Blog · 2026-06-29
A Contabo alternative: what the lowest price doesn't include
Let's start with the uncomfortable truth: on raw price per resource, Contabo beats everyone in this series, including us. The Munich company's Cloud VPS 10 gives you 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 75 GB NVMe for about €5.40 a month including taxes. If the only column in your spreadsheet is euros, Contabo wins it.
The reasons this comparison still exists live in the fine print: that price is a 12-month-commitment effective rate, billing is monthly-only with no hourly option, the entry plan carries a setup fee on short terms, the port is 200 Mbit/s, outbound traffic is "unlimited" under an unquantified fair-use policy, and cancelling permanently destroys your snapshots and backups. Unio Cloud costs a little more and removes every one of those asterisks.
Contabo at a glance
- Jurisdiction
- Contabo GmbH, Munich, Germany (investors per Contabo's own blog: Oakley Capital alongside founders/management). German company; operates surcharged non-EU locations (US, UK, APAC).
- Comparable plan
- Cloud VPS 10: 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 75 GB NVMe (or 150 GB SSD) / 200 Mbit/s - about €5.40/mo incl. taxes as the effective rate on a 12-month term.
- Setup fees
- None on 12-month terms; Contabo's help center states a one-time setup fee applies to Cloud VPS 10 on 1- and 6-month terms (orders after April 2026).
- Traffic
- Inbound unlimited; outbound "unlimited - fair usage policy applies" (no published threshold).
- API
- Free proprietary REST API, cntb CLI, S3-compatible object storage.
- Billing
- Monthly only - no hourly billing. Renewal term equals the initial term; cancellation permanently deletes snapshots and backups.
The same 4 vCPU / 8 GB server
| Contabo Cloud VPS 10 | Unio u33 | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | ≈ €5.40 incl. taxes (12-mo term) | €7.79 excl. VAT, no term |
| vCPU / RAM | 4 / 8 GB | 4 / 8 GB |
| NVMe storage | 75 GB | 80 GB |
| Port speed | 200 Mbit/s | Standard platform networking |
| Traffic | Fair-use "unlimited" | 20 TB, plainly metered |
| Billing | Monthly only, term renews at full length | Hourly, capped monthly |
| On cancellation | Snapshots/backups permanently deleted | Your data, your exports, standard S3/OpenStack |
| API | Proprietary REST | Standard OpenStack + S3 |
Contabo prices from contabo.com as of July 2026 (their storefront showed €5.40-€5.50 depending on visitor region; verify at order time). Contabo quotes prices including applicable taxes; Unio prices are excl. VAT - normalize before comparing exactly.
Why teams look for a Contabo alternative
The price assumes you stay a year
Contabo's headline number is the effective rate of a 12-month subscription, renewal terms match the initial term, and short terms on the entry plan add a setup fee. There is no hourly billing at all - the machine you spin up for a two-day experiment costs a full month. Unio bills by the hour with a monthly cap and no term.
Elasticity is not the product
Monthly-only billing, no per-hour metering and a panel-plus-API model built around long-lived boxes: Contabo is optimized for the server you keep for years. Per-branch environments, CI runners, burst capacity - the workloads clouds exist for - fit badly.
Fair-use unlimited vs a real number
Contabo's outbound traffic is unlimited under a fair-usage policy with no published threshold, on a 200 Mbit/s port. Unio gives you a concrete 20 TB on every instance - a number you can plan against.
Leaving should not cost you your backups
Contabo's own terms state that cancellation permanently deletes all snapshots and backups. On an OpenStack platform your images and volumes are exportable objects - portability is the point of using standards.
When Contabo is the right call
- Absolute lowest euro price per resource, period - if the workload is one steady server on a year-long horizon, Contabo is very hard to beat.
- You want cheap capacity in surcharged global regions (US, Singapore, Japan, Australia) from one provider.
- The 150 GB SSD option per VPS 10 gives more raw disk than u33 if storage is your constraint.
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 waitlistSources
- Contabo Cloud VPS pricing
- Contabo help center (setup fees, billing terms, cancellation policy)
- Contabo location surcharges
Prices and facts last verified against the linked sources in July 2026. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it.