Blog · 2026-06-05

An EU alternative to AWS for compute: Unio Cloud compared

Nobody needs AWS explained. If your architecture is Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS and forty other managed services, this post will not talk you out of it - and should not. This comparison is about the narrower, extremely common case: you run virtual machines, storage and networks, and you happen to run them on EC2.

For that case the numbers are stark. A 4 vCPU / 8 GB c6i.xlarge in Frankfurt costs about €124 a month before storage, before IPv4, and - the item that actually hurts - before egress at $0.09/GB. The 20 TB of traffic included with every Unio instance would cost roughly €1,560 on AWS. And structurally, Amazon is a US company: the CLOUD Act reaches Frankfurt just fine.

AWS at a glance

Jurisdiction: Amazon Web Services, part of Amazon.com, Inc. (US). Subject to the US CLOUD Act, which applies to data in a US provider's control regardless of storage location.
Comparable instance: c6i.xlarge in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt): 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, Linux on-demand - $0.194/h ≈ $141.62/mo ≈ €123.90, compute only.
Not included: Block storage (gp3 at $0.0952/GB-mo - 80 GB ≈ €6.66) and egress ($0.09/GB after 100 GB free - 20 TB ≈ €1,560/mo).
Lightsail (VPS-like): No 4/8 bundle: $44/mo gets 2 vCPU / 8 GB / 160 GB / 5 TB transfer; $84/mo gets 4 vCPU / 16 GB / 6 TB.
Sovereign offering: AWS European Sovereign Cloud launched January 2026 (Brandenburg, Germany) - German subsidiaries, EU-only staff, €7.8B+ planned investment. Pricing not published at launch.

The same 4 vCPU / 8 GB server in Frankfurt

	AWS c6i.xlarge	Unio u33
Monthly price	$141.62 (≈ €123.90), compute only	€7.79 all-in
vCPU / RAM	4 / 8 GiB	4 / 8 GB
80 GB storage	+ $7.62/mo (gp3)	Included (NVMe)
20 TB egress	≈ + $1,783/mo	Included
Billing	Per-second, no cap	Hourly, capped monthly
API	Proprietary (EC2)	Standard OpenStack + S3
S3-compatible storage	Yes (the original)	Yes (€4.99/TB)
Jurisdiction	US (CLOUD Act applies)	EU only

AWS prices verified against AWS's own pricing feeds (EC2 on-demand eu-central-1, EBS, data transfer) in July 2026; EUR at the ECB reference rate (1 EUR = 1.143 USD, 2026-07-10). Egress estimate: 20 TB at the published $0.09/$0.085 per GB tiers after the 100 GB free allowance.

Why teams look for a AWS alternative

The egress bill is the real price

The instance costs 16x more, but egress is where AWS budgets die: $0.09/GB means the 20 TB of transfer bundled with every Unio instance prices out around €1,560/month in Frankfurt. If you serve traffic - video, downloads, APIs, backups - the comparison is not close.

The CLOUD Act does not check the region tag

US law reaches data controlled by US providers wherever it physically sits - a Frankfurt EC2 instance included. Amazon's answer is the new European Sovereign Cloud with German subsidiaries and EU-only operations, which is a remarkable admission of the problem. Whether a US-parented structure can truly sit beyond US legal reach is an open question; an EU-owned provider does not need the experiment.

You are paying for a platform you may not use

EC2 pricing subsidizes an enormous surrounding machine. If your actual usage is VMs, volumes, networks and object storage, you can buy exactly that - through the same S3 API and standard OpenStack tooling - for a twentieth of the spend.

Even Lightsail, AWS's own VPS answer, concedes the point

Lightsail exists because EC2 pricing does not work for VPS use cases. But its $44 bundle has half the vCPUs, its transfer allowances top out at 6 TB, and overage bills at the same $0.09/GB. It is a US-jurisdiction VPS at four to five times the EU price level.

When AWS is the right call

Your architecture genuinely uses managed services - RDS, Lambda, SQS, EKS and friends are the product, not the VMs.
You need global regions, compliance certifications and enterprise support at a scale no VPS-class provider offers.
Reserved instances or Savings Plans with committed spend change your EC2 math substantially (though not the egress math).

Try the EU-sovereign way

Cloud servers from €4.99/mo with a full OpenStack API, billed hourly and capped monthly. EU-owned, EU-hosted.

Join the waitlist

Sources

Prices and facts last verified against the linked sources in July 2026. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it.