Cloud infrastructure is eating African startup margins. AWS, GCP, and Azure are optimised for enterprises with procurement teams and reserved-instance commitments — not lean startups running on runway.
Here is what we see consistently across clients:
- Elastic IPs and load balancers billing even when idle
- Database instances sized for peak load that never comes
- Egress fees that multiply every time the product finds traction
The alternative is not complicated. A Hetzner CX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) costs €3.29/month. With Docker and nginx it runs a Django application serving tens of thousands of requests per day. The same workload on a comparable AWS EC2 instance costs $35–60/month.
The argument against self-hosting — "you need DevOps expertise" — is weaker than it was three years ago. Tools like Coolify and Railway bring one-click deploys to bare metal. You keep the economics of a VPS with something close to the developer experience of a managed platform.
This post is a free teaser. The full infrastructure guide (including our exact Hetzner + Cloudflare + Docker setup for production Django apps) is available to Insights members.