Scaleway pricing explained

Scaleway pricing is an hourly price per instance range, gigabyte-hours for object and block storage, a control plane per Kubernetes cluster, seconds for serverless, and separate items for flexible IPv4 addresses, load balancers and gateways, all in euro before tax and without a monthly cap. On the bill the instances that run through the month dominate, followed by object storage; outbound traffic is inside the instance price and appears on object storage only above 75 GB a month.

Pricing dimensions

Scaleway bills every resource by the hour, from creation to deletion, and invoices the hours at the end of each calendar month. Beside the hourly price the pricing page shows a monthly figure based on 730 hours; it is an estimate, not a cap. Every price is per zone, the examples here for Paris.

The instance ranges differ in the price per vCPU and in the bandwidth each model carries as a ceiling: a STARDUST1-S with 1 vCPU and 1 GB costs EUR 0.0006 per hour at 100 Mbit/s, a DEV1-S with 2 vCPU and 2 GB EUR 0.00898, a PRO2-XXS with 2 vCPU and 8 GB EUR 0.0561, a POP2-8C-32G EUR 0.29 at 1.6 Gbit/s and a POP2-64C-256G EUR 2.35 per hour. The list prices include outbound traffic and an IPv6 address; the flexible IPv4 and the storage come on top. Powering an instance off pauses its billing but not that of its storage and its IPv4; only deletion ends both.

Object storage is S3-compatible and priced in three classes that differ by factors of two and six: Standard across several availability zones, Standard in one zone, and Glacier, from which a restore costs per GB. Requests and inbound traffic are included; outbound traffic is free up to 75 GB a month and costs EUR 0.01 per GB beyond, with traffic inside a region (Paris to Paris, Amsterdam to Amsterdam, Warsaw to Warsaw) not counting. The mechanics of the classes are in storage tiers and lifecycle, those of the allowances in included traffic and flat pricing models.

Kapsule provides the control plane free as a shared instance and in three dedicated sizes per hour; Kosmos, the cluster with external nodes, is charged in its shared form too. The worker nodes of both are instances and appear as such on the bill, together with their volumes and load balancers; what a cluster costs beyond the control plane is in containers and Kubernetes. Serverless Functions, Containers and Jobs bill by the second, with free tiers per account and month that cover small workloads entirely.

Invoices, exports and APIs

Scaleway assigns every resource to a project within an organization, and the invoice follows that structure: one invoice per organization and month, with a project table that names each project's consumed resources and amount, and below it a consumption table per project, service or operation, period, usage and price. The header carries the invoice number, the billing period, the issue and due dates, Scaleway SAS as the seller with its VAT number, and the customer with its Organization ID and, for business accounts, its EU VAT number. The total is untaxed; for customers in the EU the local VAT rate is applied to the untaxed total. The PDF downloads from the console; how the reverse charge applies is in VAT and reverse charge.

The cost manager in the console (Billing, Consumption) shows the organization's consumption by year, product category, product and project, before tax and without vouchers, with a list per product; deleted projects appear as deleted. For the running month it is the source, for the close the invoice is.

Two APIs deliver data. The Consumption API returns the data the invoice is built from, per month; the FinOps API under billing/v2beta1/charges returns raw consumption per resource, narrowed to resource IDs and a time window, optionally with "clampToTimeRange", which cuts a charge spanning a longer period down to the requested slice. The two sources round and aggregate differently, so small discrepancies appear in a reconciliation, and the resource name is present only where the product passes it on. Responses are paginated; an API key with IAM permissions and the Organization ID suffice. An hourly export per resource with price and tags, as a hyperscaler's usage export delivers, does not exist; the FinOps API's charges are the nearest thing, and collecting cost data from European providers places them.

Levers

Configuration

The range and the size are the first lever: at the same vCPU count a multiple separates DEV1, PRO2 and POP2, and rightsizing here means fitting the range to the workload, not only the size. Powering off pauses the instance's billing but not its storage and IPv4; whoever switches a development environment off in the evening keeps paying for its storage, which scheduling and auto-scaling puts in context. An instance without a public IPv4 saves EUR 0.005 per hour where a gateway or a load balancer provides the access.

Purchase option

The compute savings plan is a monthly commitment of EUR 50 to 9,999 over 12 or 36 months, with a discount by commitment bracket of up to 25 percent on the eligible instance ranges in every region; whoever uses less than committed pays the commitment at the discount, whoever uses more pays the rest at list price. Gen 3 instances, GPU instances and a few other types are not eligible. The discount applies after free tiers and before vouchers, and a plan can be neither cancelled nor exchanged. It shares its mechanics with the hyperscalers' savings plans, which commitment coverage and utilisation describes.

Architecture

Object storage in one zone costs half the Multi-AZ class and Glacier a sixth; lifecycle rules move what is rarely read into the cheaper class, as storage tiers and lifecycle describes. Serverless with free tiers replaces small instances that only wait for requests. The shared Kapsule control plane is free, and a dedicated plan pays only once the node count or the requirements demand it; traffic within a region costs nothing, traffic between Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw does.

Where it goes wrong

• The instance is off, the storage runs. Symptom: a powered-off instance keeps producing cost. Cause: only the compute time pauses; block storage and the flexible IPv4 are billed until deletion.
• IPv4 without an instance. Symptom: flexible IP lines with no instance behind them. Cause: a reserved address is billed per hour, attached or not.
• The monthly figure misleads. Symptom: the bill is above the monthly price shown on the pricing page. Cause: the monthly figure rests on 730 hours; a 31-day month has 744, and there is no cap.
• Egress between regions. Symptom: an object storage egress line despite little public delivery. Cause: traffic between regions is billed; only traffic within a region is free.
• Savings plan below the commitment. Symptom: the bill shows the committed amount although less ran. Cause: the commitment is invoiced at the discount whether used or not; the bracket was set too high.
• Gen 3 without a discount. Symptom: instances of the Gen 3 ranges run at list price beside a savings plan. Cause: BASIC3, STANDARD3, COMPUTE3 and MEMORY3 are not eligible; the list of ranges changes.
• Invoice and FinOps data disagree. Symptom: the sum of the FinOps API's charges differs from the invoice. Cause: the two sources round and aggregate differently; the invoice is the binding figure.

Example

List prices for the Paris zone, EUR before tax, read on 2026-10-21: a DEV1-S (2 vCPU, 2 GB) costs EUR 0.00898 per hour, shown on the pricing page as about EUR 6.55 per month and costing EUR 6.68 in a 744-hour month; a PRO2-XXS (2 vCPU, 8 GB) EUR 0.0561 per hour, about EUR 40.95 per month; a POP2-8C-32G EUR 0.29 per hour, about EUR 211.70 per month. On top come EUR 0.005 per hour for the flexible IPv4, EUR 3.72 in 744 hours, block storage at 5K IOPS at EUR 0.000130 per GB-hour, EUR 0.0967 per GB in 744 hours, and object storage Standard Multi-AZ at EUR 0.000022 per GB-hour, about EUR 0.01606 per GB-month; the dedicated Kapsule control plane Dedicated-4 costs EUR 0.11 per hour, about EUR 80.30 per month. The figures show that the IPv4 of a small instance can exceed half of its compute price, that the pricing page's monthly figure falls below the bill in long months, and that egress never appears as a line on instances and appears on object storage only above 75 GB.

Sources

Read on 2026-10-21. Prices: Virtual Instances, Storage, Containers, Serverless, Network. Billing: Understanding Instance pricing, Understanding IP billing, Reading an invoice, Cost manager, Retrieving FinOps data via the API, Understanding savings plans, Billing API.