Exoscale pricing explained

Exoscale pricing is instances per second by size and family, local SSD storage and block storage per GiB-hour, SOS object storage per GiB-hour in volume tiers, a Kubernetes control plane per hour, elastic IPs and load balancers per hour, and outbound traffic per GiB above an allowance per instance, all without tax in the account's currency, euro, francs or dollars. On the bill the instances with their local storage that run through the month dominate; traffic appears only once an instance sends more than about 1 TiB a month outward.

Pricing dimensions

Exoscale bills every resource for its exact usage time, down to the second, and without a monthly cap; the pricing page shows hourly prices in euro, francs or dollars, the account currency is set at signup by the customer's legal residence, and every price excludes tax. The standard instances are available in every zone, Frankfurt and Munich included; the prices here are in euro.

Per-second billing without a cap is the trait of this model: an instance costs exactly its runtime, and the pricing page calculates monthly figures only as an aid. The local SSD storage is not in the instance price and keeps running while the instance is switched off, as do licences; a Small with 50 GB of local storage pays per month EUR 0.02333 times 720 hours for compute and 50 times 0.00014 times 720 for storage. The families differ in the ratio of cores to RAM, the CPU-optimised Extra-large with 8 cores and 16 GB costs EUR 0.23333 per hour; what families mean at the hyperscalers is in virtual machines and instance families.

SOS object storage is S3-compatible, billed per GiB-hour and gets cheaper with volume, cumulatively over three tiers; outbound traffic from SOS costs EUR 0.02 per GiB, inbound nothing. Warm and cold classes with minimum durations and retrieval fees are announced for early 2027, and the archival class exists on request with a minimum of 10 TB per bucket. The traffic allowance applies per instance and hour, 1.42 GiB, which the pricing page translates to about 1 TiB a month per instance; traffic within a zone, between zones and to SOS is free. How such an allowance shapes the bill is in included traffic and flat pricing models. SKS charges the control plane only, free as Starter and per hour as Pro; the nodes are instances, as containers and Kubernetes describes for the hyperscalers.

Invoices, exports and APIs

Exoscale has two payment modes. Pre-paid accounts top up a balance by card or PayPal, the balance is updated hourly, and an account at zero is suspended; the invoice is the receipt of the top-up, and a monthly usage report shows the consumption. Post-paid accounts, by card or wire on request, receive on the 1st of the month the invoice for the previous month, in euro, francs or dollars; the card is charged three days after the invoice, a wire transfer is due within ten days. Invoices go to users with the Owner or Billing role and to one additional address. All prices exclude tax; how VAT and the reverse charge work for Swiss and EU customers is in VAT and reverse charge.

Usage data comes at three levels. The portal shows under Organization, Billing and Usage Details the running usage with a price estimate, refreshed hourly, aggregated by product and product type, without detail per resource. Invoices and usage reports come monthly as PDF and JSON with the amounts per product; the API returns them through GET /usage-report with a period in the format YYYY-MM, with quantities and units, not prices, and the CLI through exo x get-usage-report. Detailed reports per resource and service, as JSON and XLS per month, are included only with one of the higher support plans and land in an SOS bucket named usage-reports plus the organization's UUID. The prices themselves sit on the pricing page and in the calculator. Whoever needs cost per resource and hour therefore combines the usage report with the price list or books the support plan; what that means for FOCUS columns is in collecting cost data from European providers.

Levers

Configuration

Size and family are the first lever, and rightsizing works to the second here: an oversized instance costs more every second, and a factor of two separates Small and Medium. Switching off saves the compute time, not the local storage and the licence; whoever does not need an instance for days deletes it after a snapshot, as scheduling and auto-scaling advises for development environments. The local storage at EUR 0.00014 per GiB-hour costs as much as block storage; a smaller volume at creation saves permanently.

Purchase option

Exoscale offers no reservations or savings plans but a volume discount against a monthly minimum usage over at least twelve months, in tiers that sales names: the discounted rate applies from the first euro, whoever stays below the commitment pays the commitment, and billing continues by usage. For the bill that is private pricing, not a programme with a line of its own.

Architecture

Traffic within and between zones is free, as is traffic to SOS, so replication and backups across zones cost no egress; only the way to the internet counts, with an allowance per instance, so that several small instances bring more free egress than one large one. SOS gets cheaper with volume; whoever archives terabytes asks for the archival rate. The free SKS Starter suffices without an SLA requirement; Pro costs about EUR 39.60 per cluster in 720 hours, more than a Medium instance.

Where it goes wrong

• Switched off, but storage and licence run. Symptom: a stopped instance keeps costing. Cause: local SSD storage and Windows licences are billed per GiB-hour and per hour for as long as the instance exists.
• Balance used up. Symptom: the resources of a pre-paid account are suspended. Cause: at a balance of zero the account is suspended; automatic top-up or a switch to invoicing prevents it.
• Storage is not in the price. Symptom: the instance costs more than the hourly price times runtime. Cause: the local SSD storage is billed separately per GiB-hour; the pricing page says so in a footnote.
• Egress from one large instance. Symptom: a traffic line despite moderate delivery. Cause: the allowance of 1.42 GiB per hour applies per instance; one instance that delivers everything exceeds it while the others' allowances lapse.
• Archive with a minimum. Symptom: a small archival bucket costs 10 TB. Cause: every archival bucket is billed for at least 9,313 GiB, nearly empty included.
• No price in the usage report. Symptom: the API's report holds quantities but no amounts. Cause: GET /usage-report returns quantities and units; amounts sit in the invoice and PDF, prices on the pricing page.
• Full months for DNS. Symptom: a DNS subscription cancelled mid-month costs the whole month. Cause: subscriptions such as DNS are billed in full months.

Example

List prices in euro without tax, valid in every zone and so in Frankfurt too, read on 2026-10-21: a Standard Medium (2 cores, 4 GB) costs EUR 0.04666 per hour, EUR 33.60 in 720 hours, plus 50 GiB of local storage for EUR 5.04; a Standard Large (4 cores, 8 GB) EUR 0.09333 per hour, EUR 67.20 in 720 hours; an SKS Pro cluster EUR 0.054995 per hour, EUR 39.60; SOS Standard EUR 0.0000275 per GiB-hour, EUR 0.0198 per GiB in 720 hours; outbound traffic above the allowance EUR 0.02 per GiB, EUR 20.48 per further TiB; an elastic IPv4 EUR 0.01389 per hour, EUR 10.00 in 720 hours. The figures show that the local storage of a small instance adds about 15 percent to the compute price, that a Pro cluster costs more than a Medium instance, and that 1 TiB of egress per instance stays free while the second TiB costs EUR 20.48.

Sources

Read on 2026-10-21. Prices: Exoscale pricing, Volume discount. Billing: Billing, Usage reports, API reference, Organization.