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

Clever Cloud is a platform as a service from Nantes: you deploy from git or a Dockerfile, next to managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB and S3-style storage. CLEVER CLOUD SAS is private and run by its co-founder Quentin Adam, and its main region, Paris, runs on its own servers. It replaces Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner or Azure App Service plus RDS, ElastiCache and S3, not an EC2 estate: there are no virtual machines, block volumes or GPUs. Support is included for everyone, SLA penalties are paid in euros, and six public postmortems name their causes, Clever Cloud's own design faults among them. Against that, a database is one machine unless sales or support sets up a replica, failover is manual, failures in one part of Paris have repeatedly spread through the region, and our production workload costs EUR 1,166.46 a month, more than on AWS, with a single-node database.

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 Clever Cloud's documentation, legal terms, price and zone APIs, status page, postmortems, certificates, the French company register and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

The unit is an application, built from a git push into instances that each run in their own virtual machine, with add-ons linked through environment variables. Status is general availability unless noted.

Missing outright: virtual machines, bare metal, GPUs, block storage for applications, a container registry, serverless containers that scale to zero, Kafka, DNS, a CDN, a self-serve load balancer with a fixed IP, a documented DDoS or WAF product and fine-grained IAM. An "Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering" was announced in December 2025 for 2026; on 16 October 2026 it had no documentation page and no product in the API.

Four of workload B's line items have no equivalent. Applications "run on ephemeral file systems", so there is no block storage to buy; there is no public IPv4 per instance, because traffic arrives through the shared load balancers; a dedicated load balancer is quote-only; and the database has no self-serve standby. The 4 vCPU, 16 GB size does not exist either: the smallest size with 16 GB has 8 vCPU.

The managed PostgreSQL gives no superuser, extensions, server configuration or extra databases. Security patches are not applied in place: the customer runs a migration during which "your database will be read-only", and the "hostname and database name will be automatically changed". On Cellar, "Granting access to your Cellar add-on grants full access to all of your buckets", and lifecycle rules and replication are not documented.

The tooling is Clever Cloud's own and open: a REST API with an OpenAPI reference, the Clever Tools CLI (5.2, 15 October 2026) and a Terraform and OpenTofu provider it maintains (3.0.0, 15 October 2026). Price, zone and product endpoints answer without a login.

What it costs

Clever Cloud list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from its public price API, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in Paris (par, the only zone selling every add-on) at 730 hours a month; Clever Cloud's own monthly figures use 720 hours.

Application sizes run from XS (1 vCPU, 1 GB, EUR 16.22 a month) to 3XL (16 vCPU, 32 GB, EUR 648.89), and the price follows memory: M, with 4 vCPU and 4 GB, costs EUR 77.06, and XL, with 8 vCPU and 16 GB, EUR 308.22, so a vCPU-hour in XL costs twice as much. Whether vCPUs are dedicated or shared is not stated.

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, but the 1 TB of egress alone is USD 81.00 of AWS's USD 125.95: Clever Cloud wins only because that traffic is not on its bill.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD 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.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, both with a standby database in a second zone. Clever Cloud's platform total is 8% above AWS and 7% above Azure, 14% above AWS with the Kubernetes line. Compute makes the difference: EUR 924.67 for the three XL instances against about EUR 471.89 for AWS's three m7i.xlarge. The database and egress go the other way: AWS bills USD 320.13 for its HA database and USD 171.00 for the 2 TB of egress.

Three variants. A database replica, if billed as a second L_BIG (not documented), makes EUR 1,452.38 with the cheapest control plane. A control plane spread over three Paris sites costs EUR 200.75 instead of EUR 64.89. Running the applications as Kubernetes worker nodes brings the total down to EUR 562.18, since CKE capacity costs about a quarter as much per vCPU and GB; but CKE is a beta without SLA, and its volumes and load balancers "will be added to your invoice before the platform reaches general availability".

Egress and IPv4. The price API's 29 metered items cover Cellar, FS Bucket, Pulsar, Kubernetes and Heptapod, and the invoices documentation names outgoing-traffic charges only for Cellar and Pulsar. No page says in words that application egress is free, and we found no fair-use clause: treat the zero as unconfirmed (at the Cellar rate, 2 TB would be EUR 180.00). Cellar egress is EUR 0.09 per GB up to 10 TB a month, EUR 0.07 beyond. IPv4 is not sold: fixed inbound and outbound addresses come with a dedicated load balancer or the Unique IP service, both on quote.

Storage and databases. Cellar has no request fees; FS Bucket is EUR 1.65 per GB a month. MySQL costs more than PostgreSQL: L_BIG is EUR 263.61 against 221.03. Free DEV database plans run on shared clusters with no backups and no SLA.

Billing. Consumption is counted by the second, and the account is prepaid: you fund it each month from your usual consumption, adjusted afterwards. Autoscaling bounds set "the maximum price you want to incur" per application; we found no account-level spending cap or budget alert. The "Up Program" offers startups "up to €10,000 in cloud credits during the first year".

Price changes. The terms require "at least thirty (30) days" of notice by email, and the customer may terminate without penalty before a change applies. One change in the last 24 months: Keycloak as a Service rises on 1 November 2026 to EUR 47 a month including 100 active users, from a minimum of EUR 37.25, announced on 6 October 2026. Pulsar gets "updated pricing" at general availability. We found no change to application or database prices, though no dated price history exists to prove it.

Reliability

What a zone is. Customers pick a region; placement inside it is the orchestrator's. Clever Cloud went "from 3 to 5 datacenters" in Paris in late 2025, and its infrastructure page lists five: Greendata Nanterre, Telehouse TH2 and TH3, Etix Everywhere Vélizy and nLighten Aubervilliers. Its status page and the September 2026 postmortem speak of two availability zones in Paris ("The two AZ host complementary halves of several of our clusters"), while the Kubernetes documentation still says "3 datacenters". Clever Cloud's own pages do not settle how many fault domains Paris has. Other regions are single sites as far as the infrastructure page shows, and all depend on the control plane in Paris.

The database standby. A PostgreSQL or MySQL add-on is one virtual machine on one hypervisor, with no standby. Up to two read-only replicas can go "in a different availability zone (AZ) or region if requested", but only sales or support set them up, whether replication is synchronous is not stated, and failover is manual: you promote a replica and relink the applications. Clever Cloud's own Replication page says that after a data centre failure the switch "can take from a few dozen minutes to a few hours". AWS and Azure keep a synchronous standby in another zone and fail over in 60 to 120 seconds.

Some parts are spread by design: Materia KV and KMS write synchronously to three Paris data centres, database backups keep "three copies distributed across datacenters in the PAR region", and a CKE control plane with three or more replicas is "spread across the three sites". Whether an application's instances are spread across data centres by default is not documented.

Hypervisor failures. From 19 September 2024 to 16 October 2026 the status page has 52 entries for a failed, crashed or unreachable hypervisor, about half of them in Paris. One of 4 September 2026 reads "Add-ons and services hosted on this node are currently unreachable". Without automatic failover, each is downtime for the single-instance databases on that host.

The SLA. The General Terms (last updated 29 August 2024) promise "an average availability rate of the Platform of 99.9% per year": one figure for the whole platform, no per-service SLA.

• Downtime counts only for a "Critical Incident or Major Incident due to a cause attributable to Clever Cloud"; maintenance announced ten days ahead is excluded.
• The penalty is the share of minutes unavailable, times two, times the fees paid over the previous 12 months, capped at 10% of those fees, and paid in euros. A 4-hour outage in a 30-day month, on EUR 12,000 a year, gives EUR 133. At the cap the customer may terminate at once.
• It is the sole remedy: the customer documents the evidence and claims "no later than two (2) months after the end of the unavailability".
• Premium raises the target to 99.99% a year and, if the platform is not restored within its 2-hour resolution target, pays "50 times the billable amount" for the services concerned over the outage, capped at one month of consumption.
• No SLA was found for CKE, and DEV plans have none. Liability is capped at 12 months' fees, and "The Customer is solely responsible for its data backup policy and redundancy of its services".

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across zones and 99.95% for a Multi-AZ RDS instance; Azure gives 99.99% for VMs across zones and for zone-redundant PostgreSQL. Their credits go against future bills; Clever Cloud's lower target is backed by cash.

Status page and incidents. clevercloudstatus.com has history back to at least May 2022, and six postmortems since August 2024 name causes plainly.

The pattern matters more than any one entry: a power blip, a cooling failure, a memory spike and one flaky link each spread beyond the part that failed, as the postmortems themselves say.

Support

Support is "operated by Clever Cloud's own teams in France"; phone comes only with a subscribed option. Premium is expensive: on a EUR 1,000 monthly bill it costs EUR 2,290, of which 1,290 is the surcharge, and two Clever Cloud pages disagree on whether the multiplier covers all consumption or only "production environments". AWS Business Support+ comes to about USD 99 to 109 a month for workload B, and Azure Standard, with a one-hour target, costs USD 100. Premium does add a resolution target.

We found no independent report on support quality from the last 24 months, either way.

Getting an account

Signup takes an email address or a GitHub account, and "you will get free credits to give Clever Cloud a try with no payment card required", of an unstated amount. Creating an add-on needs the account's city and ZIP code. Under the General Terms (6.3), Clever Cloud "may ask the Customer to enter a valid means of payment" and identity information "At its sole discretion", and may suspend access until it has them. The terms address "professional developers and corporate entities".

No general quota page exists. Documented limits are 40 instances per application and 16 vCPU and 32 GB per instance. Kubernetes must be switched on in Labs, with an unpublished default quota raised through sales or support.

Workload B on day one: the applications and the PostgreSQL add-on can be created as far as the documents show; a database replica or a fixed IP needs a request. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12.

Clever Cloud may suspend on a violation "or reasonable suspicion of violation", with notice by email and a chance to "present his observations", and "without notice" when payment is more than 30 days late. It may end a contract with two months' notice. We found no first-hand report of signup checks or suspensions.

Compliance and data protection

The Security page lists "Recognized certifications: ISO 27001:2022, HDS, SecNumCloud" as if all three were held, while the same page says Clever Cloud "is in the process of obtaining SecNumCloud certification".

On 17 April 2026 the European Commission awarded one of four contracts in its sovereign cloud tender (up to EUR 180 million over six years for all four) to "A Luxembourgish-French partnership led by Post Telecom with OVHCloud and CleverCloud", rated SEAL-3, as were STACKIT and Scaleway.

The Data Processing Agreement uses the EU standard contractual clauses wording: sub-processors come "from an agreed list", with changes notified "at least 30 (thirty) days in advance", and transfers outside the EU need documented instructions or a legal requirement. The sub-processor list (version 1.6, 1 September 2026) names the data centre operator for every region, and corrected the Oracle region from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates. Outside the infrastructure, the US-located sub-processors are Twilio (phone support) and Pipedrive (CRM). You choose the zone per application and add-on; whether database backups from regions outside Paris also go to Paris was not established.

Who controls it

CLEVER CLOUD SAS (SIREN 524 172 699), created on 2 August 2010, has its head office in Nantes; its President is Quentin Adam. The register puts its staff at 50 to 99 in 2024 and shows one year of accounts, 2022: revenue of EUR 3,694,331 and a net result of EUR 831,977.

No shareholder register is public for a French SAS. The outside investors on record are Kima Ventures, The Family and angels, in small minority rounds from 2011 to 2019, and no non-European parent or significant shareholder appears. Founder control is likely, but it is our inference. A "Final Sovereignty Clause", announced in June 2026 for "certain contracts covering critical services", would give "A trusted European public entity designated in advance" "the rights needed" to keep a service running after "a change of ownership, an acquisition by a non-European player or a major regulatory shift". We did not read the clause itself.

Whose infrastructure each region runs on:

The control plane for every region runs in Paris. The software is Clever Cloud's own or open source: its orchestrator, the Sōzu load balancer, Apache Pulsar, Ceph and FoundationDB; we found no hyperscaler technology in it. Clever Cloud says it "falls exclusively under French and European law"; Oracle, which runs the Middle East region, is a US company.

Leaving

The General Terms (12.2) let a departing customer "obtain an exemption from outgoing traffic fees by making a request to Clever Cloud Support at least 30 calendar days before the termination of the Contract". Without it, 10 TB out of Cellar costs EUR 900. Help to get a copy "in an open format" may be charged, and all data "may be permanently deleted" when the contract ends. If Clever Cloud ends the contract, other than for non-payment or unlawful content, you get a free copy within 30 days.

Code leaves easily: git is the deploy mechanism, and a Dockerfile builds anywhere. Databases are standard engines with downloadable backups, and Cellar speaks S3. No managed export or outbound replication is documented, so moving a live database means a dump and restore with downtime, or replication you build yourself.

The work is in the configuration. Build and run settings live in CC_* environment variables, build hooks and a clevercloud/ folder, none of it a Procfile, buildpack or container standard, and add-ons reach applications through injected variables. Network Groups, Materia, Clever KMS and the Terraform resources are Clever Cloud's own, though Materia KV speaks the Redis protocol and KMS a Vault-compatible API. Clever Cloud calls CKE "vanilla" Kubernetes; its node groups and operator are its own, and we found no CNCF conformance listing.

What users report

Independent first-hand reports from the last 24 months are very few: a Reddit thread asking for production feedback on Clever Cloud (r/nextjs, December 2025) got no answer about it, and an Elixir Forum thread notes "very little information about them". The one production account we found (r/Startups_EU, August 2026) calls the platform "very stable, never opened a ticket in a year" but says enterprise customers asking for "hyperscale-style backups and automatic failovers" run into limits. Clever Cloud's documentation confirms the limits; the status record above qualifies "very stable".

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Clever Cloud suits teams running web applications and APIs in mainstream runtimes who want Heroku-style deploys with managed PostgreSQL, Redis and S3 under a French contract and French-speaking support; French health-data projects that need HDS; European public bodies buying through the Commission contract; and teams that would otherwise pay a hyperscaler for support.

Look elsewhere if you need automatic database failover or zone-level guarantees; if you need virtual machines, GPUs, block volumes or Kafka; if your workload is compute-heavy and the budget is tight; if you need SecNumCloud on Clever Cloud's own platform today rather than through Cloud Temple's zone; or if you need a fixed IP or a dedicated load balancer without talking to sales.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Public price API, zone par, add-on providers API and instances API
• Pricing
• Clever Cloud Premium and Clever Cloud vs Clever Cloud Premium
• Health (HDS)
• Cloud programs
• "Keycloak as a Service: pricing changes from 1 November 2026", 6 October 2026
• 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

• General Terms and Conditions of Use, updated 29 August 2024
• Premium Services Policy, 22 February 2022
• Data Processing Agreement
• Sub-processors, version 1.6, 1 September 2026 and version 1.5

Documentation

• Zones API
• Developer documentation and its index: Applications, Scaling, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Cellar, storage, Kubernetes, KMS, load balancers, Unique IP, environment variables, database migration, invoices, find help and FAQ
• Infrastructure, Replication and Technologies
• "What's new on Clever Cloud, Q4 2025", 5 December 2025
• "CKE in public beta", 27 April 2026
• Terraform provider and Clever Tools

Status and incidents

• Status page and incident history
• Postmortems, among them 2 August 2024; the others are dated 3 March 2025, 9 October 2025, 19 March 2026, 27 August 2026 and 22 September 2026
• DDoS on Paris infrastructure, 15 October 2026

Compliance

• Security and Sovereign cloud
• ISO 27001 certificate FR086307 and HDS certificate FR094504-1
• ANSSI catalogue, October 2026 and ANSSI, SecNumCloud providers in qualification
• European Commission, sovereign cloud tender, 17 April 2026 and Clever Cloud's announcement

Company and ownership

• French company register
• "VivaTech 2026: Clever AI, OpenVisio and the Final Sovereignty Clause", 16 June 2026
• FrenchWeb, "Le Nantais Clever Cloud lève des fonds auprès de Kima Ventures"

User reports

• r/Startups_EU, "Looking for PaaS/cloud recommendations", August 2026
• r/nextjs, "Looking for production feedback on Clever Cloud", December 2025
• Elixir Forum, "Clever Cloud: anyone have any experience with them?", last post February 2025