WireGuard VPN Price 2026: Free Software, 6 Cheapest VPS Ranked

Disclosure: This article contains Contabo, DigitalOcean, Ultahost, Proton VPN and NordVPN affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the figures below: every price was read on the host's own pricing page on 17 October 2026, and what could not be read is marked as such.

WireGuard's price is zero. It is free open-source software, built into the Linux kernel, with free apps on every platform and no device limit. The only thing a self-hosted WireGuard VPN costs is the server it runs on, and in 2026 that server costs between 4 $ and 6.49 $ a month, or 5.50 € including VAT at Contabo. This page is about that number: the six cheapest VPS plans that can run WireGuard, what each one really includes, and the fine print that moves the ranking.

You already know you want to self-host your WireGuard VPN. The question isn't which protocol: WireGuard won that debate years ago, as we covered in our OpenVPN vs WireGuard deep dive. The question is which 4 to 7 € VPS gives you the best actual value without the marketing fluff.

This isn't a rerun of our Contabo vs Hetzner vs OVH comparison, which focuses on 12 operational criteria across European GDPR providers, nor of our best VPS for a VPN page, which looks at paid IPv4 and throttling across eight hosts. This article is deliberately narrower: pure budget ranking, six providers, one decisive metric (price per 100 Mbit/s of port) plus an honest look at the gotchas each plan hides in the fine print.

How much does it cost to self-host a WireGuard VPN in 2026?

Between 4 $ and 6.49 $ a month on the official pages we read on 17 October 2026, or 5.50 € including VAT at Contabo. The lowest price per 100 Mbit/s of port is OVHcloud VPS-1 (from 4.54 $ for a 500 Mbit/s port, about 0.91 $ per 100 Mbit/s). The most machine for the money is Contabo Cloud VPS 4 (5.50 € for 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB SSD, 200 Mbit/s and unlimited fair-use traffic, 2.75 € per 100 Mbit/s). A solo VPN running all year therefore costs about 55 to 78 $ or 66 €, a fraction of a multi-year commercial VPN subscription. WireGuard needs no powerful hardware: a single vCPU is enough for its encryption at these port speeds.

Once you have picked the box, our free WireGuard config generator writes the server and client files in your browser, with full-tunnel or split-tunnel routing and a QR code per client, so you do not hand-edit wg0.conf.

Rather not run a server at all? Then the WireGuard price is a VPN subscription, not a VPS. Proton VPN creates WireGuard .conf files from its account page, free plan included (Free plan configs are limited to its free servers), and NordVPN runs its NordLynx protocol on WireGuard. The trade-off: shared IP addresses and the provider's servers instead of a dedicated IP on a box you control.

The metric that matters: price per 100 Mbit/s of port

Most VPS comparisons lead with CPU and RAM. For WireGuard, those specs are nearly irrelevant: the kernel module is light on CPU. What actually constrains a self-hosted VPN is:

1. Port speed in Mbit/s, as published by the host (none of the six guarantees it)
2. Monthly traffic quota in TB, and what happens above it
3. Price after applicable commitment or promotional discount, with a public IPv4 included

From those three numbers we derive a single budget signal: price per 100 Mbit/s of port per month. Lower is better. Where a host publishes no port figure, we say so rather than invent one. Here's where the six contenders land.

The 6 contenders, ranked cheapest to most expensive per 100 Mbit/s

1. OVHcloud VPS-1, from 4.54 $/mo: lowest price per Mbit/s

OVHcloud replaced its old "VPS Value" range during 2026. The entry plan is now VPS-1, and on the .com page read on 17 October 2026 it lists from 4.54 $ a month for 2 vCores, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of NVMe and a 500 Mbit/s public port with unlimited traffic. On our headline metric that is unbeatable in this list: about 0.91 $ per 100 Mbit/s, three times cheaper than Contabo.

Two caveats, both from the page itself. The price is shown with "from" and without saying whether tax is included or whether a commitment applies; the figure also varies by country and currency on OVHcloud's national sites. And the unlimited traffic is for European and North American locations only: the Asia-Pacific regions carry a 500 GB monthly quota for VPS-1, after which the port is capped at 10 Mbit/s.

Gotcha: IPv6 on OVHcloud VPS has historically been a single address rather than a routed /64, and the current page does not say otherwise. If you plan to route IPv6 through the tunnel, check the IPv6 allocation in your region before ordering, or pick a host that documents a /64.

2. Contabo Cloud VPS 4, 5.50 €/mo: most machine for the money

Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 runs on AMD EPYC processors in Nuremberg, Germany: full GDPR jurisdiction, no Five Eyes. On contabo.com on 17 October 2026 it listed 5.50 € a month including VAT for the first 24 months, with 4 vCPU, 8 GB of RAM, 100 GB of SSD, one snapshot and a 200 Mbit/s port. The price toggles with VAT status and contract length, so check the figure shown to you before ordering.

Per 100 Mbit/s of port Contabo is three times OVHcloud's price. Per gigabyte of RAM and per vCPU it is the cheapest machine here by a wide margin, and that is what matters if the same box also runs Pi-hole, a reverse proxy or a monitoring agent next to WireGuard. The unlimited traffic under fair use is the other standout: enough for a four-person household streaming 4K through the tunnel all month with no per-TB overage. You'd need a genuinely unusual pattern, a public Tor relay or fifty simultaneous torrents, to bump into the fair-use ceiling.

Gotcha: the 24-month commitment. The 5.50 € price is for a two-year term; shorter terms cost more, and Contabo's footnote reserves the right to throttle the port under its fair-use policy. Support is ticket-based rather than live chat, which most self-hosters do not mind.

Before committing for two years, read our Contabo review: a score over five categories, how support works, and the downsides we found (no preinstalled WireGuard, traffic under fair use).

3. DigitalOcean Basic Droplet, 4 $/mo: lowest sticker price, billed per second

DigitalOcean is the only host here that bills per second. Its 4 $ Basic Droplet, read on 17 October 2026, is tiny: 1 vCPU, 512 MiB of RAM, 10 GiB of SSD. WireGuard runs inside the Linux kernel and needs very little memory, so for one or two devices it is enough. The 500 GiB of outbound transfer is a number you can plan around; extra transfer costs 0.01 $ per GiB.

Where DigitalOcean wins is not the monthly price but the billing model. Create a Droplet in Frankfurt or Singapore before a trip, use it for ten days, delete it, and you pay about 1.30 $. No other plan in this list lets you do that. Our WireGuard on DigitalOcean guide walks through the setup and the transfer maths.

Gotcha: for a long-lived server the comparison turns. A Droplet with 4 vCPU and 8 GiB lists at 48 $ a month, nine times Contabo's price for the same resources, and a household streaming through the tunnel will pass 500 GiB in a week or two.

Create a 4 $ Droplet on DigitalOcean →

4. Hetzner CX23, 5.49 € + 0.50 € IPv4: reliability, when in stock

Hetzner retired the CX22 that earlier versions of this page listed; the entry shared plan is now CX23. Its price was 5.49 € excluding tax plus 0.50 € a month for the IPv4 when we read it on 9 August 2026. On 17 October the price fields on hetzner.com were rendered by JavaScript and unreadable, and the product page marked CX23 as currently unavailable, so we keep the August figures and flag them. The traffic figure is readable and generous: 20 TB a month in EU locations, the largest hard allowance here after Oracle.

If you need a VPS you can snapshot, tear down and recreate at will with hourly billing and no commitment, Hetzner's model is cleaner than Contabo's. They also have a Terraform provider and a well-documented API, which matters if you automate infrastructure.

Gotcha: the IPv4 is a separate line item, and the plan may not be orderable in your location on the day you look.

5. Hostinger KVM 1, 6.49 $/mo promo: the renewal is the real price

Hostinger's KVM 1 is often the cheapest headline number in VPS comparisons, and it used to be the cheapest on this page. On 17 October 2026 the pricing page showed 6.49 $ a month as a 67 % promotion on a 19.49 $ list price, with the renewal stated plainly next to it: 11.99 $ a month for two years. The plan itself improved since our first reading in June: 50 GB of NVMe and 4 TB of monthly bandwidth instead of 1 TB.

For a WireGuard server the 4 TB allowance is comfortable and the 4 GB of RAM is far more than needed. What the page does not give you is a port speed, so we cannot compute our headline metric, and in our experience shared ports on budget plans vary with neighbour load during evening hours.

Gotcha: the promotional price almost doubles at renewal. Compare 11.99 $ to the other plans here, not 6.49 $.

6. Vultr High Performance, 6 $/mo: best for US and Asia coverage

Vultr's public plan list, read through its API on 17 October 2026, confirms the High Performance entry plan at 6 $ a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 2 TB of traffic, and 12 $ for 2 GB and 3 TB. Vultr's cheaper Cloud Compute Regular line starts at 5 $ for 1 GB and 1 TB, and at 3.50 $ for a 512 MiB plan offered in New Jersey only.

Vultr is the provider in this list with the widest Asia-Pacific and North America coverage at a budget price point. If your use case is routing traffic through a Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles or Chicago exit, for remote work from Asia or a specific region, Vultr's 32-location roster is genuinely valuable. On raw European value it loses to Contabo and OVHcloud: 6 $ for 2 TB against unlimited traffic.

Gotcha: 1 GB of RAM is borderline for WireGuard plus a monitoring agent plus UFW. Budget the 12 $ tier if you add any other services to the VPS.

Summary comparison table

All prices read on the official pages on 17 October 2026, except Hetzner (9 August 2026, unreadable in October). Hostinger and Vultr are USD list prices before tax; OVHcloud does not state its tax treatment; Contabo is shown including VAT.

What changed since our June reading

Four of the six lines moved in four months, which is why this page carries a date. Hostinger's KVM 1 went from a 3.99 $ long-term promotion with 1 TB to 6.49 $ with 4 TB and a stated 11.99 $ renewal. OVHcloud replaced the VPS Value range (1 vCPU, 2 GB, 100 Mbit/s at 4.99 €) with VPS-1 (2 vCores, 4 GB, 500 Mbit/s from 4.54 $), which moved it from third to first on price per Mbit/s. Hetzner retired the CX22 in favour of the CX23. DigitalOcean is new to the table. Contabo's and Vultr's figures were unchanged.

What about Oracle Cloud Free Tier?

The honest answer: Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier (2 ARM OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM (1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours a month), 10 TB of outbound data a month) is genuinely impressive on paper and works well for WireGuard. The catch is in Oracle's own documentation: idle Always Free instances may be reclaimed, and a personal VPN is the kind of workload that looks idle.

Use Oracle Free as a sandbox to learn WireGuard configuration: our Oracle Cloud free tier WireGuard guide covers the two things that silently break it. Once you're confident in your setup, migrate to a paid plan. You own the SLA, the datacenter jurisdiction is explicit, and there are no surprise terminations.

WireGuard minimum viable VPS spec

To size your choice correctly: WireGuard at peak load with 10 simultaneous users requires:

• CPU: a fraction of 1 vCPU (ChaCha20 is fast)
• RAM: modest (kernel module plus configuration plus a small monitoring stack; 512 MiB works for two devices, 1 GB is comfortable)
• Bandwidth: your expected throughput × 1.05 (WireGuard header overhead)
• Disk: 5 GB is more than enough for OS plus WireGuard plus logs

Any VPS on this list exceeds these requirements. The actual differentiator is network cost, not compute. If you are sizing this for gaming, the differentiator is not even cost but region, and the reasoning is different enough to deserve its own page: self-hosted VPN for gaming. Once you've picked the box, our ready-to-use WireGuard config templates get the wg0.conf right on the first try: server, roadwarrior, kill-switch and multi-peer variants. More on dual-stack in WireGuard and IPv6.

Decision guide

You want the most server for the least money and you'll keep it for years → Contabo Cloud VPS 4, 5.50 €/month including VAT on a 24-month term: 4 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB SSD, unlimited fair-use traffic. Our step-by-step setup guide for this exact config is at self-host VPN on Contabo with WireGuard.

You want the cheapest port per dollar and no stated commitment → OVHcloud VPS-1, from 4.54 $/month, 500 Mbit/s, unlimited traffic in Europe and North America. Confirm the tax treatment and the term on your national OVHcloud site.

You need a server for a trip or a test, for days rather than months → DigitalOcean's 4 $ Basic Droplet, billed per second. Create it, use it, delete it.

You want a dedicated IPv4 for about 5.50 $ and a refund window → Ultahost VPS Basic, 5.52 $/month billed for a 24-month term (list 9.19 $), read on ultahost.com on 21 October 2026: 1 CPU core, 1 GB DDR5, 30 GB NVMe, one dedicated IPv4 and four IPv6, 30-day money-back guarantee. 1 GB is the comfortable size from the spec section above. It is not ranked with the six because the Basic plan publishes neither a port speed nor a traffic allowance, so its price per 100 Mbit/s cannot be computed; Ultahost is a US company.

You want hourly billing, 20 TB of traffic and infrastructure-as-code → Hetzner CX23, remembering the 0.50 € IPv4 line and checking that the plan is in stock.

You need a node in Asia or North America → Vultr High Performance, 12 $/month tier (2 GB RAM). The 32-location network is unique at this price.

You want to learn WireGuard for free first → Oracle Cloud Always Free, but plan your exit strategy before you depend on it.

Whichever you pick, the configuration is the same everywhere: generate the server and client files with our WireGuard config generator, paste the server file into /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf, and scan the client QR code from your phone.

For a full 12-criteria breakdown of the top European providers, including support quality, GDPR details, snapshot pricing and IP reputation scores, read our detailed Contabo vs Hetzner vs OVH comparison. Or use the interactive VPS comparator to filter providers by latency from your region, RAM and real 24-month price in one view.

Not sure whether self-hosting actually saves you money versus a commercial VPN subscription? Run the numbers with our self-hosted VPN cost calculator: it accounts for VPS subscription, setup time and renewal pricing over 1 to 5 years.

Prices change, and several of these are commitment or promotional rates. Re-read the pricing page before you order; this comparison is a snapshot, dated on purpose. Contabo's plans and DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing are one click away if you want to check them now.

A VPN changes your IP. It does not change your browser.

A tunnel replaces the address a service sees. It changes nothing about what your browser announces on its own (fonts, screen, time zone, graphics stack), and that combination is often stable enough to recognise you across sessions, tunnel or no tunnel.

Measure your own browser fingerprint: passive, no questions, no account, no email.

Related guides

• WireGuard on Oracle Cloud's free tier: what the offer really covers
• WireGuard on DigitalOcean: Droplet sizing and transfer maths
• What a VPN server actually needs: CPU, RAM, bandwidth

For the other German host people weigh against Contabo, see Contabo vs netcup: entry plans, contract terms and locations side by side. And for the two hosts this page links to, Contabo vs DigitalOcean compares them plan by plan.