The Problem: Cloud Eats Your Startup Budget
Classic situation: a startup launches on AWS, gets $5,000 in startup credits, happily builds infrastructure, and after a year the credits expire — and the bill suddenly hits $1,200/month. Familiar?
The issue isn’t AWS specifically. It’s the pricing model of big clouds: you pay not just for compute, but for traffic, management, support, every additional service. Total cost ends up 3-5× higher than expected.
Scaleway (part of Iliad Group) built an alternative: honest pricing, predictable billing, minimal hidden fees.
What Scaleway Offers
Three data centers — Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw — with a full spectrum of cloud services:
Compute: Instances from €0.008/hr (~€6/mo for 2 vCPU, 4 GB). Bare-metal from €29/mo. Managed Kubernetes (Kapsule) with free control plane — AWS EKS charges $72/mo for this.
Serverless: Containers, Functions (Python, Node.js, Go, Rust), and Serverless SQL (managed PostgreSQL with autoscaling).
Storage: S3-compatible Object Storage from €0.01/GB. NVMe Block Storage from €0.08/GB.
Key difference: generous free tiers — 1 million function invocations per month at no cost.
Competitive Comparison
| Parameter | Scaleway | AWS | Hetzner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed K8s | Free | $72/mo | N/A |
| Serverless | Yes | Yes | No |
| Object Storage | €0.01/GB | $0.023/GB | €0.01/GB |
| DCs in Europe | 3 | 6+ | 4 |
| Bare-metal from | €29/mo | €100+/mo | €39/mo |
What to Like
Serverless ecosystem. The only European provider with a full serverless platform — containers, functions, managed database.
Predictability. Prices on the website equal prices on the bill. No traffic surprises on most plans.
European jurisdiction. GDPR compliance, ISO 27001, HDS certified. Essential for European B2B startups.
Underwater Rocks
Geography. Three DCs, all in Europe. No US or Asia presence.
Serverless maturity. Cold starts are slower than AWS Lambda (1-3 seconds vs 100-500 ms).
Community. Documentation and community support lag behind AWS and DigitalOcean.
Limited managed databases. Only PostgreSQL. No managed MySQL, Redis, MongoDB.
Affiliate Program
Scaleway Referral Program offers balance credits for referred users. More modest than DigitalOcean’s $200/user. Direct partnership possible for content creators through outreach.
Verdict
Scaleway solves a specific problem: prevents startups from going broke on cloud in year one. Free Kubernetes control plane, generous serverless free tier, and European jurisdiction are three hard-to-ignore arguments. Not for everyone — but if your users are in Europe and your budget is tight, Scaleway can save you thousands of euros annually.