Building a Self-Hosted Search Engine for Under €30/Month

You don't need Google's infrastructure to build a useful search engine. You need smart architecture and €30 per month.

The Stack

Component Tool Cost

VPS Hetzner CPX21 (4 vCPU / 8GB) €15/month

Meta-search SearXNG + custom aggregators Free

API queries Bing Search API ~€7/month

Caching Redis Free

Database PostgreSQL Free

Frontend Next.js on same VPS Free

Total €22/month

Architecture Decisions

Why Meta-Search Over Crawling

Crawling the entire web requires petabytes of storage and massive compute. Meta-search queries existing indexes (Bing, Brave, Mojeek, Wikipedia, GitHub) and ranks results locally. Coverage is 95%+ of what users actually need.

Why Hetzner

German data centers. EU jurisdiction. DSGVO-compliant by default. €15/month gets you more compute than AWS €50/month.…