Get a Hetzner API token

The five-minute walk from no account to the token the setup wizard asks for, and what that token actually is.

You will be able to make a Hetzner account and hand the wizard the read-and-write token it asks for.

Crads-AI is self-hosted: your assistant runs on a server in your own hosting account. The setup wizard offers two hosting companies and builds the server on whichever you pick. This page is the Hetzner one: a German company, much the cheaper of the two in Europe, with locations in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore. Get a DigitalOcean API token is the other, and the one to read if you want your server in Sydney. To build on your Hetzner account the wizard needs an API token from you; this page gets you from nothing to that token.

The token is the key to your hosting project. It stays on your computer, the app sends it only to Hetzner's own API, and you can revoke it at any time. Treat it like a password all the same.

1. Make a Hetzner account#

Go to console.hetzner.com and sign up with your email. Confirm the email, then add a payment method: the server is billed to you by Hetzner directly, and nothing is charged until a server actually exists.

What it costs depends on the size and the location. The wizard picks Hetzner's Arm machines first, because they are the cheapest it sells with enough memory: about €6 a month for Standard, €10.50 for Roomy and €21 for Extra roomy (Hetzner's list prices on 13 October 2026). Arm is sold in Germany and Finland only. Where a location does not sell Arm, the wizard falls back to an Intel or AMD machine with the same memory, which costs more: roughly €19 to €70 a month in Germany and Finland, and more again in Singapore and the US. The wizard shows the real price for the location you pick before anything is built.

Hetzner sometimes asks new accounts to verify identity before they can create servers. That check is theirs, not ours; if it appears, complete it and come back. It can take from minutes to a day.

2. Create a project#

On the Cloud console's start screen choose New project and give it any name; "my-brain" is fine. If your account already shows a default project, that one works too. A project is just Hetzner's box for grouping servers, and your mineral will live inside whichever project the token belongs to.

3. Generate the token#

Open the project. In the left sidebar choose Security, then the API tokens tab, then Generate API token.

Name it something you will recognise later ("crads-ai" is fine), and set the permissions to Read & Write. This matters: a read-only token can look at your project but cannot build anything in it. The wizard's token check only reads, so a read-only token passes it and then the build fails at its first step.

4. Copy it straight away#

Hetzner shows a token exactly once, at the moment it is generated. Copy it before closing the dialog and paste it into the wizard. If you lose it, do not hunt for it; generate a fresh one and delete the old from the same screen.

What the wizard does with it#

The app checks the token against Hetzner with a read-only call before offering to build, shows you the real locations and machine sizes your account offers, and then creates one server with your own SSH key as its only key. The token is held in the app's memory for that run and is never written to disk or sent anywhere except api.hetzner.cloud. If you ever want to withdraw it, revoke the token in the Hetzner console; the server it built keeps running regardless, because the server is yours, not the token's.