European alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

Recently, I’ve been talking to many tech founders in Berlin. Many of them are considering the idea of switching to European software as they worry about data security, but also about growing dependencies on companies that keep getting more powerful. Monopolies push prices up and terms down.

The question that comes up again and again is infrastructure: where do I host my systems? Are there even alternatives to AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Those are the big ones, and they matter to me as a founder too. So I went looking, to understand which European providers exist, how European they really are and what they charge.

It is a big and complicated topic, and a central one: without cloud infrastructure most internet services would not exist. What I want to give you here is an overview, touching the following questions:

• Which providers are there in Europe?
• How are they financed?
• Do they offer services comparable to AWS, like managed Kubernetes or SQL databases?
• What price range are they in?

This post is a bit different from my previous ones. You will find a lot of tables. That way I can introduce the providers and compare them side by side. For each one I have collected links so you can dig into the details I cannot fit in here. The prices in particular are a snapshot and apply to July 2026. For a more detailed technical overview there is also the European Cloud Providers website.

The providers

The biggest and best-known European cloud providers come from Germany and France. Table 1 provides an overview by looking at the following categories:

1. Name of the provider
2. Where the company is based
3. Who holds the shares
4. Where the funding comes from
5. Where the data centres are (regions only, where there are too many to list)
6. Whether the company owns its data centres

One note ahead: Cleura only appears in Table 1, not in the price tables. Its service and pricing structure is not entirely clear and hard to compare. However, I wanted to include them for the question of how European a provider really is: Swedish brand, British private-equity money, rented racks.

Table 1: Who owns the providers and where their data centres are

Name	Seat	Who owns the company?	Funding	Data centres (DCs)	Own DCs?
Hetzner	DE	Family business, active since 1997. Profitable.	bootstrapped	Germany and Finland, plus the US and Singapore	In Europe
OVHcloud	FR	The Klaba family holds the majority. The investors KKR and TowerBrook have held 250 million since 2016.	Majority owned by the founders, minority with investors, publicly listed	Most in France, but also in other EU states and globally	Yes
Scaleway	FR	Part of the Iliad Group (Xavier Niel)	Conglomerate-led	Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Milan	Yes
STACKIT	DE	The cloud provider of the Schwarz Group (Lidl/Kaufland)	Conglomerate-led	Germany, Austria	Yes
IONOS	DE	62% United Internet, small investors	Publicly listed, for two years with US investors (Warburg Pincus)	EU and the US	Mostly rented infrastructure, partly self-operated
Infomaniak	CH	Founders and employees; since 2026 a foundation holds the majority as protection against takeovers	Self-funded. Slowly opening up to outside capital	Switzerland	Yes
Exoscale	CH	Akenes SA (Lausanne), part of the A1 Telekom Austria group. That group in turn belongs to América Móvil in Mexico.	Telco-led	8 zones in Europe	No, rented infrastructure (Equinix and A1)
Gcore	LU	Self-funded at first. 2024: investment from Wargaming (the World of Tanks studio, based in Cyprus); 2025: Northern Data (DE) came in.	Late-stage venture capital	Global edge network	Unknown
Cleura (City Network)	SE	Acquired by Iver in 2020, which was itself sold to the British private-equity firm ICG in 2021.	Private equity (UK)	Sweden and Germany	No, rented infrastructure (Interxion as data centre partner, operations via Iver)
UpCloud	FI	Founder-led (spun out of Sigmatic in 2011)	Venture capital from a Dutch investor	Besides global data centres there is a dedicated European cloud	Rented infrastructure
Open Telekom Cloud (formerly T-Cloud)	DE	T-Systems / Deutsche Telekom	Subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom	Netherlands and Germany	Operated by T-Systems, a subsidiary
Cloudferro	PL	Founded in Warsaw in 2015; since 2024 a minority stake held by Innova Capital, otherwise independent	Minority private equity (EU)	Germany and Frankfurt	Mixed
Cyso Cloud (formerly Fuga Cloud)	NL	Cyso Group	They appear to run without outside capital and are considered independent.	Currently Amsterdam and Zurich	Probably rented

As the table shows, there are smaller, self-funded European companies in the market, like Infomaniak and Hetzner. At the same time many providers belong to large corporate groups: behind STACKIT and Scaleway sit conglomerates, behind the Open Telekom Cloud a telecoms group. IONOS, largely owned by United Internet, took money from the US for a while. And some providers are financed with private equity.

What interested me most was who owns the data centres. Some providers only rent their infrastructure, among them Exoscale, Cleura and UpCloud. OVHcloud, Scaleway, STACKIT and Infomaniak run their own. That might be an argument for companies that care that their data does not leave Europe.

Services

This section gets more technical. If you know what managed Kubernetes (K8s) is and you rent databases, you get an overview of what the providers offer and what they are missing. For less technical readers there is something as well: the second column has general information about each company.

Here is what I looked at:

1. Name of the provider
2. Something interesting about the company
3. Is Kubernetes offered as a managed service?
4. Is there a managed database?
5. Can you rent object storage?
6. Is Function as a Service (FaaS) available, meaning code that only runs when needed, without a server running permanently?

Prices

If you have worked in companies that run on AWS in recent years, you know the problem: the cost of server infrastructure keeps increasing. But would it actually be cheaper to move to a European competitor? Next to data protection concerns, that is often the deciding question. And it is a complicated one to answer.

Here are the points that explain the complicated pricing structures. If you go looking for providers yourself, keep them in mind and read Table 3 below with these notes in your head.

• Currencies and taxes. The European providers quote euros excluding VAT, the three hyperscalers show US dollars. So you cannot compare a euro cell with a dollar cell without converting and adding tax. (At around 1.08 $/€ and 19% German VAT, a 5.49 € server from Hetzner becomes roughly 7 $ net, roughly 8 $ gross.)
• ‡ RAM differences. The table compares servers with 2 GB of RAM per vCPU, so 8 vCPU to 16 GB. Some providers ship 4 GB per vCPU in their standard line, so twice as much. The ‡ symbol marks those cases, with the actual ratio in brackets. This matters, because some providers only look more expensive because more RAM is included.
• † Infomaniak prices come without storage (the base price for our example: around 0.0036 €/vCPU-h + around 0.0018 €/GB-h); storage is billed separately (2/4 with 80 GB is about 11.55 €/month).
• § IONOS bills per unit (0.013 $/vCPU-h + 0.0022 $/GB-h); block storage and a public IPv4 address are billed separately.
• ¶ Open Telekom Cloud: the price is the Cloud Mercato hourly rate (0.108 €/h for s3.large.2, so around 0.054 €/vCPU-h, Linux, EU-DE). That is the on-demand case. If you commit for 12 or 24 months, OTC says you pay up to 60% less. The table deliberately shows the more expensive on-demand price.
• Machine classes. The rows do not compare the same machines everywhere. Hetzner’s CX and the AWS row from 4 vCPU upwards (c6i) are two different classes: CX shares the CPU with other customers, while c6i and the Azure D series get dedicated cores. So part of the price difference is machine class, not just provider. If you need dedicated cores, at Hetzner you end up on the CCX line and pay considerably more than the table shows.
• Two more things: Hetzner’s AMD line CPX stops at 12/24, which is why I list the Intel CX servers. OVHcloud’s VPS servers are not available in 16/32, so the Public Cloud is listed instead.

You can definitely save money with European providers. Hetzner and Infomaniak sit at around 16 to 21 € for 8 vCPU, AWS charges ten times that and more for comparable compute.

The catch is in Table 2: with the cheapest providers you have to look more closely at what is missing. Hetzner has neither managed Kubernetes nor a managed database, and you need a third party for both. Infomaniak offers both, though its managed database so far only supports MySQL and MariaDB, with PostgreSQL merely announced. If you want the full catalogue you end up at the Open Telekom Cloud, and at around 316 € on demand that costs roughly what AWS costs. So the saving is not simply there, you buy it with work you would otherwise leave to the provider. Nobody knows better than you what that work costs.

If you already run on a hyperscaler, you also have to ask what the move costs. Which brings us to the last section: egress.

Egress costs

Egress is the traffic that leaves the cloud. That includes everything going from your servers and your databases out to the internet, to users, to other services, to another data centre.

At hyperscalers like AWS this is a very large cost factor. Egress also comes with a lock-in effect: if you want to move your data, you pay for it. European providers price this very differently from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Inbound traffic is free at all providers.

Translated into monthly costs (calculated from the rates above):

Table 5: Three egress volumes as a monthly bill plus the one-off move, hyperscalers against Europe

Egress/month	AWS Frankfurt	Azure W. Europe	GCP Premium EU	Hetzner EU (CX)	Cloudferro	OVHcloud / UpCloud
5 TB	~441 $	~426 $	~522 $	0 € (in the 20 TB quota)	~32 €	0 €
50 TB	~4,291 $	~4,181 $	~4,224 $	~30 €	~320 €	0 €
300 TB	~18,791 $	~18,681 $	~24,015 $	~280 €	~1,920 €	0 €
10 TB one-off (move)	~890 $	~860 $	~1,130 $	~9 €	~64 €	0 €

As you can see, egress costs vary enormously. So if you run a service with a lot of outbound traffic, moving to a European provider might be worth it for that reason alone. And if, at some point, you decide that they don’t cover all your use cases, the cost of moving out will not run into the tens of thousands either.

Conclusion

So the European alternatives do exist, and they are reasonably cheap too. How European they are depends on how closely you look: brand, owner and data centre can belong to three quite different companies.

Rejecting European providers right away is hard to justify after this research. But so is saying yes across the board. At Hetzner you need a third party for managed Kubernetes, and you will only see what is missing for you once you hold your own list against the services in Table 2. And yes, you can always ask whether you really need all the features the hyperscalers offer.

You can simply try it out, because one thing this research did show: moving from one European provider to another is cheap, if you ignore the working hours.

So what do you think, do my arguments hold up? Does the analysis convince you, or do you see fundamental mistakes in the tables? Do you have your own experiences? I would love to hear from you!