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. No egress charges, no surprise bills. Scaling Path At 1,000 daily users: €22/month handles it. At 10,000 daily users: Add a second VPS (€15) + load balancer (€5) = €42/month.…