Cleura in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

Cleura, called City Network until April 2022, is a Swedish OpenStack provider in Karlskrona, part of the Nordic IT group Iver, which a fund of the London-listed ICG plc has owned since 2021. It sells two separate clouds. Public Cloud is self-service, runs in Karlskrona, Stockholm and Frankfurt at identical prices, has no availability zones and bills egress at EUR 0.02875 per GB. Compliant Cloud is for regulated customers, runs only in Stockholm, has three zones in its newest region, charges 1.5 times the Public Cloud list and nothing for egress.

The verdict: plain OpenStack infrastructure with an EU-only data path written into its contract, at flat, moderate prices (our starter workload costs EUR 81.21 a month against EUR 112.37 on AWS). For production the gaps are serious: no published SLA document, no zones on the self-service product, no self-service managed database, a small company with falling revenue, and almost no independent user reports.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against Cleura's documentation, terms, price data and status page, register data and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

Status is for Public Cloud and generally available unless noted, from Cleura's feature matrices and limitation pages.

Missing outright: Redis or Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch, a container registry, functions, serverless containers, queues, a CDN, a DDoS protection product and managed metrics and logs. Harbor, Prometheus and Grafana are Marketplace apps you deploy on your own VMs. Object storage has no bucket replication, no notifications, no GOVERNANCE lock mode and no SSE-KMS, and AWS SDKs released since early 2025 fail against it unless AWS_REQUEST_CHECKSUM_CALCULATION=WHEN_REQUIRED is set.

Kubernetes has been generally available since 3 April 2023. Its highly available control plane is an optional paid add-on that cannot be switched off once enabled; clusters are IPv4 only, with one storage class and no shared (RWX) volumes, and a minor version is force-upgraded about a month after its successor ships. We found no Cleura entry in the CNCF conformance data; Cleura calls the clusters "Kubernetes-conformant".

The tooling is upstream OpenStack: the standard APIs, the openstack CLI and the community Terraform provider, which Cleura does not maintain. Projects, users and Gardener clusters go through the separate Cleura Cloud REST API, which has no OpenAPI specification, and Cleura's own Terraform provider (first released 30 June 2026, now 0.3.2) covers only those. The documentation is public under CC BY-SA 4.0 and unusually candid about what does not work. Fra1 runs OpenStack Gazpacho (2026.1), the other regions Epoxy (2025.1).

What it costs

Cleura list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from the JSON file its pricing page loads, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in Frankfurt (Fra1) at 730 hours a month. Kna1, Sto2 and Fra1 have identical prices for every infrastructure item.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, so Cleura costs 72% of AWS and 70% of Azure. Egress is 35% of Cleura's bill; without it the total is EUR 52.46. The recovery service, on by default for new servers, adds EUR 4.09 for the 40 GB volume.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

The highly available control plane adds EUR 10.14; there is no free control plane. With "High Intensity" cores, described as "faster processors" rather than dedicated ones, the total is EUR 708.95; dedicated c flavors are not sold in Frankfurt. We treated the generic vCPUs as shared, since the docs do not say.

AWS charges EUR 985.89 for workload B on burstable t3.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,017.63 on B4s_v2, both with a managed HA database. Cleura's EUR 620.63 is 63% of AWS and 61% of Azure, but it leaves out the database. The nearest priceable substitute is two VMs of 2 vCPU and 8 GB with 100 GB volumes each, running PostgreSQL and replication yourself: EUR 148.14, which brings the total to EUR 768.77, 78% of AWS. Both nodes would sit in the same Frankfurt site. Having Cleura run the database takes at least a Business support plan, last published at EUR 175 a month, plus a quote.

Compliant Cloud has no price list of its own: the pricing page multiplies every Public Cloud figure by 1.5, shows the Kubernetes cluster at the Public price and shows egress at €0, which Cleura's egress guide confirms: "In Cleura Compliant Cloud, outbound data transfer costs €0". By our arithmetic, workload B without the database comes to about EUR 809 a month there, 30% more than in Public Cloud; contracts are usually negotiated, so take that as an indication.

Egress and IPv4. Public Cloud egress costs "the same price per gigabyte whether the data goes to your users, to another provider or back on-premises": EUR 28.75 per TB from the first gigabyte, against EUR 80.30 per TB on AWS and EUR 77.62 on Azure beyond their free 100 GB. Ingress, IPv6, IOPS and object storage requests cost nothing. A floating IPv4 address costs EUR 0.00672 an hour (EUR 4.91 a month), against USD 0.005 an hour on AWS and Azure, and a VM with a public address also needs a router at EUR 1.98 a month. Data transfer has been billed since 1 January 2023.

Billing. "Allocated resources (CPU, RAM and Cloud Storage) are monitored by the second, calculated by the hour and billed per month." A shut-off server still costs money ("you are still getting charged for it, but less so"; how much less is not stated). Invoices come monthly in arrears with 30 days to pay. A free trial gives a EUR 50 voucher, and the Startup Program up to EUR 20,000 in credits by application. Volume discounts start at 4% from EUR 2,500 a month and reach 25% from EUR 100,000, but only with a paid support plan. We found no spending limit or budget alert in the docs.

GPUs. The price list has "GPU cores (Beta)" at EUR 0.5635 per "virtual core" per hour, with no GPU model named and no GPU flavor documented. No H100, H200, B200, L40S or L4 is offered publicly.

Price changes. The EUR price file was byte-identical between an archived copy of 15 August 2025 and 16 October 2026.

On 28 September 2026, after increases at Hetzner and OVHcloud, Cleura wrote: "We have not made any decision about our own prices as of right now. But we are not going to pretend that the pressure everyone else is describing somehow stops at our door." The Terms give no separate notice period for price changes.

Reliability

What a zone is. Cleura's own comparison table gives Public Cloud no availability zones and Compliant Cloud "3", and requires "TIER-2" data centres for Public Cloud against "TIER-3" for Compliant Cloud. On Public Cloud, in-region redundancy means anti-affinity groups on different hosts; surviving the loss of a building means a second region, a separate OpenStack installation. In Compliant Cloud's Sto-Com, "Each availability zone is provided from a different data center with its own redundant power, networking, and connectivity", and Gardener supports node pools across zones. Sto1HS and Sto2HS are one data centre each.

The database standby. There is none to describe: Cleura publishes no price, engine list, standby placement, replication mode or failover time for Managed Database. AWS and Azure put a synchronous standby in another zone and state failover in 60 to 120 seconds.

The SLA. No SLA document is published. The Terms say the Services "may be subject to a service level agreement ('SLA') as updated from time to time on Supplier's website"; we found none on cleura.com, in its media library or in the docs. The only figure is a row on a comparison page giving a range of 99.90% to 99.99% for both clouds, with no service, credit schedule or claim process. The Startup Program page says "You may add a paid SLA separately", which suggests an SLA is sold rather than included. What the Terms of Service (version 26.03.02) do fix:

• Liability "per calendar year shall, in any event, be limited to twenty-five (25) percent of the annual fee for the agreed Services". Lost profit and "any loss of data or information" count as indirect damage and are excluded. Claims must come within 30 days of discovery.
• Cleura may hold "up to two (2) pre-announced maintenance windows per year and per region", announced 14 days ahead; the status page shows them as week-long windows, such as 28 September to 2 October 2026 in Sto2.
• Backups are the customer's job unless bought, and the recovery service's snapshots have no off-site copy described.

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with credits up to 100%; Azure to 99.99% across zones. Cleura offers nothing you can read before signing.

Status page and incidents. status.cleura.cloud covers Public Cloud only, and its history starts on 3 October 2025, when it replaced the City Network page, whose history is no longer online. The Compliant Cloud status page is private. In a year it lists 25 resolved incidents, 10 of them networking. No postmortem was published for any.

Frankfurt had five networking incidents in four months, and two incidents crossed regions, which limits what a second region buys you. A Gardener incident in Kna1 lasted about 7 hours on 3 October 2025; the entries not shown (portal, storage, compute) each lasted under 3 hours.

Support

Without a paid plan there is no technical support. Customer service handles pre-sales, general questions and bug reports by email "within 24 hours during our business hours", Monday to Friday from 08:00 to 17:00 CET, and "We don't provide technical troubleshooting via this form".

Those prices held from October 2024 to May 2026; the page now says "Contact Sales". Business hours are weekdays 08:00 to 17:00, and Cleura's own example is a request at 16:45 on a Friday that "may not be handled until Monday at 15:45 in the worst case". Professional services cost EUR 105 to 295 an hour. Support languages are not stated.

AWS Basic opens no technical cases either, but a one-hour target for a production outage costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend on AWS Business Support+, or USD 100 a month on Azure Standard. Cleura's fastest is 4 hours, around the clock only on Enterprise.

Getting an account

Signup is self-service for a Company or a Private account, with verification "either by entering valid credit card information, or by placing a phone call. Verifying by credit card does not incur charges." Phone verification is for company accounts only, from 08:00 to 17:00 CET. The Terms page says customers "are typically businesses, public authorities or other organisations", yet the Private account type exists.

Default quotas per project are 20 vCPU, 51,200 MiB of RAM, 1,000 GiB of volumes and 10 instances; increases go through a Service Center request with no published turnaround.

Workload B on day one: the three VMs fit (12 of 20 cores, 49,152 of 51,200 MiB), as do the volumes, and the docs mention no waiting period after verification. Kubernetes worker nodes on top would exceed the RAM quota and need a ticket. The managed database cannot be bought on day one at all. On AWS, the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12.

Three clauses in the Terms matter later. Cleura may ask for identification documents for anti-money-laundering and export checks, due "within five working days", and deactivate the services if it "cannot sufficiently verify" them. It may suspend for content that "conflicts with Supplier's code of conduct", and for non-payment 10 days after a written reminder or 30 days past due. And §9.1 says that on deactivation for any reason outside its section 4 (security and identity checks), "all Customer data will be irrevocably deleted". Read literally, a suspension for non-payment deletes your data at once; whether Cleura applies it that way is not documented.

Compliance and data protection

The Public Cloud DPA (version 250527) is accepted at signup; Compliant Cloud uses a tailored DPA. Three clauses stand out:

• On foreign orders: "When Cleura processes personal data in the EU/EEA, Cleura will not comply with any judgment of a court or tribunal or any decision of an administrative authority of a country outside the EU/EEA requiring Cleura to transfer or disclose such personal data, unless the requirement is based on an international agreement such as a mutual legal assistance treaty in force between the requesting country and the Union or a Member State". That is a contractual commitment; how it fares against any particular law is a question for lawyers.
• If Cleura engages a sub-processor outside the EU/EEA, the customer is deemed to instruct the transfer. None is listed today.
• Sub-processor changes are announced "at least thirty (30) days in advance", possibly only on Cleura's website. Breaches are notified "without undue delay", with no hour figure.

The sub-processors are Iver Sverige AB, a sister company, for infrastructure, managed services and support in every region; Interxion Sverige AB and Interxion GmbH for "remote hands" in Sto2 and Fra1; and 23 Technologies GmbH in Germany when you use Gardener. Every region is marked "Third country transfers: No". Data stays in Karlskrona, Stockholm and Frankfurt, and Cleura AI processes in Stockholm.

Who controls it

You contract with Cleura AB (556630-7806) in Karlskrona. City Network was bought by Iver in September 2020, when it had 50 employees, and became Cleura in April 2022. "Cleura is an Iver company," its site says.

EQT sold Iver Holding AB to Intermediate Capital Group plc, "a UK-based global alternative asset manager", in a deal announced on 2 July 2021, and ICG's release named its fund ICG Europe VIII as the investor. The chain from that fund down to Cleura comes from register data on hitta.se and North Data, not from a filing we read: Gilfoyle Investment Sàrl in Luxembourg, owned by ICG Europe Fund VIII Investment Sàrl, holds Iver Group AB, which holds Iver Management AB, which holds Cleura AB. ICG plc, renamed from Intermediate Capital Group in July 2025, is listed in London, is in the FTSE 100 and manages about USD 126 billion. The fund's investors are not published. We found no sale of Iver by ICG as of 16 October 2026.

Cleura is small and shrinking. From the same register data, Cleura AB's revenue fell from SEK 156.8 million in 2023 to SEK 134.7 million in 2024 and SEK 105.1 million in 2025, down 22% in the last year, with operating losses in 2024 and 2025 and 42 staff at the end of 2025, against 53 a year earlier. Iver Sverige AB, the sister company that co-runs the platform, lost SEK 325.6 million after financial items in 2025. City Network once ran clouds from "more than 20 data centers around the world"; only Sweden and Germany remain.

The platform is Cleura's own OpenStack and Gardener, run by Cleura and Iver Sverige AB. Interxion, owned by Digital Realty since March 2020, is named for remote hands in Sto2 and Fra1; whether those regions sit in Interxion buildings is not stated, and the operators of the Kna1 and Compliant Cloud sites are not named. Cleura is a Gold Member of the OpenInfra Foundation, and @cleura.com authors merged 1,549 changes into OpenStack in the two years to 16 October 2026, most of them in OpenStack-Ansible.

Leaving

Public Cloud egress costs EUR 0.02875 per GB on the way out too; Cleura's own figure for moving 10 TB is about EUR 288. Compliant Cloud egress is free. We found no exit waiver and no Data Act switching process in the Terms of Service.

The interfaces are standard (OpenStack APIs, S3 and Swift, Gardener Kubernetes), so the same tooling works on any OpenStack cloud, and disks leave as images through Glance. The lock-in sits elsewhere: projects, users and Gardener clusters live in Cleura's own REST API; an operated Managed Database means taking over its operations; and recovery-service snapshots stay inside Cleura and cannot be exported as such.

At the end, retrieving your data is your job. After you ask to delete an account, running VMs stop after 3 days and everything, "including backups", is deleted after 10. On Cleura's side, it may terminate "for convenience by giving one hundred and eighty (180) days' written notice", and may close a region or zone on "at least one hundred and twenty (120) days' notice" if "substantially equivalent core functionality remains available in other cloud regions". A Frankfurt customer could therefore be moved to Sweden on four months' notice.

What users report

We searched Hacker News, Reddit and Swedish-language sources on 16 October 2026 and found no independent report on Cleura's cloud from the last two years, so its support and real-world reliability cannot be checked against users.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Cleura suits Swedish and Nordic public bodies and regulated companies that need Swedish hosting, a three-zone region and a negotiated contract, which is Compliant Cloud, often bought through Adda, Iver, CGI or Tietoevry. Public Cloud suits developers comfortable with plain OpenStack and Terraform who want EU-only infrastructure in Sweden or Frankfurt at moderate, predictable prices and will run their own databases.

Look elsewhere if you want managed databases, caches, queues or serverless on day one; if you need redundancy across buildings in one region on a self-service account; if you need a published SLA with credits before signing; for GPU and AI training work; or if you have no operations staff and expect free technical support.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Pricing page, price JSON in EUR and in SEK, volume discount JSON
• Archived copies: EUR JSON, 15 August 2025, SEK JSON, 30 March 2025, SEK JSON, 27 August 2025, pricing page, 10 September 2024, pricing page, 21 April 2025
• Free trial and Startup Program
• Cleura Cloud Guide: "Egress fees", 14 September 2026 and "Cloud exit 2026", 28 September 2026
• Adda: contract information, Cleura volume agreement
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Terms of Service for Public Cloud, v26.03.02 and Terms page
• Data Processing Agreement for Public Cloud, v250527
• Deployment model comparison
• Support plans, archived copy of 9 May 2026, support plan PDF and customer service

Documentation

• Regions, services and sub-processors, Compliant Cloud, Managed Database, server profiles
• Feature matrices for Public Cloud and Compliant Cloud; versions
• Limitations: OpenStack, object storage, Kubernetes
• Quotas, volumes, recovery service, Marketplace, reliability pillar
• Kubernetes: background, automatic upgrades, HA control plane, launch, 3 April 2023
• AI models, REST API, create a server, create an account, delete an account, move a server between regions
• Terraform: cleura/cleura and the community OpenStack provider; documentation source

Status and incidents

• Status page and its incident pages, linked in the table above; Compliant Cloud status page (private)

Compliance

• Certifications, ISO 27001 certificate, ISO 9001 and 14001 certificate

Company and ownership

• Company page
• Iver acquires City Network, 28 September 2020; City Network becomes Cleura, 12 April 2022; new CEO, 3 November 2025
• EQT, sale of Iver, 2 July 2021; ICG, partnership with Iver, 5 July 2021
• Register data: hitta.se, Cleura AB (Dun & Bradstreet); North Data, Gilfoyle Investment Sàrl
• Wikipedia: ICG plc; Wikipedia: Interxion
• OpenInfra Foundation members; OpenDev Gerrit query

User reports

• Searched on 16 October 2026 without result: Hacker News (Algolia), Reddit site-wide, r/openstack and r/sweden, and Swedish-language web search.