six months and you add another 268.8 gigabyte-months at €1.61. The year is €864 of rent and 403.2 gigabyte-months, which is €2.14 per sold gigabyte across the whole year. Price from €1.61 and you are using month seven's occupancy on month one's invoice.
Addresses and cores run out first
Seventy percent of 64 GB, sold as 1 GB plans, is about 45 guests. The auction i7-7700 in that €72 row is a 4-core, 8-thread CPU. Forty-five guests on 8 threads is a CPU problem, and it shows up while the RAM graph still has a green margin. I have not run that guest count on that CPU. The count alone is enough to stop an order for a second box while the first one still shows 19 GB free.
Addresses land on the same plans. One primary IPv4 at €1.70 covers one guest. A lease index put extra IPv4 around $0.35 to $0.59 a month, for space you already hold. Take $0.50, the middle of that range, and 44 extra addresses are $22 a month, on top of the €72. Sell 4 GB plans instead and 70% of the node is about 11 guests. Ten extra addresses at $0.50 are $5. Plan size moves the address bill harder than it moves the RAM bill.
That screen is a Proxmox node attached in the provider console, 62.1 GB, in a lab org. CPU allocation is already over the thread count, 10 of 8, while use is 0.4 of 8. The 500% figure on the screen is the oversell ceiling you set. It is a setting. How a node gets onto that page is in the platforms and nodes guide. The marketplace around it is how NodeRings works.
A second node is due when the next plan you actually sell has nowhere to land. The addresses are gone, or the CPU is what the tickets are about. A RAM bar at 90%, with the guests still 4 GB apart, can wait.
Questions that change the spreadsheet
Is a 2026 auction node still DDR4?
The rows above are. DDR4 server modules were about $11 to $15 a gigabyte. DDR5 was about $35 to $51. If a listing does not name the generation, ask before you compare it with either bar.
Are those medians ECC?
They are RDIMM catalogue prices, registered server modules, which are ECC. A desktop UDIMM is a different part. Do not drop a non-ECC stick into a node you sell and then use these medians.
Can you slice a Hetzner auction server into customer VMs?
The €72 is what the auction listing charged to rent the whole server. Whether that contract lets you resell slices is the current Hetzner terms. Read those before the first customer VM.
What does a marketplace sale cost on top of this?
On Community, $0 a month, and 15% of that sale, from your side. Re-check the billing page linked above before you print the 15% on a proposal. A sale you invoice yourself stays off that line.
The auction rents are the servermarket.dev listing. The AX42-1 row is Hetzner's 15 June 2026 price sheet. The RAM medians are Memory Clearance and DataCenterDisk. The $0.35 to $0.59 lease range is the RS Computers IPv4 index. The 2021 poll is LowEndTalk 170286. Stripe's card rates are the published US and EEA price pages. The 15% is the billing doc linked above.