A few weeks back I had a discussion with a CTO of a large german commerce player. At one point in the conversation he said: “I agree with the necessity of going European, but it must make sense from a financial perspective. I simply cannot afford to go with the European boutique vendors”.
Is he right? Are the European players boutique and more expensive than the US counterparts? Let’s find out.
We are doing a like-for-like comparison of some basic services, namely
- Object Storage (S3)
- A managed LLM (Llama 3.3 70B Instruct)
- Basic compute instances
These comparisons serve as a simple “cheeseburger” price benchmark.
As a final comparison, we are looking at a slightly more complex scenario, which might be the core of a real-world scenario. It is inspired by the comparison done by Dominik Fries, CTO of Thinkport. The scenario looks as as follows:
- 5 Kubernetes-Nodes (each 8 vCPU, 32 GB RAM)
- 1 TB Object Storage
- PostgreSQL Single Node (16 GB RAM, minimum 100 GB)
- 1 TB outgoing data traffic (Egress)
All comparisons are using the normal price list prices. We are not considering discounts on commitments, etc.
Object Storage (S3)
Object Storage is a service all cloud providers have in their portfolio. Yet, the comparison of pricing is less trivial than one might think. This is mainly due to the different pricing schemes on traffic.
The concrete scenario compared here is: 500 GB of existing data, 2 TB of monthly uploads (70% Warm, 30% Cold Storage), 1.5 TB outbound traffic, and 1 million GET and 100,000 PUT requests.
 Scaleway |  STACKIT |  OTC |  AWS | |
| Price/Month | 44,26 € | 66,56 € | 163,23 € | 175,34 € |
| Storage | 29,65 € 1,9 TB Multi-AZ, 0,6 TB Glacier | 66,56 € 2,5 TB Premium | 48,43 € 1,9 TB Std, 0,6 TB Cold | 43,09 € 1,9 TB (Multi-AZ), 0,6 TB Glacier |
| Egress Traffic | 14,61 € | free of charge | 109,59 € | 131,33 € |
| Requests | No request cost, no ingress cost | Requests free | 5,20 € | 0,92 € |
A factor that generally makes European Cloud vendors significantly less expensive than their hyperscaler counterparts is the pricing of traffic. Many do not charge anything or very little for traffic, while with the hyperscalers, traffic cost is one of the hidden costs that quickly accumulate.
Managed LLM (Llama 3.3 70B Instruct)
A comparison of a few more models is listed in the announcement of the OVH AI Endpoints.
| Scaleway |  OVH |  Azure | AWS | |
| 1M Input Token | 0,90 € | 0,79 € | 0,268 € | 0,72 € |
| 1M Output Token | 0,90 € | 0,79 € | 0,354 € | 0,72 € |
Basic Compute Instances
With compute instances, the pattern continues. Scaleway offers a General Purpose instance for half the price of the comparable AWS instance. The picture looks different when comparing more specialized instances. For the selected providers below, the prices for Memory optimized and Compute optimized instances are all in the same range – except for Open Telekom Cloud, where those specialized instances are more expensive.
| Scaleway | STACKIT | OTC | AWS | |
| General Purpose (2xvCPU, 8GB RAM) | 40.15 € | 54.59 € | 83.11 € | 80,56 € |
| Memory optimized (16xvCPU, 128 GB RAM | 601.52 € | 553.20 € | 1,073.10 € | 644,35 € |
| Compute optimized (32xvCPU, 32 GB RAM) | 621.37 € | 644,35 € | 1,226.40 € | 695,29 € |
An (Almost) Real-World Scenario
The real-world scenario is based on the price comparison done by Dominik Fries of Thinkport: He compared prices of a typical managed Kubernetes setup, together with a relational database, some object storage and some traffic. Specifically, he compared:
- Managed Kubernetes with 5 Kubernetes-Nodes (each 8 vCPU, 32 GB RAM)
- 1 TB Object Storage
- PostgreSQL Single Node (16 GB RAM, minimum 100 GB)
- 1 TB outgoing data traffic (Egress)
| Scaleway | STACKIT | OVH | AWS | |
| Managed Kubernetes | 800 € | 1100 € | 625 € | 1400 € |
| Object Storage | 12 € | 26 € | 8 € | 22 € |
| Managed Postgres | 206 € | 200 € | 200 € | 323 € |
| 1TB Egress (Outgoing) | 10 € | 0 € | 0 € (unlimited) | 82 € |
| Total Cost | 1028 € | 1326 € | 833 € | 1827 € |
OVHcloud offers this combination of services for less than half the cost of AWS. The other European players Scaleway and STACKIT are also significantly cheaper. For readability of the table I decided to not include all European players in the overview. But the pattern is the same across the board: prices of the European players are 60% or less of the US cloud prices.
Conclusion
Several conclusions can be drawn from the basic cost comparison:
- European cloud vendors are generally cheaper than US cloud vendors. The differences can be meaningful: the real-world scenario above can be rented from an Euopean player for half the cost of a US player. Object Storage at OVHcloud costs a third of the same service at AWS.
- There are exceptions to the rule. These typically include more specialized products, such as the special instance types in the comparison above, or higher-level services.
- A consistent difference between European and US players is the pricing of traffic. Egress traffic and “intra-cloud” traffic with European players is either very cheap or completely free, wheras for US players, these can easily amount to 70-90 € per month per TB.
The costs paid to the cloud vendor represent just one component of the total cost of ownership for the infrastructure. Personnel expenses often constitute a significant portion of the overall cost. For a complete picture, we would have to take into account the efficiency of working with a particular cloud vendor. However, this consideration is for another day.
