Providers / Scaleway
Scaleway
The French cloud: hourly billing, EU-only regions, à la carte pricing.
www.scaleway.com · Prices checked 2026-08-06
- Type
- Virtual server (VPS)
- Starting cost
- ≈€10.42/mo
- Free tier
- No
- Ease of use
- 3/5
Scaleway is the most cloud-like of the European providers: hourly pay-as-you-go instances, a first-class CLI and Terraform provider, managed PostgreSQL from €11.40/month, and EU-only regions (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Milan). Watch the à la carte pricing — list prices exclude the public IPv4 (~€2.92/month) and storage, so the real bill is instance + volume + IP.
Good to know
- List prices exclude storage and public IPv4: add ~€2.92/month for a flexible IPv4 and ~€0.095/GB/month for block storage.
- Scaleway raised prices across Stardust, PLAY2, PRO2, BASIC3, and storage on 1 June 2026.
- "Standby" bills as a running instance; only a full power-off (archive) stops compute billing — and IPs and volumes keep billing regardless.
- Automated KYC can freeze accounts (sometimes with servers running) until you re-verify with ID and selfie.
- The famous €0.43/month Stardust instances are chronically out of stock.
Virtual server (VPS)
Scaleway Instances
- Best for
- EU projects that want real cloud ergonomics — hourly billing, CLI, Terraform, managed databases — without a US hyperscaler.
- How deploys work
- Spin up an instance from the console or the scw CLI, then manage it like any VPS; Terraform and cloud-init are first-class.
- The tradeoff
- À la carte pricing makes the real cost higher than the sticker, and account verification can be painful.
Why pick it
- Hourly pay-as-you-go billing — rare among European VPS providers.
- No egress fees at all; bandwidth is a flat per-instance speed.
- Managed PostgreSQL/MySQL from ~€11.40/month, plus Redis, MongoDB, and serverless products under the same roof.
- First-class tooling: scw CLI, Terraform, Pulumi, and a clean console.
- EU-only regions under an EU (French) company — clean data-residency story.
Why look elsewhere
- Instance list prices exclude IPv4 and storage — the real bill is ~40% higher on small instances.
- Broad price increase in June 2026 hit most instance ranges.
- Automated KYC lockouts are the top community complaint.
- Free-tier support is ticket-only and slow; priority support starts at €250/month.
- No non-EU regions if your audience is elsewhere.
Our ratings
What developers say
First-person reports from the past three years, drawn from public discussions and independent write-ups. These are individual experiences, not our ratings; open the original source for its workload and full context. Critical reports include a follow-up check so you can see whether the problem was fixed, partly addressed, remains current, or has no public resolution.
What people like 10 sources
An operator using several Scaleway products reports no issues, finds the platform easier and more reliable than Azure or AWS for this workload, and highlights the low-cost Stardust instances.
Which SMTP provider do you use? — Scaleway operator replyA customer says their machines and DNS have worked fine and describes support as good when contacted.
Anyone has experience with Scaleway and their services?A user of compute, managed PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes says they are happy with Scaleway's balance of services, features, and price.
Anyone has experience with Scaleway and their services?An operator calls Kapsule great, citing multi-availability-zone support, competitive pricing, useful features, and European hosting.
Scaleway Kapsule experienceAn operator running services across Hetzner and Scaleway says Scaleway is comparable in functionality and API coverage.
Scaleway hosting experienceA customer operating six Scaleway services describes them as excellent and says they have not experienced the DDoS problems raised in the discussion.
Scaleway hosting experienceA current customer prefers Scaleway's user experience to OVHcloud's, while noting that the legacy Dedibox interface is rougher.
Scaleway hosting experienceA self-hoster describes Scaleway as a solid European VPS option and reports reliable service.
What lesser-known hosting providers do you use?A Kubernetes operator says their Scaleway-hosted cluster works like a charm.
European managed Kubernetes providersDuring a trial, the evaluator praises Scaleway's clean modern interface, broad service catalog, and attractive pricing.
Anyone has experience with Scaleway and their services?Critical reports and follow-ups 10 sources
An S3 user reports intermittent AccessDenied responses and documentation that did not help identify the cause.
Are Scaleway buckets simply broken?An operator reports unavailable nodes and network problems serious enough to prompt plans to leave Kapsule.
Experience with Scaleway managed Kubernetes KapsuleA customer says two files in a roughly 75 GB Glacier archive were permanently lost and compensation was limited to vouchers.
How Scaleway Object Storage failed me — files lostA second archive user reports five lost files in roughly 1.5 TB of photographs and a small voucher rather than recovery.
Scaleway S3 Glacier lost my filesA non-European customer says phone verification failed after payment, leaving them unable to manage the purchased service.
Is this how Scaleway treats its non-European customers?A customer reports L40S and L4 instances remaining unavailable for hours while support could provide no restoration estimate.
Scaleway GPU instances repeatedly out of stockAn operator reports degraded object storage and registry service plus slow Kubernetes upgrades, making Scaleway difficult to recommend.
Scaleway Kubernetes reliability discussionA heat-related outage led a Kubernetes operator to reduce their dependence on Scaleway.
Scaleway Kubernetes reliability discussionAfter roughly a year running Kubernetes on Scaleway, an operator characterizes the experience as very poor.
Scaleway experience for an EU-hosted stackA migrating operator reports missing features, security concerns, registry degradation, and a pipeline failure lasting about three hours.
Migrating workloads to Scaleway — operator reportVirtual server (VPS)
Scaleway Instances
What you'd realistically pay
| Project stage | Estimate | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Just starting | ≈€10.42/mo | DEV1-S + IPv4 + 10 GB volume — ~€6.55 instance (2 shared vCPU, 2 GB RAM) + €2.92 IPv4 + ~€0.95 block storage. Ex-VAT, ~730h/month. |
| Steady traffic | ≈€24.92/mo | PLAY2-NANO + IPv4 + 20 GB volume — ~€20.10 instance (2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM) + €2.92 IPv4 + ~€1.90 block storage. |
| Growing | ≈€45/mo | PLAY2-MICRO + IPv4 + 20 GB volume — ~€40.20 instance (4 shared vCPU, 8 GB RAM) + €2.92 IPv4 + ~€1.90 block storage. |
Published prices
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| DEV1-S | €6.55/mo | €0.00898/h — 2 shared vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 200 Mbps. Storage and IPv4 billed separately. |
| PLAY2-PICO | €10.42/mo | €0.01428/h — 1 shared vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 100 Mbps. Storage and IPv4 billed separately. |
| PLAY2-NANO | €20.10/mo | €0.02754/h — 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 200 Mbps. Storage and IPv4 billed separately. |
| PRO2-XXS | €40.95/mo | €0.0561/h — 2 shared vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 350 Mbps. Storage and IPv4 billed separately. |
- Hourly billing (~730 h/month), ex-VAT, with no egress fees — bandwidth is an unmetered per-instance speed.
- Flexible IPv4 €0.004/h (~€2.92/month); IPv6 is free. Block Storage 5K is €0.000130/GB/h (~€0.095/GB/month).
- Savings Plans (12/36-month commitment) take up to 25% off compute.
- New Professional accounts with a payment method get €100 in credit.
Deploy workflow
| Deploy from Git push Connect a repository and every push deploys automatically. | No Not on Instances — bring your own CI, or use Scaleway’s separate serverless products. |
|---|---|
| Preview deploys Each branch or pull request gets its own temporary URL. | No Nothing built in. |
| Official CLI A maintained command-line tool for deploys and management. | Yes The scw CLI covers instances, volumes, IPs, and snapshots. |
| Instant rollbacks Revert to a previous deploy without rebuilding. | Partial Snapshots and images restore machines; no deploy-level rollback. |
Platform
| Custom domains + HTTPS Bring your own domain with TLS certificates handled. | Yes Point DNS at the server; TLS is yours via certbot or a proxy. |
|---|---|
| Built-in CDN / edge network Static assets served from locations near your visitors. | Partial Edge Services adds a CDN in front of load balancers and object storage; nothing automatic on a bare instance. |
| Serverless functions Run backend code without managing a server process. | No Not on Instances — Scaleway sells separate Serverless Containers and Functions products. |
| Docker containers Deploy your own container image. | Yes Docker-ready images or install it yourself. |
| SSH / shell access Open a shell on the machine running your app. | Yes Full root SSH. |
| EU hosting region Run the app itself in a European data center. | Yes Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Milan — EU-only by design. |
Runtime & operations
| Automatic scaling Capacity grows with traffic without manual resizing. | No Manual resizing on Instances; autoscaling lives in the serverless products. |
|---|---|
| Scale to zero Costs stop (or pause) when nobody is using the app. | Partial A fully powered-off (archived) instance stops compute billing, but IPs and volumes keep billing. |
| Scheduled jobs Run code on a schedule without an external trigger. | Yes Classic cron on the box. |
| Managed database A database the provider runs, backs up, and updates. | Yes Managed PostgreSQL/MySQL from ~€11.40/month plus storage; Redis and MongoDB too. |
| Logs & metrics built in See what the app is doing without wiring up third parties. | Partial Cockpit collects instance metrics and logs into managed Grafana; app-level instrumentation is yours. |
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