A European startup can run a SaaS product on OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, STACKIT, Exoscale or enum instead of AWS: all six have managed Kubernetes, S3-compatible object storage and block storage, and all six contract through European companies. The choice at seed or Series A comes down to four things: which startup program you qualify for, how much platform work the provider leaves to your two or three engineers, whether the provider helps or hurts your first enterprise security review, and what you pay once the credits run out.
Hetzner is not compared here. It has no managed Kubernetes and no startup program, so a team on Hetzner runs the Kubernetes control plane itself. The Outgrowing Hetzner guide covers that case.
Everything below comes from each provider’s own pages, checked on 9 October 2026. enum is one of the six, and its limits are listed with the others.
What does a startup actually need from a cloud at seed or Series A?
- Credits that last until revenue does. The amount matters less than the duration, the eligibility rules, what the credits cover and how they are applied to invoices.
- Self-service and an API. Engineers should be able to create a cluster, a bucket and a DNS zone without a sales call, and keep it in code.
- Kubernetes, object storage and block storage on one bill. A managed database saves work if you don’t want to run Postgres yourself.
- Someone else runs the control plane and the upgrades. Without a platform team, every forced Kubernetes upgrade lands on a product engineer.
- A clean answer for security questionnaires. Your first bank or hospital customer will ask where data sits, who can be compelled to hand it over, and which certifications the provider holds.
- Costs you can predict after the credits. Node prices, request fees, egress and per-cluster fees decide what the bill looks like in month 13.
Which European clouds have a startup program, and how are they structured?
Amounts, durations and criteria below are quoted from each program’s own page. AWS Activate is included as the baseline.
| Provider | Program and tiers | Credits stated on the program page | Duration | Eligibility as stated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | Activate Founders, Activate Portfolio; invite-only AWS Credits for AI Startups | Founders: starts at $1,000, up to $5,000. Portfolio: up to $200,000. AI Startups: $200,000+ | Usually expire within 1 to 2 years, depending on the package | Pre-Series B, founded in the last 10 years, AWS account on the Paid Tier Plan. Founders: self-funded. Portfolio: Org ID from an Activate Provider (accelerator, angel or VC) |
| OVHcloud | Startup Program: Start level, Scale level | Start: €10,000. Scale: up to €100,000 | 12 months | Start: selected pre-seed and seed startups. Scale: Series A and beyond. A proof of concept or MVP is required. Vouchers cover Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud only, not Bare Metal; among GPU instances only V100, V100S and RTX5000 |
| Scaleway | Startup Program: Founders, Early Stage, Growth Stage | Founders: up to €1,000. Early: €1,500 per month (€9,000 total). Growth: €3,000 per month (€36,000 total) | Founders: one year. Early: 6 months. Growth: 12 months | Under 5 years old, under 50 employees, not yet a Scaleway customer. You start with Founders; Early requires €500 and Growth €1,500 of monthly consumption; no move from Early to Growth |
| IONOS | IONOS Cloud Startup Program: SPARK, ACCELERATE | SPARK: up to €5,000. ACCELERATE: up to €100,000 | SPARK: 12 months, then a 12-month alumni discount. ACCELERATE: up to 24 months | Registered company founded less than 5 years ago, company website, an MVP, not yet an IONOS Cloud customer; once per company. Private Cloud powered by VMware and capacity-limited resources such as Cloud GPUs are excluded |
| STACKIT | STACKIT Startup Program | No amount stated; awarded by stage and technical complexity | Not stated | HQ in the EU, under 5 years old, software-based or digital business model |
| Exoscale | No startup program found on exoscale.com | - | - | - |
| enum | enum for Startups | Up to €100,000 | 12 months, extension possible | European startup or scaleup with HQ in the EU, building a product that belongs on European infrastructure, ready to run production workloads |
Checked October 2026.
Program terms change; check each program page before you apply. For prices outside the programs: OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, STACKIT price list and calculator, Exoscale, enum.
Outside the six compared here, other European providers with managed Kubernetes run startup programs too: UpCloud (Finland) states up to €25,000 at its top tier, Cleura (Sweden) up to €20,000 for up to 18 months, and Civo (UK) $1,000 to $50,000. In the US, Google for Startups states $200,000 for seed to Series A (up to $350,000 for AI-first startups) and Microsoft for Startups up to $150,000.
Read the fine print on how credits are applied. IONOS ACCELERATE covers the first €10,000 of invoices in full and then 50% of each further invoice until the credits run out or the period ends, and IONOS states that neither the amount nor the period can be extended. Scaleway’s Early and Growth tiers are a monthly amount over a fixed number of months, and a new customer starts at Founders. OVHcloud’s Start level is a fixed €10,000. OVHcloud’s Scale level, IONOS, STACKIT and enum set the amount during review, so “up to” is a ceiling, not a typical award. Check what the credits cover: OVHcloud’s apply to Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud only, and among GPUs only to V100, V100S and RTX5000 instances; IONOS excludes Cloud GPUs and VMware private cloud.
Beyond credits: OVHcloud includes 6 hours of engineering time at Start level and up to 20 at Scale level, Scaleway adds a customer success manager on paid tiers, STACKIT offers expert coaching and CTO and CEO mentoring to selected startups, and enum’s engineers set up the first cluster with your team.
How much platform work does each provider leave to you?
This is where a two-engineer team feels the difference. From what each provider documents for its managed Kubernetes:
- Control plane. IONOS includes it. OVHcloud, Scaleway and Exoscale have a free tier without the paid tier’s SLA. STACKIT bills per cluster-hour. enum includes a highly available control plane per cluster with a 99.9% SLA for the Kubernetes API. enum publishes no SLA for worker nodes and no SLA credit terms; the contract terms come from sales.
- Upgrades. At STACKIT, OVHcloud, Scaleway, Exoscale and IONOS you trigger minor Kubernetes upgrades yourself, and most providers force one when a version reaches end of life. At enum, enum runs patch and minor upgrades node by node.
- Managed databases. OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, STACKIT and Exoscale sell managed PostgreSQL. enum has no managed database product; databases run as workloads on Kubernetes with block storage, and enum documents no volume snapshots, so backups are yours to set up.
- Getting started. On the other five you create a Kubernetes cluster yourself from the console or API today. At enum, account signup, object storage and DNS are self-service, but Kubernetes clusters are set up on request until self-service cluster creation ships in Q4 2026.
- Support. Support on working days is included in every enum account. 24/7 response for critical incidents is part of Enterprise Support, priced on request.
If no one on the team wants to own production, enum also sells DevOps as a Service: enum’s engineers run your production on enum, with platform usage billed separately from that fee.
Will a European provider pass an enterprise security review?
Two questions come up in almost every questionnaire: which certifications the provider holds, and which law can compel it to hand over data.
On certifications, the larger European providers are ahead. STACKIT names its Kubernetes Engine in the scope of its BSI C5 Type 2 attestation on its certificates page and holds a company-wide ISO 27001 certificate for its ISMS. Exoscale holds a BSI C5:2020 Type 2 attestation and ISO 27001, and stated in 2024 that all its zones and products are covered by the C5 attestation (the report itself is behind a login). IONOS received a BSI C5:2020 Type 1 attestation in May 2026 covering 33 services but does not publish which ones. OVHcloud states that it meets the C5 catalogue and sells SecNumCloud-qualified products. Scaleway holds ISO 27001:2022 and HDS for French health data.
enum holds no certification of its own today. ISO 27001 is in progress (target Q4 2026) and BSI C5 is on the roadmap for 2027; the ISO 27001 and EN 50600 certificates in Frankfurt belong to the data centre facility operator, not to enum. A data processing agreement (DPA) is part of every contract, but enum publishes no sub-processor list and offers no customer-managed keys or KMS yet. Fine-grained IAM roles and a customer audit log are planned for Q4 2026; today access is managed per organization and project with service accounts and API keys. If your first enterprise customer requires a provider certificate today, pick a provider that has one.
On jurisdiction, all six contract through European companies, but the groups differ. OVHcloud and IONOS have US subsidiaries (OVH US LLC and IONOS Cloud USA Inc.). Exoscale is a Swiss company in A1 Group, whose core shareholder is América Móvil (Mexico, listed on the NYSE). STACKIT belongs to the Schwarz Group, which also includes Lidl, and Lidl runs stores in the US; STACKIT runs its infrastructure only in Germany and Austria. AWS is a US company, and an AWS region in Frankfurt meets data residency. enum GmbH is a German company based in Cologne with no US parent and no US company in its structure.
The US CLOUD Act (18 U.S.C. § 2713) requires providers subject to US jurisdiction to disclose data in their possession, custody or control regardless of where it is stored, and for a company outside the US, whether it is subject is a fact-specific question about its contacts with the US.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Have your counsel assess your specific situation.
Which costs are predictable?
| Cost line | What to check | enum |
|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes control plane | Free tier, per cluster-hour fee, or included | Included, HA, one per cluster |
| Worker nodes | Billed per hour or per second, minimums | From €0.06 per hour (1 vCPU, 4 GB), 100 GB disk per node included; general-purpose x86 nodes only |
| Object storage | Request fees, minimum charge, storage classes | €0.02 per GB per month, no request fees, no minimum, one storage class |
| Egress | Free allowance, per GB rate | €0.025 per GB, no free allowance |
| Block storage | Per GB per month, performance tiers | €0.10 per GB per month, NVMe |
| Load balancer and IPv4 | Per hour or per month | €10.00 per load balancer with one IPv4 address included, €5.00 per additional IPv4 address, per month |
| Commitments | Discount for 1 to 3 years | 10 to 20% |
Price models as of October 2026; check each provider’s pricing page for current prices.
Worker nodes are the largest line once the credits end, and enum’s list price per node is higher than OVHcloud’s, Scaleway’s and STACKIT’s. List prices per hour for one 2 vCPU, 8 GB instance:
| Provider | Instance | List price per hour |
|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud | b3-8 | €0.0512 |
| Scaleway | POP2-2C-8G | €0.0735, egress included |
| STACKIT | g3i.2 | €0.1031 |
| enum | gp-2 (2 vCPU, 8 GB) | Twice the gp-1 price of €0.06 |
Checked October 2026.
IONOS bills vCPU and RAM separately rather than per instance type, and Exoscale’s standard instances come in other sizes. vCPU types (shared or dedicated) differ between providers, so compare like for like. The included control plane, the 100 GB disk per node, outbound NAT and free S3 requests offset part of enum’s higher node price, and 1 to 3 year commitments save 10 to 20%.
Egress models differ too. OVHcloud’s startup page says its cloud has little or no ingress or egress fees. Scaleway’s instance list prices include egress. Exoscale pools a free egress allowance per instance-hour. On AWS, Amazon S3 charges per request by request type, and data transferred out to the internet is billed per GB after the first 100 GB per month. enum charges €0.025 per GB from the first byte. The S3-compatible object storage guide compares the request and egress models in detail.
What does each European provider still lack compared with AWS?
None of the six matches AWS on breadth. If you depend on many AWS services (queues, serverless functions, global edge), count what you would replace before you move. For Kubernetes-based SaaS the gaps are narrower:
| Provider | Gaps next to EKS and AWS, from the provider’s own docs |
|---|---|
| OVHcloud | No documented workload identity for pods; native Gateway API controller announced, not shipped |
| Scaleway | No managed Ingress or Gateway controller; no documented workload identity; control plane SLA only on paid tiers (99.5%) |
| IONOS | A Service of type LoadBalancer gets a static IP on one node rather than an external load balancer; registry in Frankfurt only; no documented workload identity |
| STACKIT | Two locations (Germany, Austria); ALB Ingress controller in private preview, on request only and not recommended for production; registry described as beta |
| Exoscale | Registry is a marketplace offering run by a third party; Karpenter autoscaling (generally available since March 2026) only on the SKS Pro plan; no documented workload identity |
| enum | One production region with a single availability zone (Frankfurt, zone fra-a; redundancy across failure domains in one site; Berlin on demand); no published SLA for worker nodes and no published SLA credit terms; no container registry, no workload identity, no cluster autoscaling, no managed database, no volume snapshots; L4 load balancers only, no managed Ingress or Gateway controller (you run your own); x86 general-purpose nodes only; no Terraform provider until Q4 2026; Kubernetes clusters on request until Q4 2026; reserved GPUs (NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, 96 GB) and Models as a Service on request with pricing on request, no on-demand or hourly GPUs |
Checked October 2026.
enum is also a young company: it was founded in November 2024 and does not publish funding or headcount. Workloads run on upstream Kubernetes and use the S3 API, so moving them elsewhere does not require a rewrite. The EKS, AKS and GKE replacement guide covers what to run yourself instead of the missing services.
Which one fits which startup?
- Pre-seed or seed, full self-service now: OVHcloud Start level (€10,000), or Scaleway Founders (up to €1,000) with the Early and Growth tiers once you spend €500 or €1,500 a month.
- Series A with a larger bill: OVHcloud Scale level or IONOS ACCELERATE, both up to €100,000.
- A customer needs a C5 or ISO 27001 certificate from the provider now: STACKIT, which names its Kubernetes Engine in its C5 scope, or Exoscale, which states its C5 Type 2 attestation covers all zones and products. IONOS, OVHcloud and Scaleway hold ISO 27001; for C5 at IONOS or OVHcloud, ask whether Kubernetes is in scope.
- Production on Kubernetes without a platform team, where the provider runs minor upgrades for you: enum, if one region with one zone in Frankfurt, a cluster set up with enum’s engineers, a higher node price than OVHcloud, Scaleway or STACKIT, and the gaps in the table above are acceptable.
FAQ
Is there a European cloud with startup credits comparable to AWS Activate? OVHcloud (Scale level), IONOS (ACCELERATE) and enum each state up to €100,000. AWS Activate Portfolio states up to $200,000 but requires an Org ID from an Activate Provider such as an accelerator or VC, and Google for Startups states $200,000 for seed to Series A. The European ceilings are lower than the largest US programs.
Which European startup program lasts longest? Of the programs that state a duration, IONOS ACCELERATE is longest, at up to 24 months. STACKIT states no duration. OVHcloud, Scaleway Growth and enum run 12 months; enum states an extension is possible, and IONOS states its period cannot be extended. Outside the six, Cleura states up to 18 months.
Can I apply if I already use the provider? Not at Scaleway or IONOS: both require that you are not yet a customer. OVHcloud states that applicants may or may not be customers already. Check the full terms of the other programs before you apply.
Does Exoscale have a startup program? We found none on exoscale.com as of 9 October 2026. Its product pages offer free credit to start.
Does enum have a free tier or trial? No. DNS is free for every account; compute, storage and egress are billed from the start unless you are in enum for Startups.
Where enum fits
enum for Startups gives European startups up to €100,000 in credits for 12 months, with an extension possible, across Kubernetes, object storage, block storage and networking in Frankfurt. The program is curated and enum replies to applications within a few business days. The trade-offs are listed above: one region with one zone, no enum-held certification yet, clusters on request until Q4 2026, and node prices above OVHcloud, Scaleway and STACKIT. Details and the application form are on the startups page; the AWS comparison covers the migration.
Sources
- AWS Activate credits: https://aws.amazon.com/startups/credits/
- AWS Activate credit expiry: https://startups.aws.com/learn/everything-you-need-to-know-about-aws-activate-credits
- Amazon S3 pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- 18 U.S.C. § 2713 (CLOUD Act), Cornell LII: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2713
- US Department of Justice, CLOUD Act white paper: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1153446/dl?inline=
- OVH US LLC: https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/
- IONOS Cloud USA Inc.: https://cloud.ionos.com/managed/kubernetes
- A1 Group shareholder structure: https://a1.com/investor-relations/share/
- OVHcloud Startup Program: https://startup.ovhcloud.com/en/
- OVHcloud Start level: https://startup.ovhcloud.com/en/startups/
- OVHcloud Scale level: https://startup.ovhcloud.com/en/scaleups/
- OVHcloud Startup Program FAQ (voucher scope, POC or MVP): https://startup.ovhcloud.com/en/faq-support/
- Scaleway Startup Program: https://www.scaleway.com/en/startup-program/
- IONOS Cloud Startup Program: https://cloud.ionos.de/startup-programm/en
- IONOS Cloud Startup Program FAQ: https://cloud.ionos.de/startup-programm/faq
- STACKIT Startup Program: https://stackit.com/en/why-stackit/benefits/startup-program
- Exoscale sitemap (no startup program listed): https://www.exoscale.com/sitemap.xml
- UpCloud Startup Program: https://upcloud.com/upcloud-startup-program/
- Cleura Startup Program: https://cleura.com/cleura-startup-program/
- Civo Startup Program: https://www.civo.com/startups
- Google for Startups Cloud Program: https://cloud.google.com/startup
- Microsoft for Startups: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups
- Hetzner Cloud products (no managed Kubernetes): https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
- Node prices: OVHcloud, Scaleway, STACKIT price list, enum
- Exoscale egress allowance: https://www.exoscale.com/pricing/
- STACKIT certificates: https://stackit.com/en/why-stackit/benefits/certificates
- STACKIT ownership and locations: https://stackit.com/en/facts
- Lidl countries, including the USA: https://info.lidl/en
- IONOS Cloud certificates (C5:2020 Type 1): https://cloud.ionos.de/zertifikate
- OVHcloud C5: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/compliance/c5/
- OVHcloud SecNumCloud (SNC Cloud Platform): https://corporate.ovhcloud.com/en/newsroom/news/ovhcloud-obtains-secnumcloud-qualification-snc-cloud-platform/
- Scaleway ISO 27001 and HDS: https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/
- STACKIT ALB Ingress (private preview): https://docs.stackit.cloud/products/runtime/kubernetes-engine/basics/networking/application-load-balancing/
- Exoscale BSI C5: https://www.exoscale.com/compliance/bsi-c5/ and https://changelog.exoscale.com/exoscale-obtains-bsi-c5-attestation/
- Exoscale Karpenter GA and Pro plan requirement: https://changelog.exoscale.com/sks-karpenter-autoscaling-integration-ga/ and https://community.exoscale.com/product/compute/containers/how-to/karpenter/
- Managed PostgreSQL: OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, STACKIT, Exoscale
- Kubernetes features and certifications for each provider: see the sources in Replacing EKS, AKS or GKE in Europe and Choosing a European managed Kubernetes provider
- enum for Startups: https://enum.co/startups
- enum GPUs and Models as a Service: https://enum.co/gpu, https://enum.co/models-as-a-service