Open source on T Cloud: in-house or managed
The patching, the backups, the certificate rotation and the 3am pager do not go away when you self-host. They get assigned to someone. This page puts the two options side by side with a pricing formula you can compute yourself.
The real question
The work does not disappear. It just moves.
Nobody decides between having operations and not having them. You decide who is accountable, and what that accountability costs in salary, attention and risk.
What running open source in-house actually contains
- Continuous CVE monitoring across every component you self-host, including the ones nobody remembers installing.
- OS patching on a schedule that survives a busy quarter, not one that slips the moment a release is due.
- Version upgrades researched, staged and executed per service, each with its own breaking changes.
- Backups that are actually restore-tested, which is a different task from backups that run.
- Certificate rotation before expiry rather than during the outage it causes.
- 24/7 monitoring and an on-call rota, which requires enough people to make a rota humane.
None of this is difficult work. All of it is relentless, and it competes directly with the roadmap every single week.
Side by side
In-house operations versus Elestio on your own T Cloud account
Same infrastructure, same account, same jurisdiction. The difference is who carries the operational load.
Worked example
What twenty services cost to have managed
The Elestio fee is a formula, so you can compute your own number rather than ask for a quote.
Beyond cost
The two arguments that usually decide it
Budget holders start with the monthly number. They sign for different reasons.
Key person risk is the quiet one
In most organizations, one engineer knows how the stack is really wired. When that person takes a new job, the knowledge leaves with them. Handing operations to a provider converts a person-shaped dependency into a contract with a response time attached.
Opportunity cost is the expensive one
Every hour spent patching a wiki or rotating a certificate is an hour not spent on the thing your organization is actually judged on. That cost never appears on any invoice, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged for years.
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FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
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Is this cheaper than hiring?
That depends entirely on your own loaded cost per engineer, which is why the pricing is a formula rather than a quote. Compute your total with $5 per vCPU plus $2.50 per GB RAM plus $0.025 per GB disk across the services you would hand over, add support level if you need an SLA, and compare it against the fully loaded cost of the engineering time it replaces at your rates.
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Do we lose control by outsourcing operations?
No. You keep full root access to every server, the virtual machines stay in your own T Cloud account, and your contract with Deutsche Telekom is unchanged. Elestio access runs through a dedicated IAM user that you can revoke from your own console at any time.
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What if we only want some services managed?
That works. The fee is charged per managed service based on its resources, so you can hand over the twenty things that are pure operational overhead and keep the ones your team genuinely wants to own.
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Does the cost scale down if we shrink?
Yes. Management fees are billed hourly on actual resources, so reducing instance sizes or removing services reduces the fee immediately. Salaried headcount does not behave that way.
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What happens to our existing Telekom discount?
It is untouched. Deutsche Telekom bills your infrastructure directly on your existing account, so committed volume and negotiated discounts still apply. Elestio never sits in that billing relationship.
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What if we want to leave later?
The infrastructure is already yours and stays where it is. Revoke the IAM user in your own console and the servers keep running unmanaged. You can also clone or migrate managed services to any of the 9 cloud providers Elestio supports.
Compute your number, then decide
Same infrastructure, same account. The only variable is who carries the operational load.
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