Scaleway
Iliad's cloud, "Europe's sovereign cloud and AI provider": cheap compute by the hour in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw, free instance egress, ISO 27001 and HDS, a stated freedom from the CLOUD Act, and the reasons a UK small business will hesitate: no UK data centre, no pounds, a disk and a public IP that are sold separately and turn a €28.79 instance into a €42.89 server, a 99% SLA on shared instances, and a Trustpilot of 1.6.
How we testScaleway (SCALEWAY SAS, Paris, a subsidiary of Xavier Niel's Iliad group) is the most ambitious of the European challengers: three multi-availability-zone regions in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw, GPUs up to H100, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, OpenSearch, Kafka and ClickHouse, Kapsule Kubernetes with a free mutualised control plane, S3-compatible object storage, load balancers, VPCs, IAM with SSO and enforced multi-factor authentication, and official Terraform, Packer, Crossplane and Pulumi integrations plus the scaleway CLI. Its trust page says the platform is "free from the US CLOUD Act", holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and France's HDS health-data certification, and is "currently undergoing" SecNumCloud qualification, so the sovereign badge is not yet earned. There is no UK data centre, no UK entity and no GBP pricing.
Prices in EUR, ex VAT, read 8 September 2026, and the price list needs reading twice because instances are sold without a disk or a public IP. The tiny STARDUST1-S (1 vCPU, 1 GB) is €0.0006 an hour, about €0.43 a month, when available; the practical entry is PLAY2-PICO at €0.01428 an hour, about €10.42, for 1 vCPU and 2 GB. The reference BASIC3-X2C-4G (2 vCPU, 4 GB) is €0.03945 an hour, about €28.79 a month, plus an 80 GB block volume at about €7.59, a snapshot of it at about €2.86 and a flexible IPv4 at €0.005 an hour, about €3.65: a real monthly cost of €42.89, the highest of the European providers and close to EC2. Instance egress is free up to the port speed (350 Mbit on the reference), object-storage egress is €0.01 per GB after 75 GB. Older DEV1, GP1 and PRO2 lines are still on sale alongside the newer BASIC3, STANDARD3 and POP2 families with no retirement notice, which makes the catalogue harder to read than it should be. The marketplace's image count, maintainers and cadence could not be found, and there is no official MCP server.
Support is ticket-only and free with an eight-hour P1 target; a hotline starts at €50 a month or 5% of spend, and the team is in Paris. The SLA is 99% for shared instances and 99.5% for dedicated ones, with credits from 10%. Trustpilot is 1.6 on 348 reviews (79% one-star, not inviting, not replying), and the July and August 2026 one-star themes are billing timing, an instance advertised at €0.40 that cost €4 once IP and storage were added, account restrictions without explanation and charges after cancellation. The engineering is serious and the sovereignty positioning is real; the price list and the service record are not yet at the level of the ambition.
Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews.
Pros
- +EU-owned with ISO 27001 and HDS, a stated freedom from the CLOUD Act, and three multi-AZ EU regions
- +Free instance egress, a full managed-service catalogue, IAM with SSO and enforced MFA, Terraform, Packer, Crossplane and Pulumi
- +Cheap compute by the hour
Cons
- −No UK data centre, no UK entity, no GBP
- −The disk and the public IP are extra: €28.79 of compute becomes a €42.89 server
- −Trustpilot 1.6 on 348 reviews; a 99% SLA on shared instances; SecNumCloud still in progress
Pricing
Minimum commitment: €10.42 (€10.42/mo × 1 seat × 1 month (no commitment)). The least you can spend before walking away; excludes numbers, minutes and add-ons.
PLAY2-PICO
€10.42/mo · no commitment
Same price on any term
- ✓1 vCPU / 2 GB, €0.01428/hr, 100 Mbit port, egress included; disk and public IPv4 sold separately; ex VAT, EUR only. STARDUST1-S (1 vCPU / 1 GB) about €0.43/mo when available.
BASIC3-X2C-4G
€28.79/mo · no commitment
Same price on any term
- ✓2 vCPU / 4 GB, €0.03945/hr, 350 Mbit port. Add 80 GB block storage about €7.59, a snapshot about €2.86 and a flexible IPv4 €3.65. Real monthly cost: €42.89.
Specifications
| Rating | 3.2 |
| Smallest instance | €10.42/mo (1 vCPU / 2 GB, disk extra (PLAY2-PICO)) |
| Reference instance | €28.79/mo (2 vCPU / 4 GB, disk extra (BASIC3-X2C-4G)) |
| Real monthly cost* | €42.89/mo |
| Hourly billing | ✓ |
| Egress overage | Unmetered |
| Public IPv4 | €3.65/mo |
| Backups | Block snapshots €0.036 per GB per month (no automatic backup product found) |
| UK location | No |
| EU locations | 3 |
| Locations | 3 |
| Owned in** | EU-owned |
| Sovereign offering | None |
| Owner | Iliad group |
| Vendor-maintained images | No |
| Managed databases | ✓ |
| Kubernetes | ✓ |
| Object storage | ✓ |
| API | ✓ |
| Terraform | ✓ |
| MCP server | No |
| Uptime SLA (%) | 99.00 |
| Trustpilot (reviews) | 1.6 (348) |
| Snapshots (per GB/mo) | €0.036 |
| Free credit | 750 GB of object storage free for 90 days |
| HQ | France |
| Publicly listed | No |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ |
| SOC 2 | No |
| Block storage | ✓ |
| Load balancers | ✓ |
| Bare metal | ✓ |
| GPU instances | ✓ |
| ARM instances | No |
| Image marketplace | ✓ |
| DDoS protection included | ✓ |
| Private networking | ✓ |
| CLI | ✓ |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| Phone support | No |
| Support channels | Ticket 24/7, Hotline (paid plans) |
*Real monthly cost: the reference instance (the nearest to 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB) with automatic backups switched on and a public IPv4 address, per month at the monthly or capped-hourly rate, in the currency the vendor shows a UK visitor on the research date; see each profile for the VAT basis, the backup rule and the egress bill on top.
**Owned in: where the company that owns the provider answers to. A US-owned provider is subject to US law (including the CLOUD Act) wherever the data centre is; a local data centre is not the same thing as local jurisdiction. "Sovereign offering" records what the vendor offers beyond a local data centre.
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
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