OVHcloud pricing for the Public Cloud is instances per second or per month, object storage per GiB-hour in several classes, block storage per GB-hour by performance level, a control plane per Kubernetes cluster, and floating IPs, load balancers and gateways per hour; outbound traffic is inside the instance price in Europe, and a Savings Plan lowers the instance price against a commitment of one to 36 months. On the bill the instances dominate, at the hourly price for as long as nobody has chosen the monthly price or a Savings Plan.
Pricing dimensions
Every Public Cloud project gets its own bill, and every resource in the project belongs to one of the dimensions below. The instance prices are in euro excluding VAT on the German price page; for third-generation instances the monthly figure beside them is not the list price but the price with a twelve-month Savings Plan, calculated on 730 hours.
| Dimension | Unit | What drives it | Optional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instances, hourly | Second from the ACTIVE state, one minute minimum, per type and region | Range (B3, C3, R3, D2 and older generations), size, region; Windows licence per vCore and hour | No |
| Instances, monthly | Every commenced month in full, about 50 percent below the hourly rate | Switch per instance, any time from hourly to monthly, never back; Gen 3 only through a Savings Plan | Yes |
| Savings Plan | Commitment to a number of instances for 1, 6, 12, 24 or 36 months | B3, C3, R3 and Managed Rancher; automatic association; the excess per second at list price | Yes (commitment strategy) |
| Block storage | GB per hour by performance level, 1 GB granularity, shown per GB-month on 730 hours | Size and level; snapshots and backups per GB used | Yes |
| Object storage | GiB per hour by class, 1 GiB granularity | Standard (Multi Zone), One Zone, Infrequent Access, Active Archive, Cold Archive with minimum durations of 730, 2,190 and 4,380 hours | Yes |
| Traffic | Outbound inside the instance price except Asia-Pacific (1 TB per project and month) | Inbound included everywhere; object storage egress and API calls inside the storage price | No |
| Managed Kubernetes | Hour per cluster control plane | Free tier at no cost; Standard with three availability zones and a 99.99 percent SLA per cluster hour; nodes as instances | Yes |
| Network | Hour per floating IP, public IP, load balancer, gateway | Count and size; private networks free; instances outside Local Zones come with one IPv4 | Yes |
| Bare metal | Metal Instances per hour or month inside the project; dedicated servers per month outside it | Model and term | Yes |
Hourly billing is per second: the clock starts when an instance reaches the ACTIVE state, build time does not count, and after the first minute every second is billed, never rounded up to the next hour. A stopped or paused instance keeps paying; an hourly instance can be shelved, after which only its snapshot is billed, and only deletion ends the billing. The monthly price sits at about half, but every commenced month is billed in full, even when the instance is deleted on the third day. The switch from hourly to monthly is possible any time in the Control Panel, through the OpenStack or OVHcloud API or Terraform; there is no way back. For third-generation instances the monthly price no longer exists as an option, only the Savings Plan does.
A Savings Plan is a commitment to a number of instances of one type, not to an amount: the Control Panel shows utilisation (used against covered resources) and coverage (covered against consumed), the bill carries one line for the plan and beside it the seconds above it at the standard rate, and instances are associated automatically. The documentation calculates savings of 54 percent over three years for 20 B3-16 and 35 percent over one year for ten B3-8; the price page advertises up to 30 percent and shows 15 percent for twelve months. A plan cannot be modified yet, and Local Zones and regions with three availability zones are excluded.
Object storage is billed on the space used in GiB-hours, shown per GiB-month on 730 hours; inbound traffic, internal traffic, API calls and public egress are inside the storage price, which sets the service apart from the hyperscalers' metered models. The cold classes have minimum storage durations, and an object deleted or moved earlier pays the difference at the class's hourly price; how classes and lifecycle interact is in storage tiers and lifecycle. Managed Kubernetes prices the control plane only: free in the free tier, per cluster hour in the Standard tier with three availability zones; nodes are Public Cloud instances on which Savings Plans apply, and volumes and floating IPs are billed individually, as containers and Kubernetes describes for the hyperscalers. Bare metal comes twice: as Metal Instances inside the Public Cloud project, billed per hour or month on the same bill like instances, and as dedicated servers with a monthly price and their own invoice outside the project.
Invoices, exports and APIs
Every project has its own bill, which totals all resources billed in the month and is generated on the first day of the following month; Savings Plans appear as one line with the total amount, pro rata when started mid-month, and the covered instances are not itemised. The Control Panel shows per project the usage history and the current usage, refreshed hourly, plus an estimate of the next invoice and alerts when the forecast exceeds a threshold. How the invoice shows VAT or the reverse charge depends on the contracting entity and the customer; VAT and reverse charge explains the rule.
The OVHcloud API returns a project's running usage through GET /cloud/project/{serviceName}/usage/current and a projection through /usage/forecast; the month's usage sits there by resource type, not as an hourly line per resource. Since 2026 OVHcloud goes a step further than any other provider in this chapter: through POST /finops/bucketExport an export of the billing data into any S3-compatible bucket can be set up, as CSV in the FOCUS 1.3 format, once a day at a chosen hour or every hour, each run covering the running calendar month up to that moment; the guide is dated 2026-08-31 and names neither the column list nor the product scope, both of which sit in the FOCUS specification and in the export itself. What that means for the mapping onto FOCUS columns and where the other providers stand is in collecting cost data from European providers.
Levers
Configuration
The choice between hourly and monthly is the first lever: an instance that runs through the month costs about half monthly, one deleted after a week costs less hourly than monthly, and the switch is a one-way street. Shelving instead of stopping saves the compute time on hourly instances, because stopping keeps paying; scheduling and auto-scaling describes the patterns. Rightsizing between B3, C3 and R3 applies as everywhere, with the difference that the Windows licence counts per vCore.
Purchase option
The Savings Plan replaces the monthly price on Gen 3 and pays for a stable baseline over twelve or more months; the documentation names savings of 35 to 54 percent by term and quantity. Because the commitment counts instances, not euros, a plan for ten B3-8 covers no B3-16; coverage and utilisation in the Control Panel show whether the commitment fits, as commitment coverage and utilisation explains.
Architecture
Included egress makes OVHcloud different for outbound workloads from metered providers: traffic from instances and object storage is part of the price in Europe, and included traffic and flat pricing models puts that in context. Cold object storage classes pay only with their minimum duration; whoever deletes objects earlier pays the difference. The free tier of the Kubernetes control plane suffices for clusters without an SLA requirement; the Standard tier pays per cluster hour for three zones.
Where it goes wrong
- Monthly chosen, deleted early. Symptom: an instance deleted at the start of the month appears on the bill at the full monthly price. Cause: every commenced month is billed in full; the switch cannot be reversed.
- Stopped, not deleted. Symptom: a stopped instance keeps costing. Cause: stopping and pausing do not end the billing; shelving reduces it to the snapshot, deleting ends it.
- The monthly figure is a plan price. Symptom: the bill of an hourly B3 instance sits far above the price page's monthly figure. Cause: the monthly figure is the price with a twelve-month Savings Plan; without a plan the per-second rate applies.
- The plan covers the wrong type. Symptom: instances run at list price beside a Savings Plan. Cause: the commitment counts instances of one type; B3-16 are not covered by a plan for B3-8, Local Zones and 3-AZ regions never.
- Early deletion from Cold Archive. Symptom: a surcharge when moving objects. Cause: a minimum duration of 4,380 hours; the difference is billed at the class's hourly price.
- Two bills a month. Symptom: several invoices for the same account. Cause: every project gets its own bill; projects are the billing unit.
- Usage by type, not by resource. Symptom: the API's usage cannot be assigned to one instance. Cause: usage/current aggregates by resource type; the per-resource attribution comes from the FOCUS export into the bucket.
Example
List prices from the German price page, EUR excluding VAT, read on 2026-10-21: a B3-8 (2 vCore, 8 GB, 500 Mbit/s) costs EUR 0.060928 per hour, EUR 37.81 per month with a twelve-month Savings Plan; a B3-16 (4 vCore, 16 GB) EUR 0.121737 per hour, EUR 75.54 with a plan; a B3-32 (8 vCore, 32 GB) EUR 0.243474 per hour, EUR 151.08 with a plan; a second-generation B2-30 with 50 GB SSD EUR 0.084371 per hour or EUR 29.9523 per month at the monthly price. The figures show that a B3-8 over 730 hours costs EUR 44.48 at the per-second rate and EUR 37.81 with a plan, 15 percent less, as the price page states for twelve months, that the range scales linearly with the vCores, and that outbound traffic appears in none of these figures as a line of its own.
Sources
Read on 2026-10-21. Prices: Public Cloud prices, German page, Managed Kubernetes Service. Billing: Public Cloud billing, Switching from hourly to monthly billing, Savings Plans, Exporting billing data to a bucket.