Hetzner free credits: None

Hetzner offers no free credit as a standard signup grant. As of 2026-08-21, neither the Hetzner Cloud page nor the billing docs describe any automatic credit for new accounts. What exists is a promo code mechanism, where individual codes carry their own amounts. This page exists to state that negative finding with a date, because the opposite claim circulates widely.

Correcting the €20 claim

Coupon roundups and blog posts commonly state that new Hetzner accounts get a €20 credit. That figure is not on Hetzner’s official pages as of 2026-09-02. If a specific promo code grants €20, that is a property of the code, not a standing signup offer. Treat any post citing an automatic Hetzner credit as stale until Hetzner’s own pages say otherwise. The same correction pattern applies to the DigitalOcean $200 claim, which is also absent from official pages.

How Hetzner promo codes actually work

Per the official billing docs: you can use a referral code or a cloud promo code, but not both. Credit from codes applies to future billing periods, and it covers the Cloud category only, not dedicated servers or other product lines. Amounts are per code, so there is no single number to publish here.

Why Hetzner still matters without a credit

Hetzner’s position in this space is price, not promotions. Its cloud VPS pricing is low enough that a small always-on box costs a few euros per month paid, which for many workloads beats burning a 30 day credit elsewhere and then migrating. If your goal is the cheapest sustainable always-on server rather than free experimentation, a no-credit provider at a lower monthly rate can be the better answer; the trade-offs are laid out in how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Hetzner if you want low sustained VPS pricing and do not need a trial credit; skip it if you specifically want free evaluation money, in which case see Civo free credits or Scaleway free credits. Every grant I track, including negative findings like this one, is on the credits index.