AWS vs European Cloud — Cost Calculator
Plug in your monthly cloud workload. We'll show you what the same workload would cost on AWS vs five European cloud providers — Hetzner, Scaleway, OVHcloud, UpCloud, and a benchmark of where the savings come from.
Calculate Your Cloud Savings
Enter your monthly cloud workload. We'll show what you'd pay on AWS vs European cloud providers.
Approximate based on public 2026 pricing for comparable cloud server, block storage, object storage, and egress. AWS values reflect on-demand x86 pricing in us-east-1. Real costs vary with reserved instances, spot pricing, region, and managed services.
Why the gap exists
American hyperscalers price compute, RAM, and especially egress at margins that were established when there was no real competition. Egress alone — the cost of moving data out of the AWS network — is often the single largest line item in a startup's cloud bill, and it's roughly 9× more expensive on AWS than on Hetzner.
European cloud providers compete primarily on price-performance. They run leaner organizations, don't subsidize a sprawling product range with compute margins, and operate in markets where customers compare prices instead of accepting them. The result: comparable infrastructure at 50–80% lower cost.
How accurate is this calculator?
The pricing is approximate, based on public 2026 rate cards for typical compute, block storage, object storage, and egress. We've used representative on-demand x86 pricing in us-east-1 for AWS and standard public cloud pricing for the EU providers.
Real costs vary depending on:
- Reserved instances and committed-use discounts (typically 30–60% off list)
- Spot/preemptible pricing for fault-tolerant workloads
- Region (EU regions on AWS are slightly more expensive than US)
- Specific managed services (RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, etc.) which have their own premium
- Free tier credits, which are time-limited and small at scale
Most teams find their actual savings track close to this calculator's estimates — sometimes better, because Hetzner and Scaleway don't have the per-API-call costs that quietly inflate AWS bills.
The realistic migration path
You don't have to migrate everything at once. Start with a single workload — usually a staging environment, an internal tool, or a non-critical service — and run it on Hetzner or Scaleway for 30 days. Measure what actually breaks (typically nothing). Then plan the bigger migration.
Our step-by-step AWS-to-Hetzner migration guide walks through the full process. Most startups complete the migration in 1-2 weeks of focused work.