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Hostinger pricing re-verification — 2026-10-21

What this closes: kanban t_c022e713 ("Hostinger verification — study/reference only, open item 12"), migrated from fleet-board.md.

Hostinger pricing re-verification — 2026-10-21

What this closes: kanban t_c022e713 ("Hostinger verification — study/reference only, open item 12"), migrated from fleet-board.md.

The question was narrow and it stayed narrow: is what we already recorded true? This is not a competitive comparison, not a new market study, and not a purchase recommendation. Nothing here should be read as advice to buy or not buy.

Headline finding: the catalogue numbers in our Hostinger study were taken from Hostinger's global .com pages while the study was labelled "AU pricing". Hostinger serves different prices on .com/au, materially so on the AI plan. Separately, every price has moved since 2026-10-18 — these are Black Friday promotional prices. The study's strategic conclusions survive; its numbers do not.

1. The locale error — the root cause

Our study §1 is titled "What Hostinger sells (AU pricing, measured 2026-10-18)" and its figures are the global USD prices restated as A$. They were not read from Hostinger's Australian pages. Concretely:

ProductStudy says (A$)Hostinger AU page (A$)Global page (USD)
Web hosting PremiumA$4.39 introA$3.49 intro$2.49
Managed Hermes / OpenClaw$5.99 (USD)A$7.29 intro, renews A$17.39$4.99, renews $11.99

The two pages are not an FX conversion of each other. At the 2026-10-20 rate of A$1.43/USD (exchangerate-api, read 2026-10-21 00:02 UTC), global $4.99 would be A$7.14 — close to, but not equal to, the A$7.29 actually published. Hostinger's AU price must be read from the AU page, never derived. The 2026-10-18 verification document assumed A$1.55/USD, which is also now wrong.

2. Count of claims checked

MetricCount
Claims checked38
Reached / live page read38
Could not be reached0
Corrected in place11 price/limit
Confirmed unchanged25
Stale source contradicted by the live page1 (tutorial)
Unverified — product not found1 (AI App Builder)

The full per-claim table is in [hostinger-product-pricing-study](hostinger-product-pricing-study) §7.

Reachability: 0 vendor pages failed to load. The single unverified item (AI App Builder) is a product claim that does not appear on any Hostinger page — not a price that could not be fetched.

3. Corrected figures (live, 2026-10-21, Black Friday pricing)

Australian page (.com/au) — the page our AU customers see:

ProductIntro (A$/mo)Renewal (A$/mo)
Web hosting Premium (3 sites, 20 GB SSD)3.4915.89
Web hosting Unlimited (unlimited sites, 50 GB NVMe)4.9924.59
Cloud Startup (10 Web Apps, 4 CPU, 4 GB)11.5937.59
VPS KVM 1 / 2 / 4 / 89.39 / 12.79 / 18.79 / 37.5917.39 / 21.69 / 41.99 / 72.39
Managed Hermes Agent / OpenClaw (24-mo)7.2917.39
Business email Starter / Standard / Premium (per mailbox)0.59 / 1.49 / 2.892.29 / 4.09 / 5.79
Google Workspace Starter / Standard / Plus10.19 / 20.29 / 31.89same (12-mo)
Email marketing Reach Starter / Grow / Profree 1 yr / 2.58 / 4.052.19 / 3.69 / 5.79
AI Website Builder (own line)3.49–11.5915.89–37.59

Global page (.com, USD): Premium $2.49 (renews $10.99), Unlimited $3.49 ($16.99), Cloud Startup $7.99 ($25.99), VPS KVM 1 $6.49 ($11.99), KVM 2 $8.79 ($14.99), Managed Hermes/OpenClaw $4.99 ($11.99).

4. The specific corrections, and why each matters

  1. "A$4.39" is not the AU price. It is the global rate. AU Premium is A$3.49. This is the study's own headline number ("the single most important number"), so it propagates.
  2. Premium is not "unlimited sites". The AU Premium plan is 3 websites. The unlimited-sites plan is a separate, higher plan (Unlimited, A$4.99). Our study attributed unlimited sites to the entry plan.
  3. Managed Hermes is not $5.99 on any page any more. Live 2026-10-21 it is $4.99 (global) / A$7.29 (AU). The 2026-10-18 correction ($5.99) is itself now superseded.
  4. The renewal is not "after the term" — it is a further 2-year term. Both locales state "Renews at …/mo for 2 years". Our doc said "after the term", which understates the lock-in.
  5. The renewal multiplier was wrong. A$15.89 ÷ A$3.49 = 4.6×, not the "3.6×" stated. (The 27× ratio became 34×.)
  6. Domain renewal assumption was wrong. Hostinger's published AU domain table shows renewal equal to first-year price on the listed TLDs, not a premium. The "A$15–25/yr typical" range was both too high and built on a false premise.
  7. VPS tiers are now on the landing page — the study's honest limit ("I did not price Hostinger's VPS tiers; the landing page did not surface them") is no longer true.
  8. AI Website Builder and Reach are standalone lines, not bundles. The study listed them as "(bundled)".
  9. "AI App Builder" could not be found on any Hostinger page checked. Marked UNVERIFIED rather than assumed absent. It may be a name we invented.
  10. Source 2 (the Hermes cost tutorial) is stale. It still advertises $5.99/$11.99 while the vendor's own live pricing page says $4.99/$11.99. Kept as a record of what was published.

5. What did NOT change

The strategic conclusions stand and are, if anything, reinforced:

  • We do not compete with Hostinger on raw hosting price, and the gap is larger than we recorded (34×, not 27×).
  • The 48-month lock-in is Hostinger's real product, and our monthly/no-lock-in model is the honest counter-position.
  • Managed Hermes/OpenClaw is the closest thing to our EVE offer and is cheaper than our Solo tier's AI component alone — P4 standalone (A$49–79) is the line most exposed, as already flagged for Mira.
  • They include AI credits and Telegram/WhatsApp; we do not. Still true.
  • They do not sell Medusa + POS + EVE. Still true.

6. Honest limits of this re-verification

  • All prices are Black Friday promotional (read 2026-10-21, "Get your Black Friday deal before it ends"). They are a promotional floor, not a durable benchmark, and will move again.
  • Hostinger's global and Australian pages disagree, so any future comparison must name the locale. I checked both.
  • Hostinger's own tutorial contradicts Hostinger's own pricing page. Where a vendor's pages disagree, I have recorded the pricing page as the live price and flagged the tutorial as stale rather than choosing between them silently.
  • Exchange rate: A$1.43/USD on 2026-10-20 (exchangerate-api). Our 2026-10-18 document assumed A$1.55/USD. Both the rate and the locale are now corrected.
  • I did not purchase anything and did not test either managed product. The effective cost with AI credits consumed is unmeasured — Hostinger says only "heavier usage may require additional credits".
  • Agency Startup (A$41.99/mo, 100 sites, 6 CPU, 12 GB RAM) was surfaced during this pass but not priced into any study; it is out of scope for "is what we recorded true".
  • The filed VPS claim "not on the landing page" is now false — the tiers are on the landing page. Recorded as a correction, not a reach failure.

7. Files changed (in place, dated, sourced)

FileChange
Docs/Projects/vhost/research/hostinger-product-pricing-study.md§1 table corrected (AU + global), §2/§3/§4 figures corrected, new §7 audit table, honest limits updated
Docs/Projects/vhost/research/hostinger-managed-ai-verification.mdHeadline + §1 numbers corrected for both locales, FX note added, source list expanded with 1b and 7, tutorial flagged stale
Docs/Projects/vhost/decisions/services-pricing-model-aud.md§8.9 corrected (A$3.49 / A$7.29–17.39), locale + promo caveat added
Docs/Fleet/06-implementation/hostinger-product-study.mdRe-verification banner added pointing at the corrected figures

Sources

Hostinger managed-AI — verified, and one number corrected

Open item 12 of prod-implementation-plan-2026-10-18.md reads: "Hostinger managed-Hermes feature-set verification beyond public page (Echo)." This closes it.

Hostinger study — their catalogue as our benchmark

Young, 2026-10-18: "Study hostinger.com for their products offer and plan up for Yukon IT."

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