What does it actually cost to self-host a planet Photon?
The ChibiGeo docs on self-hosting Photon tell you what the software needs: roughly 95 GB for the planet index, and per Photon's own documentation 64 GB of RAM for smooth operation. That is an accurate answer to a question nobody actually asked. What people want to know is what those numbers cost in euros every month, and whether it is worth it.
So here is the arithmetic, with real prices you can check.
The cheapest box that actually fits
The binding constraint is RAM, not disk. 95 GB of index fits on almost anything; 64 GB of memory does not. On Hetzner, the cheapest dedicated servers that clear the bar look like this:
| Server | RAM | Storage | Price/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| EX44 | 64 GB | 2 × 512 GB NVMe | €44 |
| AX42 | 64 GB | 2 × 512 GB NVMe | €49 |
| SX65 | 64 GB DDR4 ECC | 2 × 1 TB NVMe | €104 + €39 setup |
All excluding VAT, and some lines carry a one-time setup fee. Call it €44/month for the entry point, or a little over €500 a year before tax.
That is the honest floor. You will see people running Photon on a 32 GB box, and it works — the index is memory-mapped, so the OS pages what it needs. It just gets slower under concurrency, and reverse-geocoding a large backlog is exactly the workload that punishes a small page cache.
The costs that are not on the invoice
The €44 is the part that is easy to count. The rest:
The initial import. Building a planet index is measured in hours, not minutes, and it wants disk and CPU while it runs. You do this once, and then again every time you want fresher data.
Staying current. OpenStreetMap does not hold still. An index built in January is January's world. Keeping it fresh means re-importing or running updates, and that is a recurring chore you own.
Being on call for yourself. When the index gets corrupted, or the box runs out of inodes at an inconvenient moment, or Elasticsearch decides today is the day — that is yours. It is not hard. It is just never zero.
None of this is an argument against self-hosting. It is an argument against pretending the cost is €44.
The case for doing it anyway
Self-hosting genuinely wins on three things, and they are not small ones.
No cap, ever. Your own box does not meter you. If you are geocoding tens of millions of points, no subscription competes — the hardware amortises and then you are just paying for electricity someone else bought.
Nothing leaves your network. Every hosted geocoder, ChibiGeo included, sees the coordinates you send it. If your threat model says your location history never touches another party's infrastructure, that is a real requirement and no amount of privacy-policy language substitutes for it.
No dependency. Providers change pricing, get acquired, and shut down. A box in a rack does not.
When the arithmetic goes the other way
The comparison only tips when your volume is low relative to the hardware. ChibiGeo's Self-Hoster plan is €9.99/month for 500,000 requests — roughly a fifth of the entry dedicated server, for what a personal location timeline actually consumes. Builder is €29/month for 250,000 general-purpose requests.
For a personal Dawarich instance labelling your own GPS points, €44/month of dedicated hardware to run a planet index is a lot of machine for the job. For a company geocoding continuously at scale, it is obviously cheaper than any per-request API, and you should run your own.
The dishonest version of this post would stop before that last paragraph. The useful version is: work out your monthly request volume first, then pick. If you land above a couple of million requests a month, buy the box — Photon is good software and self-hosting it is well documented. If you land below that, paying someone else to keep 64 GB of RAM warm is the cheaper trade.
Prices checked August 2026 from Hetzner's public pricing and quoted excluding VAT. Hardware pricing moves; the arithmetic is what matters, not the exact figure.