Blog · 2026-07-06

An EU alternative to Google Cloud VMs: Unio Cloud compared

Google Cloud's compute story in Europe has a particular shape: excellent engineering, list prices in line with the other hyperscalers, and the most expensive internet egress of the big three - $0.12 per GiB from Frankfurt with no meaningful free allowance from EU regions. Its sovereignty answer is also distinctive: rather than building its own EU structure, Google partners with Thales - the French S3NS venture earned SecNumCloud qualification in December 2025, and a German equivalent was announced in May 2026.

Which is to say: Google outsources the sovereignty question to European partners, at partner-set prices, for workloads that fit those environments. For everything else, a Frankfurt VM remains a US-controlled resource at hyperscaler prices. The 4 vCPU / 8 GB class lands around €123 a month before disks and egress, versus €7.79 at Unio.

Google Cloud at a glance

Jurisdiction: Google LLC / Alphabet Inc., USA - subject to the CLOUD Act. Sovereign options run through partners (S3NS with Thales in France, SecNumCloud-qualified Dec 2025; German venture announced May 2026).
Comparable instance: c2d-highcpu-4 in europe-west3 (Frankfurt): 4 vCPU / 8 GB - $0.1932/h ≈ $141.00/mo ≈ €123.36. The cheaper e2-standard-4 ($126.05/mo ≈ €110.28) carries 16 GB but shared-burst E2 CPUs.
Not included: Persistent disks (pd-balanced $0.12/GiB-mo - 80 GiB ≈ €8.40) and egress at $0.12/GiB (0-1 TiB tier) with no free EU allowance.
Billing: Per-second consumption, no monthly cap; sustained-use and committed-use discounts.
API: Proprietary (Compute Engine API), gcloud CLI, official Terraform provider.

The same 4 vCPU / 8 GB server in Frankfurt

	GCP c2d-highcpu-4	Unio u33
Monthly price	$141.00 (≈ €123.36), compute only	€7.79 all-in
vCPU / RAM	4 / 8 GB	4 / 8 GB
80 GB storage	+ ≈ $9.60/mo (pd-balanced)	Included (NVMe)
Egress rate	$0.12/GiB, no EU free tier	20 TB included
20 TB egress	≈ + $2,300/mo	€0
Monthly cap	No	Yes
Sovereignty model	Partner-operated (Thales/S3NS)	EU ownership, native
Jurisdiction	US (CLOUD Act applies)	EU only

GCP prices from cloud.google.com pricing pages (region europe-west3) in July 2026; EUR at the ECB reference rate (1 EUR = 1.143 USD, 2026-07-10). Egress estimate: 20 TiB at the published $0.12/$0.11 per-GiB tiers; GCP bills per GiB.

Why teams look for a Google Cloud alternative

The big three's most expensive egress

From Frankfurt, internet egress starts at $0.12/GiB with no free EU allowance - a fifth more than AWS or Azure, and roughly $2,300/month for the 20 TB that ships free with every Unio instance. For traffic-serving workloads, egress is the product you are actually buying.

Sovereignty by proxy

Google's SecNumCloud path runs through Thales-operated ventures - separate environments, partner-set pricing, a subset of services. It is a serious offering for French and soon German regulated workloads, but it is not the cloud you use day to day. At an EU-owned provider, the default region is the sovereign region.

No clean 4/8 either

GCP's standard families skip 4 vCPU / 8 GB - e2-standard-4 doubles the RAM on burst-class CPUs, and the true 4/8 (c2d-highcpu-4) is a compute-optimized SKU at $141/month. u33 is just... a 4/8 server, at €7.79.

When Google Cloud is the right call

Your workloads are data and AI - BigQuery, Vertex, GKE - where GCP's engineering advantage is real and the VMs are incidental.
Committed-use discounts plus sustained-use discounts materially reduce steady-state VM costs (egress stays expensive).
You need the partner-run sovereign environments specifically (SecNumCloud via S3NS) for French regulated workloads.

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.