This chapter describes how eight European cloud providers bill and what cost data they expose: Hetzner, Scaleway, OVHcloud, IONOS, STACKIT, T Cloud Public (Open Telekom Cloud until January 2026), Exoscale and UpCloud. It explains each provider's pricing logic as its pricing page and billing documentation state it on the read date, in the currency the provider bills in, and it says what an invoice, a usage export and a billing API give you there and what they do not. It does not compare the providers on price and ranks none of them; what the article on comparing European cloud provider costs does, it does not repeat.
What this chapter covers
The provider pages follow one pattern. Each starts with what the provider charges for: compute time per hour or minute, often with a monthly cap, storage per gigabyte and hour, data transfer per terabyte beyond an allowance, and fixed items such as IP addresses, load balancers or a Kubernetes control plane. A table holds the pricing dimensions, a section on invoices, exports and APIs says in which form the cost data arrives, and the levers name what changes the bill. An example with list prices from a European region closes each page, with the date on which the prices were read.
The pricing models differ from the hyperscalers' in two ways that run through the whole chapter. First, outbound traffic is almost everywhere part of an allowance: terabytes per server at Hetzner, inside the instance price at OVHcloud, an hourly quota per instance at Exoscale, a fair-use limit per plan at UpCloud; the bill therefore usually carries no egress line, and what included traffic does to the shape of the bill is the subject of the page on included traffic and flat pricing models. Second, many providers bill compute by the hour but cap it at the monthly price: a server that runs the whole month never costs more than its monthly price, one deleted after three days only its hours.
On cost data the difference runs deeper. None of the eight providers delivers an hourly export per resource with price and tags in the manner of a CUR or an Azure cost export. What exists ranges from a PDF invoice with a CSV file of daily usage, through a billing API per project, to FOCUS reports in an object storage bucket. The page on collecting the cost data sets the eight providers side by side in one table: invoice, usage CSV, API, granularity, resource identifiers, tags or labels and currency, and it says what is missing when the data is to be mapped onto FOCUS columns.
The pages describe what the providers document. Whether a pricing model fits a workload is the reader's decision; whether an invoice carries VAT or falls under the reverse charge is explained in the Europe chapter, and the check stays with the tax adviser.
Key terms
- Included traffic: the outbound data volume contained in a server's or plan's monthly price, per server or pooled per account.
- Usage export: the machine-readable file or API response the invoice is built from, here mostly a CSV per month or a consumption per project.
- Granularity: the smallest unit of time and resource the export distinguishes, with the European providers mostly a day or a month per product.
- Invoice currency: the currency the provider invoices in, here the euro, at Exoscale also francs or dollars, at UpCloud a balance in euro.
- Data transfer: the traffic a provider meters and charges beyond an allowance.
- FOCUS: the vendor-neutral specification these providers' cost data can be mapped onto, with the gaps the page on collecting the data names.
Neighbouring chapters
Chapter 5, "What cloud services cost", describes the hyperscalers' pricing dimensions per service class; the provider pages here point to its pages on virtual machines and instance families, data transfer and egress and containers and Kubernetes where the mechanics are the same. Chapter 3, "Billing data and standards", describes the hyperscalers' exports and the CSV and file imports against which this chapter's cost data is measured. Chapter 12, "Cloud costs in Europe", explains VAT and the reverse charge on cloud invoices, the price differences between regions and the sovereign offerings of the hyperscalers, which this chapter leaves aside. Chapter 4, "Pricing models and commitments", explains savings plans and reservations, which OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS and T Cloud Public offer in their own forms. What a team running several providers needs from cost management is the subject of the page for EU companies. Every chapter is listed in the handbook.