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Nodes: yours or rented

Compute does not have to come from us. A machine you already own can join your cluster over a private link; if you need more, a rented machine joins in about a minute and you pay only while it runs.

Last updated 2026-09-05

Two ways to add capacity

Bring your own deviceA Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, a home server or a VPS you already pay for. Free power, connected over Tailscale.
Rent a machineA Hetzner server provisioned from the dashboard. It is added to your cluster automatically — nothing to install.

Bring your own device

Your devices reach your cluster through Tailscale, a free private network: no ports to open on your router, nothing exposed to the internet, one sign-in. The setup is three steps on the Cluster tab.

  1. Create your private link. Sign in to Tailscale once from the dashboard. This takes about two minutes and is done once per account.
  2. Install Tailscale on the device and sign in with the same account. On Linux and Raspberry Pi: 
    $ curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
$ sudo tailscale up --hostname=my-device
    On Windows and macOS, install the Tailscale app and sign in — no commands.
  3. Add it. Within a minute the device appears on the Cluster tab. One click puts it to work.

Your own devices join a dedicated cluster (Pro). A machine from your home is, by design, hardware the platform cannot vouch for — so it never joins a control plane shared with other tenants. Adding one moves you to the dedicated k3s cluster that comes with Pro, where it shows up as a Ready worker in kubectl get nodes. The dashboard offers the upgrade at that moment instead of failing quietly.

A home node is on your network, behind your NAT, and you can unplug it whenever you like. Workloads scheduled on it come back on other capacity when it disappears, the way Kubernetes always behaves.

Rent a machine

Pick a machine type and location from the list on the Cluster tab. The server is provisioned at Hetzner and added to your cluster — no commands, typically in under a minute. Your dashboard's resource figures then reflect that machine's real cores, memory and disk instead of the plan's allowance.

You pay for the time the machine runs; remove it from the dashboard and the charge ends. Prices are shown before you confirm.

Already running things on a server?

If the machine you want to add is already hosting your business — Docker containers, or plain Linux services behind nginx — pair it and you get a migration plan for what is on it, rather than a bare node. See Bring an existing app.

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