Firecracker hosts: $179 a month on Vultr, $300 on AWS, $474 on Azure
Which clouds support nested virtualization, and what a small setup costs on each.
Plori Tech1 view
Firecracker needs KVM, so the host must be a bare-metal server or a VM with nested virtualization. We priced the same small setup on six clouds, at list prices from October 14 and 15, 2026.
The short answer
- Vultr costs the least of the providers with an HA control plane: $179 a month with one host.
- AWS $300, Google Cloud $313, Azure $474. Their $73 control plane fee, higher host prices and egress make the difference.
- Bare metal costs less once more than 1.7 hosts run all month.
One host, all month, US West
| Provider | Per month |
|---|---|
| OVHcloud* | $145 |
| Vultr | $179 |
| DigitalOcean | $196 |
| AWS | $300 |
| Google Cloud | $313 |
| Azure | $474 |
*No HA control plane, and OVHcloud warns that a live migration can make a nested VM's kernel panic.
When the answer changes
- More than 1.7 hosts all month: one OVHcloud RISE-2 bare-metal server costs less, if one failure domain is acceptable.
- Hosts that run most of the year: one-year commitments bring AWS, Google Cloud and Azure host prices below Vultr. Their $73 control plane fee stays.
- Hosts outside the US, credits, or much more storage and egress: these numbers do not apply.
The full post has what each provider states about nested virtualization, the cost breakdown and Geekbench scores.