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

STACKIT is the public cloud of the Schwarz Group, the family-owned German group behind Lidl and Kaufland, with two regions: eu01 in Germany and eu02 in Austria. It sells a broad set of managed services under a precise German contract (a legal certificate per product, SLA credits up to 100%, a clause on how you leave) and charges nothing for traffic: our production workload costs EUR 908.10 a month there, 84% of the AWS price. The weak points are as concrete. Only businesses may sign up, and only those in Germany, Austria and Switzerland can do so without going through sales; plain VMs cost more than at budget clouds; three incidents in 2025 and 2026 spread across the whole eu01 region despite its three zones; and STACKIT does not document where its database standbys sit or how long a failover takes.

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 STACKIT's documentation, terms, price API and status page, the Schwarz Group's figures and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account.

At a glance

What you can build

Status is general availability unless noted, from STACKIT's price API and product index; "eu01 only" means no eu02 price.

Object Storage has versioning, lifecycle rules, replication and Object Lock (up to 365 days), but its documentation lists no ACL writes, website hosting, bucket notifications or storage-class transitions, and a project is capped at 500 MB/s.

Missing outright: bare metal, functions, serverless containers, managed Kafka and MySQL, a queue other than RabbitMQ, a standalone DDoS protection product, GPUs newer than the H100, spot capacity (none found), and any region outside Germany and Austria. eu02 gets a subset, without GPUs, AI Model Serving, Secrets Manager or VPN.

Kubernetes. STACKIT removes a minor version on the patch day before its upstream end of life and upgrades the clusters still on it: 1.34 went on 14 October 2026, about seven weeks after its deprecation note. STACKIT calls SKE "CNCF-certified"; we did not check the CNCF list.

Tooling. The official Terraform provider, stackitcloud/stackit, reached v0.120.0 on 15 October 2026, still below 1.0, with 70 open issues; an older community provider, SchwarzIT/stackit, is still published, so check which one an example uses. Pulumi support "is in an ALPHA state". The documentation leaves out default quotas, where the database standbys sit and the default boot volume class, and disagrees with the price API on which Intel Gen3 types share their CPUs.

What it costs

STACKIT list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from its public price API (every SKU, no key needed) and price list, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in eu01 at 730 hours a month (STACKIT's own monthly figures assume 720 hours). eu02 is about 5% dearer on most items.

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.

A VM price covers vCPU and RAM only. Every VM below the largest types needs a boot volume, billed per GB plus a flat monthly fee for its performance class, which on a small VM costs more than the disk. The default class is not documented; STACKIT's CLI example uses class 1. Class 0 (120 IOPS) brings the total to EUR 41.71.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, but on AWS the 1 TB of egress is USD 81.00 of a USD 125.95 bill. Without it AWS would cost USD 44.95 (EUR 40.11), less than STACKIT. Hetzner's workload A is EUR 26.48.

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.

Dedicated-vCPU g1a.4d instances (AMD Gen1) cost less per hour than the shared Intel ones: EUR 890.73 in total.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, so STACKIT costs 84% of AWS and 83% of Azure on shared vCPUs, and 82% of AWS on dedicated ones. Against AWS's burstable t3.xlarge (EUR 985.89) it is 92%. Egress makes almost all of the gap: of the EUR 174.51 between STACKIT and AWS, EUR 152.57 is AWS's charge for the 2 TB. The database (EUR 296.86 against EUR 285.63 on AWS), the control plane (EUR 72.70 against EUR 65.13 for EKS) and block storage are dearer at STACKIT. Among the European providers in this series that sell every part of workload B, IONOS, UpCloud, Scaleway and Exoscale charge less.

Three assumptions sit in the total. PostgreSQL Flex has no 2 vCPU, 8 GB size, so we priced the nearest larger one. Whether a three-node set's storage is billed once or per node is not documented; we priced it once. And the load balancer runs on "Two Compute Engines as active-passive deployment", billed separately at a size STACKIT does not name: EUR 20.63 a month as t2i.1, the cheapest current 1 vCPU, 1 GB type, or 36.01 as t3i.1. Worker nodes are not included, as everywhere in this series.

Egress and IPv4. The price data has no traffic item, and STACKIT says it offers "free ingress and egress traffic" so as not to make switching "artificially difficult". We found no fair-use clause. AWS charges EUR 80.30 per TB and Azure EUR 77.62 beyond their free 100 GB. A public IPv4 address costs EUR 2.96 a month, against USD 3.65 on AWS and Azure.

Billing. Everything is billed per started hour, with no monthly cap and no minimum term (Object Lock aside); a stopped VM is billed until it is shelved. Invoices come monthly in arrears, in EUR, paid by invoice or card. There is no free tier or trial credit, and we could not establish whether budget alerts or a spending cap exist.

GPUs, per GPU-hour, eu01 only: L40S EUR 1.74; A100 80 GB EUR 2.66, or EUR 4.08 on the four-GPU type, which needs a ticket; H100 EUR 8.04. There is no H200, Blackwell part or L4. In Frankfurt, AWS charges EUR 2.08 for an L40S and does not sell the H100 (EUR 6.57 in Stockholm); Azure's H100 NVL there is EUR 8.10. The documentation lists only the 8-GPU H100 type; we could not confirm that the smaller H100 NVL types in the price data can be ordered.

Price changes. We found no general price change in the last 24 months, though we did not compare older price lists. The Terms let STACKIT change the price of a running service "in the event of changed market conditions or significant changes in procurement costs" on at least four weeks' notice, and no written objection within ten days counts as approval.

Reliability

What a zone is. "An availability zone (AZ) consists of one or more data centers within a region" with "independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure", and it may be "Multiple fire sections within a single data center". The compute documentation draws eu01 as three data centres with one zone each, but the Compute Engine certificate says "Several Availability Zones can be located in the same building", STACKIT names two German sites (Neckarsulm and Ellhofen), and it does not say which form each region uses. eu02 is described as one site, Ostermiething.

Metro. The eu01-m scope "automatically distributes virtual machines (VMs) and data across two or more AZs" at twice the VM price for almost every machine type. A Metro VM is restarted in another zone on failure, but "This failover process can take time", and STACKIT itself recommends single-zone placement with redundancy built at the service level. Object Storage replicates across all three zones.

The database standby. PostgreSQL Flex HA is a three-node set: "All three nodes are a full mirror of each other". STACKIT does not say where the standbys sit, whether replication is synchronous, or how long failover takes. Its certificate gives a backup RPO of 4 hours, and an RTO of 4 hours below 500 GB. AWS and Azure both document a synchronous standby in another zone and failover in 60 to 120 seconds.

The SLAs. The contract has three layers: the Terms of Use (v1.3.2), the Service Description (v1.4), whose general SLA is 99.9% a month (99.5% for non-redundant services), and a Service Certificate per product, which "shall take precedence".

• Credits are 10% of the affected service's invoice below the target, 20% below 99.0%, 50% below 98.5% and 100% below 95.0%, set against the next bill; "A payout or other reimbursement ... is excluded."
• You claim "in text form within two (2) weeks of receipt of the invoice". If STACKIT rejects the claim, "it is the Customer's responsibility to demonstrate the breach".
• Excluded: "DNS and routing problems", DoS attacks, and force majeure, which the text extends to "power outages" and "acts or omissions of Internet providers".
• Liability for ordinary negligence is capped at "EUR 25,000 per individual event of loss or damage".

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with claims until the end of the second billing cycle; Azure gives 99.99% across zones and 60 days to claim.

Status page and incidents. status.stackit.cloud keeps history back to 2019 and lists 174 entries other than maintenance from August 2024 to October 2026. Most use a template ("We have identified a fault in the STACKIT platform") and name no cause; two incidents in the last 24 months have postmortems.

Both postmortems describe one change spreading across the whole region, in June into the second region too; three zones contained neither. Many other entries concern the control plane, where STACKIT states that running workloads were not affected.

Support

The paid prices come from the price API, so read them as starting figures. Essential's targets are "best-effort basis, but are not binding"; Advanced and Ultimate aim to meet theirs 90% of the time, with credits of 25% below that and 50% below 80%, according to the price API. Support works in German and English, from a team "based in the European Union".

The free plan has phone support and a target, which AWS Basic (no technical cases) and Azure Basic (no technical response targets) do not. A one-hour target costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend on AWS Business Support+ and USD 100 a month on Azure Standard.

Getting an account

STACKIT's Terms are for "entrepreneurs within the meaning of Section 14 of the German Civil Code (BGB)" and public-law bodies, and "customers have no right to registration". "You can create a new customer account for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland yourself", with the company's VAT ID and commercial register number. Everyone else uses the sales contact form. Either way the account exists only once the "customer account application is approved". STACKIT does not say how long that takes or what it checks, and we could not establish whether a founder elsewhere, or a sole trader without a register entry, gets an account.

Default quotas, GPU quotas included, are not published; the documentation points to a Help Center ticket. So we cannot say whether workload B can be built on day one. 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.

Three clauses matter later. STACKIT may block access "temporarily or permanently" on "concrete indications" of a breach or for "another legitimate interest in blocking (e.g. default of payment by the Customer)", warning first "if possible". It may terminate any subscription "with a notice period of four (4) weeks" without giving a reason. And in a security incident it may disconnect or shut down affected systems "without prior notice or consultation".

Compliance and data protection

The C5 list leaves out MariaDB, Redis, Key Value Store, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ, KMS, DNS, Container Registry and Git.

The Data Processing Agreement (v2.4.2) keeps customer data "within the European Union or the territory of another signatory to the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA)"; anything else needs "an express agreement". All 14 sub-processors have EU addresses (nine in Germany, two in Spain, one each in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Romania); we did not check who owns each.

STACKIT says customers are "safe from data access by unauthorized third parties (e.g. US authorities under the CLOUD Act)": that is its claim, not our finding. The Terms accept the professional secrecy duties of § 203 of the German Criminal Code, which matters to doctors, lawyers and tax advisers.

Who controls it

You contract with Schwarz Digits Cloud GmbH & Co. KG of Bad Friedrichshall (Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 741347), named STACKIT GmbH & Co. KG until 2026; ownership did not change with the name. It is "Part of Schwarz Digits, the IT and digital division of the Schwarz Group", which "also includes Lidl and Kaufland", and says it "is independent of external investors". The Schwarz Group, based in Neckarsulm, is privately held and family owned according to Wikipedia, and as it is not a corporation under commercial law it publishes no consolidated balance sheet. STACKIT's Terms count D. Schwarz Beteiligungs-KG and every entity it holds a majority in as group companies; we did not check the shareholdings above it in a register. Every entity on the imprint is German, and we found no non-European parent or shareholder.

STACKIT publishes no revenue of its own; Schwarz Digits, which also runs IT for Lidl and Kaufland, reported EUR 2.2 billion for 2025. STACKIT runs on its own "7 data centers in Europe (Germany and Austria), with more under construction", and its own software, built on open source; its IaaS API replaced an "infrastructure/OpenStack API", and STACKIT does not say whether OpenStack still runs underneath.

STACKIT names the European Commission (a framework contract of "up to 180 million euros") and German and Dutch government bodies among its customers; we did not verify these.

Leaving

There is no egress fee to leave. The limit is throughput: at 500 MB/s per project, draining a 100 TB bucket takes about 2.3 days.

The Terms contain a switching clause in the style of the EU Data Act. You give two months' notice; STACKIT then makes your "Exportable Data and Digital Assets" available for download for 30 days (up to seven months if it says that is not technically feasible), and for "at least 30 calendar days" after that. The customer, "and not STACKIT, is solely responsible for uploading the data to the new provider".

Every service certificate ends with an export register: Object Storage data "Yes" over S3, PostgreSQL Flex data "Yes" as SQL, and for Compute Engine, VM configuration data and system logs "No. Company confidential STACKIT". We could not establish whether disk images can be exported.

Lock-in sits in the details: PostgreSQL Flex backups cannot be restored into the existing instance, and the IaaS API is STACKIT's own, though its OpenAPI specifications are published.

The Service Description promises 360 days' notice before discontinuing a service "or an essential functionality". Some notices were shorter: Block Storage incremental backups, announced on 22 April 2026, end on 31 October 2026, and Kubernetes minor versions go six to seven weeks after their deprecation note. Whether those count under the contract is a legal question we leave open.

What users report

We searched Hacker News from October 2023 and blogs in English and German; Reddit could not be read. Independent reports are scarce, and several themes rest on exactly two. Xebia and OPITZ CONSULTING (publisher of The Cattle Crew blog) are consultancies that sell cloud work; we did not check whether either is a STACKIT partner. The Camunda series names no affiliation.

Dearer than budget clouds, justified by sovereignty. Users report that STACKIT is "way more expensive than what you can get on Hetzner" and "very much not a discount cloud provider" (both April 2026). A Camunda team puts production at EUR 1,240 a month and writes: "Take the requirement away and I would struggle to justify either" (Camunda on STACKIT, part 6, September 2026). OPITZ CONSULTING found the entry "etwas teurer" (a bit dearer) but the costs "sehr transparent" (very transparent) (The Cattle Crew, May 2026).

Fewer examples to copy. Users report a start "etwas holpriger als bei AWS" (a little bumpier than on AWS), with fewer blog posts and answers to draw on (The Cattle Crew, May 2026), and "few Camunda-on-STACKIT examples to copy" (part 6, September 2026).

No instant signup. Users report "You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first" (41350485, August 2024), and a signup that failed twice with "No authentication process found" (47873452, April 2026; repeated in 47924357). The business-only Terms and the approval step explain the pattern.

A standard Kubernetes application runs with ordinary tools. Xebia needed "around 2.5 hours to get the application running on StackIT, without any prior knowledge" (Xebia, July 2025); OPITZ CONSULTING wrote "Die Plattform lief stabil" (the platform ran stably) (The Cattle Crew, May 2026); the Camunda platform is run by "a team of two" (part 6); and a Hacker News user calls it "Still some room to grow but a solid foundation" (47923588, April 2026). Against that, Xebia saw "26 errors in short succession" during a forced node update, though it has also seen updates without errors, and most of these reports predate the region-wide incidents of June and July 2026.

On support quality we found fewer than two independent reports.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

STACKIT suits companies and public bodies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that need EU-owned infrastructure with C5 and ISO evidence, managed Kubernetes and databases in a three-zone region, no egress charges and a contract that spells out SLAs and exit, and that are comfortable with enterprise-style onboarding and prices.

Look elsewhere if you are an individual or hobbyist; if you are a founder outside those three countries who wants to deploy the same day; if you run plain VMs and price comes first; if you need functions, Kafka, MySQL, bare metal, GPUs newer than the H100 or a region outside Germany and Austria; or if you must know how the database fails over before you sign.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Price API, all SKUs and price list, version 1.0.44
• Prices, Advanced Support and payment methods
• 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 Use v1.3.2, valid from 4 May 2026
• Service Description v1.4, valid from 4 May 2026
• Service certificates, among them Compute Engine v1.6, Compute Engine GPU v3.1, Block Storage v1.7, Object Storage v1.2, Kubernetes Engine v1.2, PostgreSQL Flex v1.1, Network Load Balancer v1.5, Application Load Balancer v1.2 and Public IPv4 v2.1
• Data processing agreement v2.4.2

Documentation

• Regions, Compute Engine regions and availability zones, machine types and IaaS API FAQ
• Object Storage supported operations and limits
• SKE basics, FAQ, lifecycle and release notes
• PostgreSQL Flex architecture and flavors and performance classes
• Support plan tiers, creating a customer account, Resource Manager limitations and release notes
• Terraform providers stackitcloud/stackit and SchwarzIT/stackit, Pulumi and API specifications

Status and incidents

• Status page and its history, browsable by month, which holds the postmortems of 17 June and 8 to 9 July 2026
• Incidents of 2 May 2025 and 12 February 2026

Compliance

• Certificates and data sovereignty
• ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, ISO 22301 certificate and BSI-IGZ-0691-2025

Company and ownership

• Imprint, STACKIT facts and public sector page
• Schwarz Group results for 2025, 11 June 2026
• Secondary: Wikipedia: Schwarz Gruppe

User reports

• Camunda on STACKIT, part 6 (24 September 2026), The Cattle Crew, OPITZ CONSULTING (5 May 2026) and Xebia, Kicking the tires of StackIT (updated 16 July 2025)
• Hacker News: 41350485, 47873452, 47923588, 47924006, 47924357, 47926300