Sovereign cloud costs in Germany are not in any single price list. They come from the operating model, missing services, support, migration and the quality of the billing data, and every offering shifts those items differently. Below are seven cost criteria with a way to verify each, and a comparison sequence, without a ranking.
Which offerings German companies are comparing
The offerings fall into four designs, and the design decides which costs exist at all:
- A separate hyperscaler partition. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud has been generally available since 14 January 2026, with the region
eusc-de-east-1in Brandenburg inside its own partition,aws-eusc. It needs new accounts and has its own billing system. For customers located in the EU the contracting party is Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Luxembourg, and prices are in euros. - Controls on existing public regions. Microsoft describes its Sovereign Public Cloud as Microsoft-operated datacentres within the EU Data Boundary, with added controls such as External Key Management. In Germany, Google offers "Germany Data Boundary by T-Systems": folders in a Google Cloud organisation with a defined set of controls and
europe-west3as the resource location. - Partner-operated variants. Microsoft's National Partner Clouds are run by local entities; for Germany, Microsoft names Delos Cloud, operated by an SAP subsidiary.
- Independent European platforms. STACKIT, IONOS Cloud, OVHcloud and Open Telekom Cloud have their own APIs, price lists and service catalogues.
Seven cost criteria and how to verify them
| Criterion | Cost question | How to verify |
|---|---|---|
| Operating model, jurisdiction and control | Who contracts, who operates, who has admin and support access? Which controls (key management, access approval) cost extra? | The agreement, the provider's operations description, each control as a calculator line |
| Service catalogue gaps | Which of your services are missing or restricted, and what does a replacement cost? | The offering's service list or matrix against the services in your last three months of cost data |
| Price list and currency | Public price list? Currency, net or gross, billing unit, commitment models? | Archived calculator output with date and configuration; invoicing entity and VAT treatment checked with your tax adviser |
| Support and operations access | What does support cost in the new model, who delivers it, and does your current support contract apply? | Support price list and service description, escalation path in the contract |
| Migration and egress | What do transfer out of the source, the parallel run, rebuilding and a later exit cost? | Source egress prices, switching and exit clauses, your own effort estimate |
| Billing data and export | Will you get a machine-readable cost export with resource IDs, tags and account hierarchy? | Request a sample export and reconcile it with one monthly invoice |
| Certifications as buyer evidence | Does the attestation cover the services and operations you use, and what must you add yourself? | Request the C5 audit report; read its period and scope against your service list |
A criterion is verified when the right-hand column holds a dated document. "Sales said so" is not evidence.
Why list prices alone do not compare
A separate partition prices the same instance differently from a commercial region, and compute is not the only difference. Three effects distort the comparison.
Currency. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud shows prices and bills in euros; depending on the customer location, payment is possible in euros or a preferred currency. Commercial AWS regions publish list prices in US dollars. Side by side, you also compare an exchange rate: convert both into one reporting currency and record rate source and date.
Commitments. Savings Plans, reservations or a minimum-spend agreement belong to one organisation and one contract; a new partition or a new provider does not inherit them. If workloads move while the old commitment runs, part of it goes unused. Check terms before you set a migration date.
Support. AWS publishes separate euro support pricing for the European Sovereign Cloud. Business Support there costs the greater of €86 per month or a tiered percentage of the monthly charges incurred in that region; Enterprise Support starts at €4,300. The fee is based on charges in that partition, so plan a separate support contract and have AWS confirm it.
Turning service catalogue gaps into replacement cost
Missing services are easy to overlook in a price comparison. Microsoft describes National Partner Clouds as physically and logically isolated and independently operated, so ask the operator for its service list rather than assuming global Azure's. For Germany Data Boundary by T-Systems, Google states that an unlisted product is unsupported and has not met the control requirements, and that unsupported products may share an API endpoint with supported ones. That second point needs a policy that blocks such services.
To turn a gap into a number:
- Export your costs for the last three full months by service and region.
- Mark each service in the target as available, restricted or missing, linking the dated service list.
- Choose a replacement for every missing service: self-operated, third party or an architecture change.
- Estimate running cost, operations effort (on-call, patching) and rebuild effort separately.
Also check whether a third-party replacement breaks the requirement behind the whole evaluation.
Migration, parallel running and exit
From 12 January 2027 the EU Data Act prohibits providers from charging switching charges for the switching process; until then, reduced charges may not exceed the provider's costs directly linked to the switch. Standard service fees, your own migration work, the parallel run and any rebuild remain your cost. The detail is in EU Data Act cloud switching costs.
Plan the parallel run as its own period with costs in source and target plus data transfer for cutover, and price the later exit from the new offering now.
Billing data: the underrated criterion
A separate partition has its own billing; a new provider has its own export format. Missing cost-centre tags, a different account hierarchy or credits absent from the export mean manual work for finance and engineering at every month-end.
Ask for an export in the FinOps standard FOCUS (see the glossary). On 10 October 2026 the FinOps Foundation's FOCUS site listed, among others, AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and STACKIT as data generators for FOCUS 1.2 and OVHcloud for FOCUS 1.0. A provider missing from that list may still have an export. Check the sample for:
- daily granularity and resource IDs,
- tags or labels on cost lines,
- commitments and credits as separate lines,
- adjustments after month-end and a match to the invoice,
- API access that works without a console login.
For AWS exports, see CUR 2.0 or FOCUS.
Certifications as evidence, not a price argument
The BSI's C5 criteria catalogue sets minimum information security requirements for cloud services. Auditors commissioned by the provider test the criteria, and the result is an attestation. The BSI recommends that customers request the C5 audit report at the start and then annually, analyse it themselves, and decide whether the minimum criteria need supplementing for their use case. C5 was substantially revised in 2025/26, so ask which version the audit used.
Read which services, locations and periods the report covers; an attestation for the global platform does not automatically cover a new partition or partner cloud. Complementary controls the report assigns to the customer are your effort.
For procurement, the European Commission published a Cloud Sovereignty Framework on 20 October 2025. It defines criteria, assurance levels and a scoring method across strategic, legal, operational and technological dimensions. Your procurement decides which level you need. Whether an offering meets your legal requirements is for your legal and data protection advisers to judge.
One workload, not a ranking
Compare on a real workload, not a reference architecture:
- Pick a workload with a clear owner and record its baseline cost by service, region and month.
- Have security and legal state requirements as controls: administration, data and key location, support.
- Complete the service mapping and replacement cost for each offering as above.
- Price the target in the provider's calculator: same configuration, one currency, price date recorded, without and then with commitments.
- Add one-off and exit costs.
- Map a sample export to your cost centres.
- Hand every open gap, with an owner and a date, to management.
A cost sheet with placeholders is enough for steps 4 and 5:
Term T (months), per offering:
Recurring = T × (running cost + support + controls + replacement services + operations effort)
One-off = migration + parallel run (months × (source + target)) + data transfer + rebuild
Exit = data transfer + rebuild + parallel run for the later switch
Total = Recurring + One-off + Exit
Open items: criterion | missing evidence | owner | date
Where Costfluent fits in this comparison
Costfluent reads cost data from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud through read-only native billing connectors. Cost reports and saved views hold the baseline from step 1 by service and region. Billing-file imports for other providers are Planned. How Costfluent itself handles company location, hosting, access and data portability is set out on the sovereignty page; the same criteria apply to a cost tool.
Sources and method
Checked on 10 October 2026: AWS: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, AWS European Sovereign Cloud FAQ, AWS European Sovereign Cloud support pricing, Microsoft Learn: What is Microsoft Sovereign Cloud?, Microsoft Learn: National Partner Clouds, Google Cloud: Germany Data Boundary by T-Systems, BSI: C5 criteria catalogue, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, Article 29, FinOps Foundation: FOCUS, European Commission: Cloud Sovereignty Framework. The criteria, table and sequence are Costfluent recommendations, not legal, tax or procurement advice. The offerings named are examples of the market and are neither scored nor ranked.
