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

Elastx is a Stockholm cloud provider founded in 2012, with about 35 staff and SEK 67.8 million of revenue in 2025; Sobro, the investment company Ragnar Söderberg founded, owns 53% of it. It runs its own OpenStack platform in three data centres in the Stockholm area, keeps data in Sweden, includes 24x7 support with a 15-minute response for urgent cases in every price, and pays SLA credits of up to 100% when you spread a workload over its zones. It is also the most expensive provider in this series that sells every part of our production workload: SEK 20,678 (EUR 1,850.13) a month, 171% of the AWS price. An account starts as a request for a test account, Kubernetes clusters are ordered by ticket, and the documentation names OpenStack Yoga, a 2022 release the OpenStack project now marks unmaintained.

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 Elastx's documentation, legal terms, price list and status page, its owner's statements, company register data and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads. Elastx prices only in Swedish kronor; EUR figures use the ECB reference rate of 15 October 2026, 1 EUR = 11.1765 SEK.

At a glance

What you can build

Status is general availability unless noted, following Elastx's own product phases.

Missing outright: file storage, DNS, a container registry, functions, queues, MongoDB, Kafka, OpenSearch, a pay-per-token model API, and compute anywhere but Stockholm.

The database service is Severalnines CCX under Elastx's name: its documentation is written for "CCX", and Severalnines, of Kalmar, is the listed platform partner. The Kubernetes 1.34 changelog lists a known issue: "Snapshots are not working".

Tooling. Elastx has no API or Terraform provider of its own for infrastructure: you use the upstream OpenStack APIs, the Horizon dashboard and the openstack CLI. The Terraform provider is the community OpenStack one, whose latest release, 3.4.0, came out on 11 November 2025; Severalnines' provider covers databases but cannot yet create users or databases. Elastx's own Cloud Platform API is in beta and its Cloud Console in technical preview. Since 30 March 2026 automation must use application credentials or EC2 credentials.

The OpenStack version. The product page and the documentation both say Yoga. Yoga was released on 30 March 2022 and its upstream status is "Unmaintained"; the current release is 2026.2 Hibiscus, of 30 September 2026. Elastx says it upgrades the platform "normally two times per year", but no upgrade past Yoga is documented, and whether it backports security fixes is not stated. One visible effect: a fix for a "known bug with sigv4-streaming and chunked uploads" in the S3 API is merged upstream, but "we do not yet have it implemented". The same page asks you to set the S3 region to "us-east-1" and to segment uploads over 5 GiB.

What it costs

Elastx list prices in SEK, VAT excluded, from its product pages and its price list ("Date of version: 2026-07-01"), in Stockholm at Elastx's 730-hour month. Where Elastx's own sources disagree, the totals use the newest dated one.

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 Elastx is about 39% above AWS, with 24x7 support that the AWS figure lacks. The router alone is 28% of the bill; shared with other workloads in the project, it drops out and the total is SEK 1,247 (EUR 111.57).

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 985.89 to 1,082.61 for workload B and Azure EUR 1,017.63 to 1,091.88, so Elastx costs 171% of AWS on its general-purpose instances and about 1.9 times its burstable ones. Kubernetes is the biggest line, 38% of the total, against USD 73 a month for an EKS control plane: Elastx runs the control plane on your own VMs and adds SEK 4,900 (EUR 438.42) for the managed service, with its SLA and 24x7 monitoring. It also needs at least three worker nodes, SEK 2,502 (EUR 223.86) more, which workload B leaves out, as everywhere in this series.

Variants: Intel v1 VMs make it SEK 21,284 (EUR 1,904.35). A non-managed cluster saves the fee, SEK 15,778 (EUR 1,411.71), but comes with office-hours support, no monitoring and no place in the availability SLA. No dedicated flavour is near 4 vCPU and 16 GB; the nearest, d2-c8-m120-d1.6k with 8 vCPU and 120 GB of RAM, makes it SEK 41,558 (EUR 3,718.34).

Two assumptions sit in the total: database storage is billed on each node, as the scaling guide implies, and the Kubernetes API's load balancer needs no floating IP of its own (if it does, add SEK 58). Not included: database backups, billed per GB in Swift, SSL termination (SEK 146, EUR 13.06) and inbound traffic.

Egress and IPv4. The price list's note on traffic reads "Both ingress and egress, No cost for traffic internally or between AZ". A terabyte out costs SEK 500 (EUR 44.74), below AWS's EUR 80.30 and Azure's EUR 77.62, but those two give 100 GB a month free and do not bill inbound traffic. The Swift page lists its own "Transferred data per 1 GB" at SEK 0.55, and which rate applies to traffic served from Swift is not stated. A public IPv4 address costs SEK 58 (EUR 5.19) a month, against USD 3.65 on AWS and Azure.

Billing. Compute and databases are billed by the hour and invoiced monthly with 30 days to pay, or prepaid by card; late payment costs 2.0% a month. The services have no minimum term; the agreement runs until terminated with 30 days' notice. Commitment and volume discounts exist at unpublished rates. There is no free tier, and we found no spending limit or budget alert. The price includes 24x7 support, DDoS protection and encryption of storage and of traffic between zones.

GPUs, per GPU-hour, every flavour marked "Contact support to get access":

Azure sells the RTX PRO 6000 in Frankfurt at USD 7.15 an hour. Elastx has no H100, H200 or B200, and no spot option.

Price changes. Three rises in 13 months, each announced three months ahead:

For July Elastx cited hardware costs that, it says, rose 150 to 250% in six months, and called it "the first time we have increased the prices on most of these services". Network items (load balancer, IPv4, router, traffic) were in neither broad rise. The d3 flavour now costs SEK 14,795, 37.6% more than before June 2025. The Terms let Elastx change them "at any time", effective 30 days after publication, and name no separate notice period for prices.

Reliability

What a zone is. Each zone is "a separate data center", with "20km max distance between AZ", a "low delay fiber ring, 0.5ms round trip" between them, and sites "Tier 3 and staffed 24x7"; the operators are not named. Swift keeps "three copies, one in each AZ", and Kubernetes puts a control plane node and a worker in each zone. Block storage is per zone, with no cross-zone volume type and no live migration, so surviving the loss of a zone means running copies in two or three: Kubernetes and the DBaaS do that for you, plain VMs do not.

The database standby. PostgreSQL runs as a primary with one or two read-only replicas and automatic failover, and "Nodes are always in different AZs when possible": another data centre is the intent, not a guarantee. Whether replication is synchronous is not stated for PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB (SQL Server is "Asynchronous-commit Mode"), and no failover time is given. AWS states a synchronous standby in another zone with failover typically in 60 to 120 seconds.

The SLA (Availability SLA, version of 26 November 2025):

• The steps favour the customer: across zones, a month below 99.00% earns 100%, where AWS's multi-zone EC2 SLA reaches 100% only below 95.0%. The OpenStack API is covered, which some providers leave out.
• Credits come off the next invoice; whether the percentage applies to the affected service or the whole invoice is not stated.
• You claim by email "no later than 1 month after the month that the claim is referring to". If the cause turns out to be yours, "Elastx has the right to charge for hours spent investigating". AWS allows until the end of the second billing cycle, Azure 60 days.
• Down means "unreachable via external connection or if storage volumes perform zero IO with IO in queue"; degraded performance does not count. Force majeure includes "errors in another operator's network, denial of service attacks".
• Non-managed Kubernetes is not in the SLA. The local boot disk is "None. Single point of failure", and "Elastx does not take backup of customer data."
• Liability is capped at "the amount paid by you for the Services for the month prior to the occurrence", and only for "our sole and exclusive gross negligence".

Status page and incidents. status.elastx.se has history back to at least September 2022 and names the zones each incident touched. It publishes no postmortems; Elastx sends an incident report "to affected customers on request". The incidents of the last 24 months worth knowing:

The three zone-level events stayed in their zone. What failed everywhere at once was shared: the network, object storage, the identity provider. The zones are separate for power and hardware, not for the layers above them. Elastx's v2 block storage runs on Lightbits software, so the unnamed supplier in STO1 was probably Lightbits; that is our inference.

Support

One level, in the price: "24x7 support is included in all our services". From the Support SLA (version of 1 October 2024):

Requests go through a support portal (Zendesk) or email; phone is not listed. The targets are for response, not resolution, and a missed one earns no credit. Monitoring your environment is a separate service at SEK 14,900 (EUR 1,333.15) a month. The Support SLA names no language; the documentation is in English, the DPA and contract arbitration in Swedish. Elastx says all its staff are Swedish citizens with annual background checks.

A 15-minute target on AWS means Enterprise Support, from USD 5,000 a month; Business Support+ (30 minutes for a business-critical system) costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend, and Azure Standard (one hour) USD 100 a month.

Getting an account

"Sign up" leads to "To request a test account, kindly fill out this form", and the pricing page ends with "Our sales team is here to help!". Access to the Cloud Console needs "a user account in the IdP, contact our support". Who may sign up is not stated: we found no business-only clause, identity check, deposit or card requirement, and no published approval time. The customers Elastx describes are companies and public bodies.

Workload B once the account exists: the three VMs (12 vCPUs) just fit the default quota of 20 vCPUs and 50 GiB of RAM per project, set "upon ordering" and changed later through support, and a datastore starts "Normally within 10 minutes". Kubernetes does not: "Ordering and scaling of clusters is currently a manual process", and "a cluster is typically delivered within a business day". So VMs and database on the day the account opens, Kubernetes a business day later, and the account itself after a request with no stated turnaround. AWS's default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit.

The contract is ongoing with 30 days' notice, under Swedish law, with disputes settled by expedited arbitration at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, in Swedish. Elastx may terminate or suspend "without notice" over an unpaid invoice, and may suspend an account whose use "endangers our servers, network or other infrastructure ... even where your use is otherwise lawful".

Compliance and data protection

Elastx says it falls under Sweden's NIS2 law (Cybersäkerhetslagen 2025:1506) as a cloud, data centre and CDN provider supervised by PTS, and that "we can where needed enter into a säkerhetsskyddsavtal" (a security protection agreement), which "is notified to Säkerhetspolisen", the Security Service.

Elastx's self-assessment against the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework gives "Sovereignty Score of 87% and SEAL 3", held back by suppliers outside the EU; an outside assessment by european.cloud, "based on public information and, for some questions, educated guessing", rates it SEAL 1 at 71.2%. Elastx was not among the four winners of the European Commission's sovereign cloud tender in April 2026; whether it bid is not known.

The Data Processing Agreement follows GDPR Article 28, is "available in Swedish" and is sent on request, with breaches notified "within 24 hours of becoming aware"; we did not read it. On sub-processors Elastx writes "No, not for your data on the platform", only for invoicing and dispatch. No list is published, and whether Zendesk (the support portal) and Status.io (the status page) are on it is not known. Data stays in Sweden: "we store data within Sweden".

Who controls it

Sobro's portfolio page gives its share as "Ägarandel 53%" (ownership share 53%), held since 2020. Sobro was founded "2007 av Ragnar Söderberg" (in 2007 by Ragnar Söderberg) and invests "vårt eget kapital" (our own capital). Register data from Dun & Bradstreet names Sobro i Klara AB as the direct parent and Southrock AB as the ultimate parent of a group of 80 companies; aggregators name Ragnar Söderberg as Southrock's beneficial owner, which we could not read at a register. The founders, Joakim Öhman (now CEO) and Henrik Grankvist, "remain significant owners" according to Sobro's 2020 announcement; who holds the other 47% today is not published. We found no non-European parent or shareholder. You contract with Elastx AB under Swedish law.

Whose infrastructure. The platform is Elastx's own OpenStack on its own network, AS48579. The buildings are not. In January 2020 Elastx said it would run its public cloud "hos Interxion i Stockholm" (at Interxion in Stockholm), and Interxion became part of the US group Digital Realty in March 2020. Whether all three current zones are Interxion sites, and who runs the rock shelter in Västra Götaland, Elastx does not say. Its licensed software comes from Severalnines in Sweden (databases), Lightbits Labs, whose press releases are datelined San Jose, California (block storage), and Virtuozzo (the PaaS being retired). Elastx states that "As a Swedish company with no corporate ties outside Sweden, we are not subject to third-country legislation such as the US CLOUD Act and FISA"; that is Elastx's claim, not our finding.

Leaving

Data out costs SEK 0.5 per GB like any traffic: 10 TB is SEK 5,000 (EUR 447.37). We found no free exit allowance or Data Act switching waiver in the Terms; Elastx says it has "no mandatory lock-in periods, in line with the EU Data Act". For large volumes, a Cloud Connect private line costs SEK 5,550 (EUR 496.58) a month plus SEK 6,800 (EUR 608.42) once.

Most of the platform is portable because it is plain OpenStack: Terraform written for any OpenStack cloud carries over with flavour and network names changed. Kubernetes is CNCF-certified and vanilla, and the databases support pg_dump and mysqldump. The lock-in points: Barbican secrets in Elastx's HSMs, a DBaaS without superuser access, and clusters that Elastx changes rather than your code.

When the agreement ends, "you are responsible for removing your data from our servers", and Elastx has "no obligation to provide data to you after the expiration of the terminated agreement". A service at end of life gets at least three months' notice, twelve for "our platform service". The Virtuozzo PaaS got 18 months: deprecated on 16 June 2025, it ends on 31 December 2026, and its product page does not say so.

What users report

We found no independent user reports about Elastx: Hacker News has two stories and two comments that name it at all, and Reddit, Swedish forums, migration write-ups and the press gave no experience report or outage account, so no theme met our evidence bar.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Elastx suits Swedish companies and public bodies, health care and software suppliers to municipalities in particular, that need data kept in Sweden by a Swedish-owned provider with ISO 27001, NIS2 coverage and a security protection agreement on offer, want 24x7 support with a 15-minute target without buying a plan, and will spread workloads over three data centres to earn the 99.99% SLA. Standard OpenStack and vanilla Kubernetes keep the exit open.

Look elsewhere if price matters: our production workload costs 171% of AWS. Also if you want to sign up and deploy the same day, or create Kubernetes clusters from code; if you need a region near Frankfurt or outside Sweden, H100-class GPUs, serverless, queues, DNS or a registry; if you must know the database's replication mode and failover time before you sign; or if you run on Elastx's Virtuozzo PaaS.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Price list, ecp-cost-estimation.xlsx, version 2026-07-01
• Pricing, OpenStack IaaS, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, GPU, Swift
• OpenStack IaaS announcements, with the price changes
• ECB reference rates, 15 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

• Terms of Service, version 2026-02-20
• Availability SLA, version 2025-11-26
• Support SLA, version 2024-10-01
• Acceptable Use Policy, version 2026-09-28

Documentation

• OpenStack overview and network
• Swift S3 compatibility
• Kubernetes overview, cluster configuration, upgrades, 1.34 changelog
• DBaaS overview, FAQ, scale a datastore, upgrade lifecycle
• Cloud Console introduction, Virtuozzo PaaS announcements
• OpenStack releases, community OpenStack Terraform provider, CNCF landscape entry

Status and incidents

• Status page and history
• Incidents of 26 September 2025 and 28 November 2025

Compliance

• Trust Center
• Intertek certificates: ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018
• european.cloud provider profile
• European Commission, sovereign cloud tender, 17 April 2026

Company and ownership

• Sobro portfolio entry for Elastx, About Sobro, Sobro press release, 26 June 2020
• hitta.se company data (Dun & Bradstreet)
• About Elastx, services overview
• Elastx press release on Interxion, 29 January 2020 and Digital Realty on completing the Interxion combination, 13 March 2020
• RIPEstat, AS48579
• Lightbits press release, 18 May 2026 and Severalnines partner page

User reports

• Hacker News comment search for Elastx