What cheap should and shouldn't cost you
A low headline price almost always trades against something. The usual sacrifices are storage (a host advertises a budget tier on SATA SSD or spinning disk while reserving NVMe for higher plans), oversold OpenVZ containers that pretend to be full virtual machines, or a recycled IP that arrives already on a blacklist. None of those savings reach you; they just move the cost to your time and your deliverability.
What cheap should never cost you is the core of why you chose offshore in the first place: real jurisdiction diversity, no ID collection, and an honest renewal price. A teaser monthly rate that doubles at renewal is not a cheap VPS, it is a deferred bill. We price month to month at the real rate, charge no setup fee, and treat annual prepay as two months free rather than a lock-in discount you can't escape.
Our pricing floor, end to end
Our wolf-named tiers run from the Pup at $3.50/mo (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB NVMe) up to the Fenrir at $99/mo (16 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, 800 GB NVMe). Every tier in between, Cub through Garmr, is the same all-NVMe KVM with a dedicated clean IPv4, an IPv6 /64, unlimited traffic, free DDoS mitigation and roughly 60-second deploys once payment confirms on chain.
There is no setup fee at any tier, the minimum top-up is $25, and annual billing is simply two months free. We do not publish a 24-month or 36-month contract price and present it as the monthly rate, which is a common tactic in this segment and one worth watching for when you read a rival's pricing page.
Why all-NVMe at the entry price matters
The most common way to hit a low offshore price is to drop the entry tier to slower storage. It works on a spec sheet and quietly hurts every database query and page load you run afterwards. We do not do it: there is no spinning-disk or SATA-SSD bait tier here, so the $3.50 Pup runs on the same NVMe fabric as the $99 Fenrir.
This is exactly where several otherwise-reputable offshore hosts differ. Cockbox's entry plan is HDD-based at the listed price, with NVMe reserved for its Moldova tier; Privex defaults its DE V1 to HDD with SSD as an optional upgrade; AlexHost and Shinjiru ship their cheapest plans on SSD, not NVMe. If raw entry RAM is your only metric they can look competitive, but on storage class at the entry price, all-NVMe is the differentiator.
An honest comparison against the offshore privacy field
Here is the verified field at a glance, using each host's published entry figures (the full table is rendered separately). Among true offshore, Monero-friendly, no-KYC hosts, our $3.50 Pup sits at or below every comparable all-NVMe peer.
- CryptoHost is the closest twin: all-NVMe configurator, Monero set as the default at checkout, 14 coins, and it owns its Bucharest datacentre. From about €3.62/mo, but Romanian VAT at 21% is added on top (roughly €4.38 all-in), and it is single-location.
- IncogNET lists a 1/1/20 GB NVMe plan at $8/mo with 6 TB transfer on EPYC hardware with SME/SEV memory encryption, which is genuinely strong, but its points of presence are US-heavy and it is frequently out of stock.
- FlokiNET starts its Romania VPS at €7.99/mo plus a one-time €5 setup fee on monthly billing; NVMe, free DDoS, long heritage, but its Iceland tiers ship less traffic.
- 1984 Hosting lists €8.72/mo for 1/1/25 GB on NVMe RAID1 with live XMR pricing, Iceland only.
- Cockbox is $10/mo but on HDD at that tier; Shinjiru is $11.90/mo on SSD and only on a 24-month term; Njalla is €15/mo for 1.5 GB RAM; OrangeWebsite is €29.90/mo (€22.40 on a 3-year term) and is very pricey per spec.
The pattern is clear: where a rival beats us on entry price it is usually onshore or KYC'd; where a rival matches our offshore-and-no-KYC posture it sits roughly two to eight times our entry price, charges VAT or a setup fee on top, or drops to slower storage to get there.
The budget floor is not an offshore substitute
It is worth being blunt about the genuinely cheap mainstream hosts, because they will appear in any "cheapest VPS" search and they are not playing the same game. Contabo can sell you roughly 3 vCPU and 8 GB on NVMe for about €4.95/mo, which is excellent value, but it is German-jurisdiction, requires KYC, enforces DMCA and does not accept Monero. RackNerd lists tiers around $11 to $22 per year, but it is US-based, KYC'd and Monero-rejecting. BuyVM matches our $3.50 headline, yet on SSD, with light KYC, and it is neither offshore nor no-KYC.
If your priority is simply the most RAM per dollar and you do not care about jurisdiction, ID collection or crypto payment, those hosts will undercut us, and we will say so plainly. They are a budget floor for context, not a substitute for an offshore, no-KYC server.
Cheapest by location
Value tiers versus privacy-premium multipliers
Your physical location choice moves the price. Our base catalogue rate applies in the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria, and Romania and Bulgaria are where the absolute cheapest deployments live, so a Pup in Bucharest or Sofia is the lowest-cost way onto our network.
The premium locations carry an honest multiplier that reflects real cost and posture: Stockholm adds 10% for its free-speech jurisdiction, Reykjavik adds 20% for Iceland's free-press and IMMI protections, Kuala Lumpur adds 15% for APAC reach, and Zurich adds 35% for Swiss FADP privacy and non-EU neutrality. You are not paying extra for nothing; you are paying for the jurisdiction. If price is the only axis that matters, pick a value location; if a specific legal posture matters more, the multiplier buys it.
Total cost of ownership, not just the sticker
The headline rate is the easy number. The expensive number is the one that does not appear on the invoice: the hours you lose delisting a recycled IP from Spamhaus and other DNSBLs, and the mail or signups that silently fail while you do. A host that hands you a pre-flagged IP at $3 has effectively sold you a $3 server plus a delisting project.
We screen and allocate clean IP space and invite you to verify our ranges yourself before you buy. A clean dedicated IPv4 at deploy time is part of why our "cheap" is honestly cheap: the lifetime cost stays close to the sticker instead of ballooning into reputation-repair work. That is the same wedge that makes our entry tier viable for outbound mail and for running your own VPN.
How to buy at the lowest price
To get to the lowest possible monthly cost, two levers matter. First, choose a value location, Romania or Bulgaria, to stay on the base catalogue rate with no multiplier. Second, pay annually so two months come free, which brings the effective monthly rate down without committing you to a multi-year teaser.
Checkout accepts any supported coin and settles on chain, so no third party holds your payment identity, and there is no ID step. Pick a tier, choose your coin (Monero is first-class), and your server deploys in about a minute. If you are deciding between hosts on crypto support specifically, our best Monero VPS roundup compares the field on payment privacy rather than price alone.
