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

Exoscale is the public cloud of Akenes SA, a Lausanne company founded in 2011. The Austrian telecom group A1 bought a majority in 2017 and owns all of it today; A1's controlling shareholder is América Móvil of Mexico. It sells managed Kubernetes with an SLA-backed control plane, PostgreSQL and seven other managed engines on one price list for eight zones, under a Swiss contract that keeps data in the country you choose. Our production workload costs EUR 908.88 a month there, 84% of the AWS price, and we found no list price increase since October 2024. The weak points are the zones and the catalogue. Each zone is one facility in one city, so the database standby shares a facility with the primary, and the control plane is shared: on 1 September 2026 the API and portal failed in all eight zones for nearly seven hours. There is no application load balancer, routed VPC, serverless product or queue other than Kafka.

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 Exoscale's documentation, terms, price data and status page, the Swiss commercial register, A1's annual report 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 general availability unless noted: listed on the pricing page with a price and documented without a beta label on 15 October 2026.

Missing outright: bare metal, a routed VPC with subnets and a NAT gateway, an application load balancer, file storage, MongoDB, a container registry, functions, serverless containers, queues other than Kafka, a WAF, a secrets manager, a log service and a managed backup service. We found no DDoS protection product or documented network-level mitigation, and the database SLA excludes denial-of-service attacks.

The parts that exist have gaps. Object Storage has versioning, Object Lock and cross-zone replication, but no object tagging, lifecycle management, access logging, event notifications or website hosting, and bucket policies are written in CEL rather than AWS's policy language. Private Networks are "a classic layer 2 segment", where "Security group rules do not apply to traffic inside private networks" and "No encryption is performed".

The platform is Exoscale's own, not OpenStack, with a published OpenAPI 3.0 spec, the open-source exo CLI, SDKs for Go, Python and Java, and a Terraform provider maintained by Exoscale (0.75.0, published 12 October 2026, still before 1.0). Every documentation page is also served as Markdown, and each product has its own limits and SLA pages with a last-updated date.

What it costs

Exoscale list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from the public price API that its pricing page loads, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, at 730 hours a month. The rate is the same in every zone; we priced Frankfurt (DE-FRA-1).

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; on AWS the 1 TB of egress alone is USD 81.00 of a USD 125.95 bill. The allowance is counted per hour, so the zero assumes traffic spread across the month; at worst the line is EUR 18.63.

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.

With the free SKS Starter control plane (no SLA) the total is EUR 868.73. AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, so Exoscale is 84% of AWS and 83% of Azure with SKS Pro, and 80% of both with Starter. The saving is in what Exoscale includes: on AWS, egress, IPv4 and the load balancer's own charges come to USD 228.61, and EKS costs EUR 65.13. The database goes the other way: there is no HA plan with 2 vCPU and 8 GB, so the nearest larger one costs EUR 384.20, 42% of the bill, against USD 320.13 with storage on AWS. Of the European providers in this series that sell every part of workload B, IONOS, UpCloud and Scaleway cost less, from EUR 436.79 to 582.07.

Three assumptions sit in the total. The 2 TB of egress is taken as inside the pooled allowance; billed in full it would add EUR 37.25. The load balancer targets Instance Pools only, so the three VMs run as one pool, at no charge. And there is no dedicated-vCPU version to price: dedication is sold only as whole hosts at an unpublished price. Worker nodes are not included, as everywhere in this series.

Egress and IPv4. Every instance comes with a public IPv4 and an IPv6 address at no charge; an extra Elastic IP costs EUR 10.14 a month, where AWS and Azure charge USD 0.005 an hour for every IPv4 address. Unused allowance "is reported on other running instances of the same organization". Beyond it, egress costs about EUR 21.47 per TB, against EUR 80.30 on AWS and EUR 77.62 on Azure beyond their free 100 GB.

Billing. The price API returns the same number in EUR, CHF and USD, and your currency follows "your initial legal residence", so at the ECB rates of 15 October a USD bill is about 11% cheaper and a CHF bill about 7% dearer than the same figure in euros. There is no monthly cap or sustained-use discount, and a stopped instance still pays for its disk. On a pre-paid account, at zero credit "your machines will be stopped and your account will be suspended", while volumes keep accruing charges; we found no budget alert for post-paid accounts. Volume discounts need a 12-month commitment at unpublished rates, and there are no spot or reserved instances and no free tier.

GPUs, per GPU-hour on the one-GPU size: RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB EUR 2.15 (Frankfurt, Zagreb, Zurich), A40 EUR 1.05 (Frankfurt), A30 EUR 1.23 (Geneva), RTX A5000 EUR 1.34, RTX 3080 Ti EUR 0.92 and V100 EUR 1.38 (Vienna). B300 is priced on request; H100, H200, B200, L40S and L4 are not offered. In Frankfurt AWS charges EUR 5.10 for an RTX PRO 6000 and EUR 2.08 for an L40S, about twice Exoscale's A40. Every new organisation has a GPU quota of 0, raised by support ticket after "a manual screening process", with "priority to established businesses", and quotas "do not reserve GPU capacity".

Price changes. We found no increase to an existing list price between October 2024 and October 2026. Support plans fell on 1 July 2025 (Starter from EUR 100 to 50 a month, the Enterprise minimum from EUR 2,500 to 1,500). Two posts announce 30% off the A40, from 1 February and 1 June 2026; the second takes the Small size from EUR 1.4933 to 1.0453 an hour, and whether these were two cuts or one delayed cut is not clear. The Terms allow increases "upon a forty-five (45) day prior written notice".

Reliability

What a zone is. On Exoscale a zone is one data centre facility in one city ("each facility can be comprised of several rooms or buildings"), and instances, buckets, private networks, load balancers and Elastic IPs each live in one zone. Inside a zone, an anti-affinity group places up to 8 instances "on different physical hypervisors"; surviving the loss of a building means a second city, or Vienna's second facility.

The database standby. A Business plan is a primary and one standby, Premium a primary and two, and "all data remains inside the zone-country you selected". Since a zone is one facility, the standby sits in the same facility as the primary; whether on another host or rack is not stated. Premium uses "synchronous replication"; the mode for Business is not stated, and no failover time is published. AWS and Azure put the standby in another zone and state 60 to 120 seconds for failover.

The SLAs:

• Downtime counts only in periods of "five or more consecutive minutes".
• You claim by email "within thirty (30) business days", with the times of the unavailability, so your own monitoring makes the case. Credits "can be used only towards future billing charges".
• Total liability is capped at what the client paid for that service in the preceding twelve months; loss of data and lost profits are excluded.

The first credit step is 50%, where AWS and Azure start at 10%, and 99.99% for an HA database beats RDS Multi-AZ at 99.95%, with the standby in the same facility. But AWS and Azure also promise 99.99% for VMs spread across zones, which Exoscale cannot offer inside one city. AWS gives until the end of the second billing cycle to claim, Azure 60 days.

Status page and incidents. The incident history on exoscalestatus.com, read back to July 2024, has 350 entries, about 146 of them unplanned incidents by title (our count). Some carry a written post-mortem that names the cause.

Every incident that crossed zones was a control-plane failure (Compute API latency and timeouts also hit all zones on 20 August 2026, for 1 hour 38 minutes), and the November 2025 outage stayed in Zurich, after which Exoscale audited the power on every rack in every zone. A multi-zone design here protects running workloads, not your ability to change them.

Support

The targets are for "the initial response time only", but a response more than 61 seconds late is a breach worth 25% of that month's support fee, capped at the fee. The free plan has no target and no weekend cover, yet a new account asks for its HA database plan, GPU quota and larger instance sizes through it. AWS Basic opens no technical cases and Azure Basic has no response targets, so Built-In at least reaches engineers. A one-hour target costs EUR 500 on Exoscale, on weekdays only; Azure Standard gives one hour for USD 100, and AWS Business Support+ costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend.

Getting an account

You verify an email address, create an Organization, then "Register your credit card, or add some credits in advance"; cards must support 3D Secure. The documents describe no identity document or selfie check; wire-transfer billing needs "a proved line of credit" and manual vetting.

A new organisation gets 20 instances, 5 Elastic IPs, 3 Kubernetes clusters, 10 database services and 20 buckets; the largest instance sizes and the Business and Premium database plans are enabled by support. Workload B on day one: everything fits except the Business-8 PostgreSQL, which waits for support, best effort in office hours on the free plan. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

Two clauses matter later. Post-paid amounts unpaid 30 days after the due date let Exoscale "stop providing the Services". And it may "immediately terminate and/or suspend", upon written notice, if the client broke a law or the use clause, or if Exoscale "receives any direction, notification or instruction from any Governmental Authority (or any independent Internet content monitoring entity)".

Compliance and data protection

Every certificate and audit report sits in the Compliance Center in the customer portal, released "once a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) has been accepted electronically". We found none in public, so none was seen.

The Data Processing Addendum, "applicable starting May 5th, 2025", is with Akenes SA under the GDPR and the Swiss FADP. It lists one sub-processor, Aiven Oy of Helsinki, for orchestrating the managed databases, with 30 days' notice of changes. Two third parties that Exoscale's own pages name are not on that list: "Our partner DNSimple" for DNS, and "Ducksify's cost-effective Akamai-powered CDN". Whether they process personal data we could not establish.

On data location the Terms are specific: Exoscale "shall store Client Data exclusively within the country selected by Client ... including for backups, snapshots, and disaster recovery copies", unless the client instructs otherwise or law or a court order requires it. API keys and security groups are global. New volumes are encrypted by default, and KMS has offered customer-managed keys since 2 July 2026. The Terms allow disclosure when "compelled to do so by law ... or any Governmental Authority", with notice "to the extent legally permitted".

Who controls it

The operating company is Akenes SA in Lausanne, registered in the canton of Vaud; "Exoscale is a registered trademark of Akenes SA". A group release of 30 August 2017 announced that A1 Digital International had acquired a majority, buying out Swisscom Ventures and Anaroll Holding, and Telekom Austria AG's annual report lists "Akenes S.A., Lausanne" as 100% owned at 31 December 2025.

Telekom Austria AG (A1 Group) is listed in Vienna. At 31 December 2025 América Móvil B.V. (Netherlands), "a wholly owned subsidiary of América Móvil, S.A.B. de C.V.", held 60.94%, the Republic of Austria through ÖBAG 28.42%, and the free float 10.64%. The report names América Móvil, "located in Mexico" and listed on the NYSE, as the ultimate parent. The two vote "on a concerted basis" under an agreement extended on 6 February 2023 for ten years: América Móvil nominates 8 of 10 shareholder representatives on the Supervisory Board and the CEO, and ÖBAG, while it holds 25% plus one share, can veto among other things "the relocation of the company's registered office and material business functions". We report the chain; we draw no conclusion on which laws reach the operating company.

You contract with Akenes SA under Swiss law and the courts of Lausanne. Four zones run in A1's data centres (both Vienna sites, Sofia, Zagreb) and four in Equinix facilities (Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Zurich). Three services lean on others: the database control plane is Aiven's technology, the CDN is Ducksify's on Akamai, and DNS runs with DNSimple. Exoscale's revenue and headcount are not published.

Leaving

Exoscale says switching-related egress is "waived or refunded upon request", and the Terms of 2 July 2026 follow the EU Data Act switching process: a written notice, receipt confirmed within 3 working days, a transition that can be extended to seven months, then a 30-day period to retrieve data. Exoscale's own documents disagree on one point: the Terms return data "upon charge of a recovery service fee" and the pricing page lists it at EUR 0.12 "max per GB", while the billing documentation says Exoscale does not charge for "support for data portability or reversibility". Get the answer in writing.

Instance snapshots download as QCOW2, buckets speak S3, SKS is upstream Kubernetes, and the databases export with standard tools. Block Storage snapshots "cannot be exported or downloaded", so volume data is copied out from inside an instance. The CEL bucket and IAM policies, the Kubernetes load balancer and volume integrations and the Terraform code are Exoscale's own and have to be rebuilt elsewhere. Retirements came with weeks of notice: Managed Redis gave way to Valkey on 30 April 2025, about 8 weeks after the announcement.

What users report

The independent record is thin: 25 Hacker News comments since October 2024 mention Exoscale, almost all in lists of EU alternatives, and two Reddit users asking for experiences found little (r/BuyFromEU, September 2026; r/informatik, September 2025). Two of the five themes below rest on one report plus an Exoscale document, and we name the voices with a commercial tie.

Support answers fast, even for small accounts. A hands-on SKS review reports a reply in "Six minutes. On a trial account." (eucloudcost.com, March 2026, later corrected with input from an Exoscale employee), and a Hacker News user praises "good customer service that doesn't hide behind 'community forums'" (42135407, November 2024). So does an Exoscale-certified consultancy (agsolutions, September 2024). The free plan still has no response target.

Teams keep some AWS services or build their own. The same consultancy kept AWS SES and SNS and missed lifecycle policies and managed backup for buckets (agsolutions); a Reddit user notes "Jedoch kein Serverless", but no serverless (r/informatik, September 2025). The catalogue confirms both.

Networking is flat. One reviewer reports private networks that are "pure Layer 2 ... No routing, no NAT, no internet gateway", where "Security groups don't apply to private network traffic", and a Kubernetes API endpoint that "is always public" (eucloudcost.com, March 2026). One report, but Exoscale's Private Network page confirms the first two.

Object Storage is solid but not the cheapest. The one first-hand account comes from a former Exoscale employee, who says so: they used it "as a customer for a long time without problems", call it "solid" and name "the slightly higher price" as the usual complaint (pb7eb4y, September 2026). That is one voice, and not an independent one. The status page lists several Object Storage error-rate incidents, so "solid" is their view.

Pre-paid works as a hard spending cap. One user values "hard spend limits via account pre-pay balances" (42135407, November 2024), and the billing documentation confirms that machines stop at zero credit.

We found no recurring complaint about signup, account closures or billing surprises; with so few reports, that is an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Exoscale suits European teams that want managed Kubernetes and PostgreSQL under a Swiss contract, with data kept by contract in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria or Croatia; regulated workloads that need C5, HDS or SOC 2 evidence and can sign an NDA to read it; and teams that value a flat price list, included IPv4 and a provider that publishes its limits and post-mortems.

Look elsewhere if you need high availability across zones inside one city, serverless, queues other than Kafka, an application load balancer or a routed VPC with NAT; if you want the cheapest compute or dedicated vCPUs by the hour; if you need H100, H200 or B200 GPUs on demand; or if control has to stay entirely with European shareholders.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Pricing page and its price API, portal.exoscale.com/api/pricing/<product>
• Volume discount and billing documentation
• Changelog: support plans, 30 June 2025, A5000 and 3080 Ti GA, RTX PRO 6000 and A40 cut, A40 cut, June 2026, archival storage
• 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 and Conditions, applicable from 2 July 2026
• Data Processing Addendum, applicable from 5 May 2025
• SLA overview, with the SLAs for Instances, SKS, DBaaS, Object Storage and Support
• Support case priority
• Data portability

Documentation

• Data Center Zones and data centres, with the Spain page
• Compute: Instances overview, Instances limits, Dedicated Hypervisors
• Kubernetes: SKS overview, SKS limits, CNCF conformance, v1.36
• Databases: DBaaS overview, DBaaS limits
• Storage: Block Storage, Object Storage limits, bucket policy
• Networking and security: Private Network, Network Load Balancer, CDN, KMS, IAM
• Accounts: Quick Start
• Tooling: OpenAPI spec, llms.txt, Terraform registry, API v1 deprecation
• Changelog: feed, ClickHouse GA, Valkey, SPF record type

Status and incidents

• Status page and incident history
• Incidents 247488, 246340, 227381, 211222, 197031, 197141

Compliance

• Compliance and compliance documentation
• ISO 27001, BSI C5, SOC 2, TISAX, CSA STAR
• Changelog: BSI C5, 29 October 2024, SOC 2 Type 2, HDS

Company and ownership

• About us
• Zefix, Akenes SA
• Telekom Austria AG, Annual Financial Report 2025
• TelecomTV, A1 Digital acquires Exoscale, 30 August 2017

User reports

• eucloudcost.com, "Exoscale SKS Review", 13 March 2026
• agsolutions, "From AWS to Exoscale", September 2024, updated January 2026 (an Exoscale-certified consultancy)
• Reddit: r/BuyFromEU thread, September 2026, comment pb7eb4y; r/informatik comments neeqka4 and nf1kmba
• Hacker News: 42135407 (November 2024)