Blog · 2026-06-14

A Scaleway alternative: EU sovereignty at a third of the price

Scaleway calls itself Europe's sovereign cloud and AI provider, and the jurisdiction backs it up: a French company owned by the iliad telecom group, with data centers only in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. If your reason for leaving a US cloud is legal, Scaleway solves the same problem Unio Cloud solves.

The comparison is therefore about price and mechanics. A 4 vCPU / 8 GB instance at Scaleway runs €31-78 per month depending on tier, before storage and the public IPv4 - both of which are separate line items that keep billing while the instance is powered off. The same class of machine at Unio is €7.79, storage and IPv4 included.

Scaleway at a glance

Jurisdiction: Scaleway SAS, Paris, France - subsidiary of the iliad Group. Compute regions in the EU only (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Milan).
Comparable plans: DEV1-L (4 shared vCPU / 8 GiB): €0.04284/h ≈ €31/mo. PLAY2-MICRO (4/8, no SLA): ≈ €40/mo. POP2-HC-4C-8G (4 dedicated/8): €0.1064/h ≈ €78/mo. All excl. VAT, excl. storage and IPv4.
Extras billed separately: Public IPv4 €0.004/h (≈ €2.92/mo) and block storage are separate items - both continue billing while the instance is powered off.
API: Proprietary REST API (not OpenStack) with premier-tier Terraform provider, CLI and SDKs. S3-compatible object storage with no request fees.
Billing: Per hour of uptime, no commitment, no monthly cap; optional savings plans.

The same 4 vCPU / 8 GB server

	Scaleway DEV1-L	Unio u33
Monthly price (excl. VAT)	≈ €31.27 + €2.92 IPv4	€7.79, IPv4 included
vCPU / RAM	4 shared / 8 GiB	4 shared / 8 GB
Storage	Local SSD/block, sized separately	80 GB NVMe included
Traffic	Egress included	20 TB included
Monthly price cap	No	Yes - hourly stops at the cap
Powered-off cost	IPv4 + storage keep billing	Delete and the meter stops
API	Proprietary REST	Standard OpenStack + S3
Jurisdiction	EU only (France)	EU only

Scaleway prices from scaleway.com as of July 2026, excl. VAT; Scaleway's monthly figures are its own ~730h approximations, not caps. DEV1-L is Scaleway's cheapest 4/8; its dedicated-core 4/8 (POP2-HC) is ≈ €78/mo vs Unio d23 (4 dedicated / 16 GB) at €22.90.

Why teams look for a Scaleway alternative

Three to ten times the price for the same sovereignty

Scaleway's jurisdiction is as clean as ours - but its cheapest 4 vCPU / 8 GB instance costs about four times more once you add the IPv4, and the production-grade tiers multiply from there. If EU jurisdiction is the requirement, you should not have to pay a premium for it.

The bill has moving parts

Instance, storage and IPv4 are separate meters at Scaleway, there is no monthly cap, and storage plus IPv4 keep billing while a machine is powered off. Unio's model is one price per instance, hourly, hard-capped at the monthly figure.

Proprietary API, no SLA on the cheap tiers

Scaleway's tooling is excellent but Scaleway-specific, and its affordable 4/8 tiers (DEV1, PLAY2) carry no availability SLA - the production PRO2 line skips the 4/8 size entirely. Unio's u33 is a standard OpenStack instance with the same platform SLA as everything else.

When Scaleway is the right call

You use the broader platform - serverless, managed databases, GPU/AI inference - not just instances.
Egress-heavy workloads: Scaleway includes egress in instance prices with no metered transfer allowance.
You want an established EU provider with iliad-scale backing today, rather than a waitlist.

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.