European Cloud Pricing Comparison: How EU Providers Stack Up Against AWS, Azure, and GCP
A data-driven comparison of compute, storage, and egress pricing across five major European cloud providers — Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, and UpCloud — benchmarked against AWS, Azure, and GCP. European providers consistently deliver 4-10x lower compute costs and dramatically cheaper or completely free data egress, though the trade-off is fewer managed services.
Key Takeaways
- Hetzner's entry-level cloud VM (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) costs EUR 3.99 per month — roughly 30 times cheaper than a comparable AWS t3.medium on-demand instance.
- Three of the five EU providers (OVHcloud, Scaleway, UpCloud) charge zero egress fees on compute traffic, compared to AWS's $0.09 per GB ($90 per TB). The EU Data Act will ban punitive egress charges entirely from January 2027.
- European providers collectively hold approximately 15% of the European cloud market, while AWS, Azure, and GCP control roughly 70% — but EU providers compete aggressively on price-performance for standard compute and storage workloads.
- The pricing advantage comes with a trade-off: EU providers offer fewer managed services than hyperscalers. Organisations must weigh raw cost savings against the operational overhead of self-managing databases, analytics, and ML infrastructure.
The Price Gap Nobody Talks About
If you have ever compared a Hetzner invoice to an AWS bill, you already know the punchline. But the scale of the difference is still not widely understood, even among infrastructure engineers who should know better. European cloud providers are not marginally cheaper than US hyperscalers. They are, for equivalent compute and storage, four to ten times cheaper. In some categories, the gap is even wider.
This is not a secret. Independent benchmarks by GetDeploying found that a 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM VM on Hetzner costs approximately $12 per month compared to $120 for a comparable AWS t3.xlarge instance. A separate analysis by United Manufacturing Hub confirmed that AWS and Azure are "at least 4x-10x more expensive than Hetzner" for equivalent workloads. Yet most European organisations continue to default to US hyperscalers, often without running the numbers.
This article lays out the actual pricing, provider by provider, category by category, using data from official pricing pages as of April 2026. We cover five EU providers — Hetzner (Germany), OVHcloud (France), Scaleway (France), IONOS (Germany), and UpCloud (Finland) — and benchmark them against AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Compute: The Headline Numbers
The table below compares monthly pricing for a standard workload: 2 vCPU with 4-8 GB of RAM, the kind of instance you would use for a web application backend, a small database, or a CI runner. All prices are sourced from official provider pricing pages.
| Provider | Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EU Hetzner (DE) | CX23 | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB | €3.99 |
| EU Hetzner (DE) | CX33 | 4 | 8 GB | 80 GB | €6.49 |
| EU Scaleway (FR) | BASIC2-A2C-4G | 2 | 4 GB | — | €16.79 |
| EU UpCloud (FI) | DEV-2xCPU-4GB | 2 | 4 GB | 60 GB | €18.00 |
| EU IONOS (DE) | 2 vCPU + 4 GB | 2 | 4 GB | — | €23.36 |
| EU OVHcloud (FR) | b2-7 | 2 | 7 GB | 50 GB | €24.20 |
| US AWS | t3.medium | 2 | 4 GB | — | ~€35 |
| US AWS | t3.xlarge | 4 | 16 GB | — | ~€110 |
Hetzner's CX23 at EUR 3.99 per month is not a promotional rate. It is the standard list price, available to anyone, with 20 TB of included traffic. That is roughly one-ninth of what AWS charges for a comparable on-demand instance. Even after Hetzner's April 2026 price adjustment (approximately 30-37% increase due to rising hardware costs), the gap remains enormous.
Scaleway, UpCloud, IONOS, and OVHcloud sit in the middle ground — more expensive than Hetzner but still dramatically cheaper than hyperscalers. OVHcloud's b2-7 instance offers 7 GB of RAM (not 4) for EUR 24.20, which is still less than a quarter of an equivalent AWS instance. IONOS uses a unique component-based pricing model at EUR 0.012 per hour per shared vCPU and EUR 0.002 per hour per GB of RAM, giving you fine-grained control over your configuration.
Egress: Where the Real Money Goes
Compute pricing gets the attention, but egress fees are where hyperscalers quietly extract the most value. If you run a content-heavy application, an API serving external clients, or anything that moves data out of your cloud, egress costs can rival or exceed your compute bill. And this is, by design, the strongest lock-in mechanism in cloud computing.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) explicitly identified egress fees as a "significant barrier" to switching providers or adopting multi-cloud strategies. The numbers explain why:
| Provider | Egress Cost | Cost per TB | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU OVHcloud | Free | €0 | Included on all compute and storage |
| EU Scaleway | Free (compute) | €0 | Included in instance pricing; 75 GB free on object storage, then €0.01/GB |
| EU UpCloud | Free | €0 | Zero-cost data transfer on all plans |
| EU Hetzner | €0.001/GB overage | €1.00/TB | 20 TB free included, then €1/TB |
| EU IONOS | €0.030/GB (2-10 TB) | €30/TB | 2 TB free, then tiered pricing |
| US AWS | $0.09/GB | $90/TB | 100 GB free, then tiered |
| US Azure | $0.087/GB | $87/TB | 100 GB free, then tiered |
| US GCP | $0.085-$0.12/GB | $85-$120/TB | Varies by network tier |
To put this in concrete terms: transferring 10 TB of data out of AWS costs approximately $900. The same transfer from Hetzner costs nothing (it falls within the 20 TB free allowance). From OVHcloud, Scaleway, or UpCloud, it is also free. That is not a marginal difference. For data-intensive workloads — media streaming, CDN origin servers, large API platforms, data distribution — egress pricing alone can make EU providers 50-90 times cheaper than hyperscalers.
The EU is addressing this legislatively. The EU Data Act, applicable since September 2025, requires that egress charges be limited to "cost-covering" levels. From January 2027, switching and egress charges will be banned entirely for data processing services in the EU. AWS has already eliminated egress fees for customers switching providers, and Google has followed for EU and UK users. The market is moving, but EU-native providers were already there.
Object Storage: The S3 Alternative
Object storage is the second-largest line item for many cloud deployments, especially those dealing with backups, media assets, logs, or data lakes. All five EU providers now offer S3-compatible object storage, making migration from AWS S3 relatively straightforward at the API level.
| Provider | Storage Cost (per GB/month) | Egress on Storage | 1 TB Total Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU Hetzner | ~€0.0065/GB | 1 TB free, then €1/TB | €6.49 |
| EU OVHcloud | €0.007/GB | Free | €7.00 |
| EU Scaleway (One Zone) | €0.0075/GB | 75 GB free, then €0.01/GB | €7.50 + egress |
| EU IONOS | €0.007/GB | 2 TB free, then €0.030/GB | €7.00 |
| US AWS S3 Standard | ~$0.023/GB | $0.09/GB | ~$24.63 + egress |
The pattern is consistent: EU providers charge roughly one-third to one-quarter of what AWS charges for object storage, and most include free or near-free egress on top. GetDeploying's analysis confirmed the gap: Hetzner object storage costs $5.76 per TB compared to AWS S3's $24.63 per TB — a 4.3x difference on storage alone, before egress.
OVHcloud deserves a particular mention here. As of January 2026, OVHcloud charges zero egress fees on object storage. For use cases like CDN origin, backup distribution, or data sharing between services, this eliminates one of the most unpredictable cost variables in cloud infrastructure.
The Market Reality
If European providers are this much cheaper, why do they hold only 15% of the European cloud market? According to Synergy Research Group, the European cloud market reached approximately EUR 61 billion in 2024 and grew sixfold since 2017. US hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, and GCP — collectively control roughly 70% of that market. European providers' combined share stabilised at around 15% in 2022, down from 29% in 2017, and has held steady since.
The gap is not about price. It is about the ecosystem. AWS offers over 200 managed services — RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, SageMaker, Kinesis, Step Functions — that eliminate operational overhead. A two-person startup can deploy a globally distributed, auto-scaling application on AWS without hiring a single infrastructure engineer. Hetzner gives you a VM with an IP address. What you do with it is your problem.
This is the honest trade-off. European providers win decisively on price-performance for standard compute and storage. Hyperscalers win on managed services, breadth of tooling, and ecosystem integration. For workloads that are compute-heavy, storage-heavy, or bandwidth-heavy — web hosting, media serving, CI/CD, databases you are willing to manage yourself — EU providers offer savings of 70-90%. For workloads that depend on proprietary managed services (serverless functions, managed ML pipelines, fully managed analytics), the switching cost is measured in engineering time, not cloud bills.
The European market is growing rapidly. Fierce Network projected 24% year-over-year growth for the European cloud market in 2025. GenAI services within the European market are growing at 140-160%. And the regulatory environment — the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, the DORA and NIS2 directives, and the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act — is systematically pushing public-sector and regulated-industry procurement toward European providers.
What This Means for Your Infrastructure Budget
The pricing data tells a clear story, but the right conclusion depends on what you are building. Here is a framework:
Strong case for EU providers: Web applications, APIs, content delivery origins, CI/CD pipelines, self-managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis on VMs), static site hosting, backup and archival storage, development and staging environments, and any workload where data egress is a significant cost driver. For these workloads, EU providers can reduce infrastructure costs by 70-90% with no meaningful capability gap.
Hybrid approach: Run your core compute and storage on EU providers. Use hyperscaler managed services selectively for specific capabilities you cannot replicate in-house — for example, using a managed Kubernetes service from Scaleway Kapsule while keeping your databases on Hetzner, or using a hyperscaler's ML inference API while training on EU GPU instances.
Weaker case for EU providers (today): Workloads deeply integrated with hyperscaler-specific managed services (AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, BigQuery, SageMaker) where rewriting would cost more than the savings justify. Also global applications requiring data centres in 20+ regions — EU providers' geographic footprint is concentrated in Western and Northern Europe.
For organisations evaluating a move, the starting point is straightforward: audit your current cloud bill by service category. Identify the line items that are pure compute, pure storage, and egress. Those are the categories where EU providers' pricing advantage is largest and the migration effort is lowest. Our guide to vendor lock-in with US hyperscalers covers the practical switching costs in detail, and our analysis of the cloud credits gap explains why startups often end up on hyperscalers despite the price difference.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much cheaper is Hetzner than AWS?
For equivalent compute, Hetzner is typically 4 to 10 times cheaper than AWS. A 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM VM costs EUR 3.99 per month on Hetzner compared to approximately EUR 35 on AWS. For egress-heavy workloads the gap is even larger: Hetzner includes 20 TB of free traffic while AWS charges $0.09 per GB after 100 GB.
Do European cloud providers charge egress fees?
Three major EU providers — OVHcloud, Scaleway, and UpCloud — charge zero egress fees on compute traffic. Hetzner includes 20 TB of free traffic per server with overage at just EUR 1 per TB. IONOS provides 2 TB free with tiered pricing after that. By comparison, AWS, Azure, and GCP charge $0.085 to $0.12 per GB, which amounts to $85 to $120 per TB.
Will the EU ban cloud egress fees?
Yes. The EU Data Act, applicable since September 2025, requires egress charges to be limited to cost-covering levels during a transition period. From January 12, 2027, switching and egress charges for data processing services will be eliminated entirely across the EU.
What is the trade-off of using EU cloud providers instead of AWS?
EU providers offer dramatically lower pricing for compute, storage, and bandwidth, but fewer managed services. AWS has over 200 managed services (Lambda, DynamoDB, SageMaker, etc.) that EU providers do not match. For workloads that depend on those proprietary services, switching costs are high. For standard compute, storage, and bandwidth-heavy workloads, EU providers offer 70 to 90 percent cost savings with no meaningful capability gap.