For years, the standard objection to "Buy European" in digital procurement has been that European alternatives are more expensive than the US hyperscaler offerings they would replace. The claim is usually made without numbers — and when the numbers are actually run, it tends to fall apart.
Below, seven categories where any buyer can run the comparison today. Verify before quoting specific figures: cloud pricing drifts, and these are illustrative SKUs rather than contractual quotes. The pattern, however, is robust.
The clearest gap. For a basic 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM general-purpose VM:
Egress fees compound the gap. AWS charges $0.09/GB after a 100 GB monthly free tier; OVHcloud and Scaleway include generous egress allowances; Hetzner includes 1 TB × (vCPU/2) per machine, with overage at €1/TB — a price that AWS would charge for roughly 11 GB. For workloads with non-trivial outbound traffic, bandwidth alone can be 10–20× cheaper outside the hyperscalers. Object storage tells the same story: Scaleway and OVHcloud match S3 on $/GB stored, then beat it on $/GB transferred.
The two are routinely conflated, but the price dynamics are different and they need to be separated.
Serverless / FaaS (event-driven, pay-per-execution) is the hyperscalers' genuine price stronghold at small scale. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions / Cloud Run, and Azure Functions all carry generous free tiers — typically 1M requests/month plus hundreds of thousands of GB-seconds — which makes them effectively free for low-volume workloads. European serverless (Scaleway Serverless Functions, OVHcloud Functions, Clever Cloud's pay-per-use modes) exists but is less mature and rarely beats the hyperscaler free tier on raw sticker. At high volume the picture inverts — managed Kubernetes on European clouds is cheaper than equivalent FaaS at scale — but at small scale, the hyperscalers do have a real edge here.
PaaS (managed long-running application runtimes) is much closer to even. Hyperscaler offerings — AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, Azure App Service — price near the underlying compute cost. European PaaS (Clever Cloud, Scalingo, Platform.sh) sits in the same range, typically with simpler pricing, smaller per-application overheads and a modest cost advantage.
Adjacent categories where the EU advantage reappears clearly:
Net: serverless is the one category where hyperscalers genuinely win on small-scale price. PaaS proper, managed databases and managed Kubernetes are mixed-to-favourable for Europe.
Hyperscaler: Microsoft 365 Business Standard $12.50/user/month annual (rising to $14 in July 2026); Google Workspace Business Standard $14/user/month annual. Both carry a heavy bundling premium — you pay for the entire suite whether you use it or not. (As of November 2025, EU DMA enforcement forced Microsoft to unbundle Teams from M365, with separate without-Teams SKUs sold at a regulated minimum discount.)
Managed EU SaaS: Infomaniak kSuite Pro (Swiss, fully GDPR-aligned, includes mail, calendar, drive, meet, office editor) starts at CHF 5.75/user/month — under half the M365 price. Nextcloud One (managed by Nextcloud GmbH in Germany) is €15/user/month at small scale, dropping at volume. Third-party hosted Nextcloud from EU IaaS providers is widely available in the €4–9/user/month range.
Self-hosted: Nextcloud Hub with LibreOffice, Collabora or OnlyOffice on European IaaS: pennies per user per month at any reasonable scale, plus operational labour. Nextcloud Enterprise (a self-hosted product with vendor support) starts at €69/user/year (~€5.75/user/month) for the Standard support tier — covers support and SLAs, not infrastructure, which sits on top.
For organisations whose actual needs are document editing, drive, calendar and basic collaboration, the M365 / Workspace markup is structurally hard to justify on price — at any of the three tiers.
Hyperscaler: Dropbox Business Standard $18/user/month annual (or $20 monthly), with Advanced at $24–30/user/month. Google Drive within Workspace is bundled.
Managed EU SaaS: Tresorit Business Standard $14.50–18/user/month annual (Swiss, end-to-end encrypted); pCloud Business $9.99/user/month annual; Internxt and similar Swiss/EU competitors in the same range. Sovereignty and security come alongside a price advantage, not as a substitute for it.
Self-hosted: Nextcloud Files on European object storage: cents per GB, no per-user fee. Past about twenty users, the cost gap to Dropbox is an order of magnitude — sometimes two.
Hyperscaler / US: Zoom Pro $13.33/user/month annual ($16.99 monthly). Microsoft Teams (since the EU-mandated unbundling in November 2025) is sold either inside M365 with-Teams SKUs or as a standalone subscription at $5.25–8.55/user/month depending on tier.
Managed EU SaaS: Whereby Pro at $9.99/month flat-rate (Norwegian, not per-user — a structural pricing difference at scale). Tixeo (French, ANSSI-qualified, EU sovereign-cloud certified, available as cloud or on-premise) — pricing on quote, but typically below Zoom enterprise tiers and the only major option with verifiable EU end-to-end encryption and no US-jurisdiction exposure.
Self-hosted: Jitsi or LiveKit on European IaaS: infrastructure-cost only. A small organisation can run thousands of participant-hours for the price of a single VM. The gap to Zoom widens at scale, where self-hosted wins decisively.
Hyperscaler / US: Slack Pro $7.25/user/month annual; Slack Business+ $12.50/user/month annual ($15 monthly). Microsoft Teams as a standalone subscription (post-unbundling): $5.25–8.55/user/month depending on tier.
Managed EU SaaS: Element Server Suite hosted (managed Matrix from Element, with EU-region hosting) typically in the €3–5/user/month range. Threema Work (Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, GDPR-aligned) starts at around $2/user/month for the Essential tier. Wire Pro (Swiss/German) is in the €5–8/user/month range. All three are routinely half to a third of Slack Business+.
Self-hosted: Matrix/Element or Mattermost on European IaaS: free at the licence level, infrastructure-only.
The lock-in matters as much as the price: Slack paywalls full message search history at the upper tiers, which means part of what an organisation pays each month is access to its own conversations.
Hyperscaler / US: Okta Workforce Identity runs $6/user/month for the Starter Suite up to $17/user/month for the Essentials Suite, with a $1,500 annual contract minimum. Microsoft Entra ID Premium: $6/user/month for P1, $9/user/month for P2.
Managed EU SaaS: Zitadel Cloud (Swiss, hosted in EU regions) and goauthentik.io (German, commercial sponsor of the Authentik project) both offer managed identity at a fraction of Okta's pricing — typical SME deployments land in the low single digits per user per month, with generous free tiers for small organisations.
Self-hosted: Keycloak — free, mature, widely deployed in production at scale.
For organisations currently paying Okta, migrating to a self-hosted or EU-hosted alternative is often the largest single line-item saving in the entire cloud stack — 5 to 10× reductions are routine.
Five of seven categories show European or Open Source alternatives at multiples cheaper than their US-hyperscaler equivalents on raw sticker price. One (PaaS) is mixed-to-favourable. None show European more expensive on a like-for-like comparison.
Total cost of ownership widens the gap rather than closing it. Hyperscaler pricing is engineered around costs the sticker does not capture: egress fees that compound with usage, bundles that force purchase of services that go unused, switching costs designed to be punitive. Strip those out and the European/OSS picture gets stronger, not weaker.
It is also worth noting how rarely buyers get to see this pricing structure clearly. The November 2025 Microsoft Teams unbundling — where the EU Digital Markets Act forced Microsoft to sell M365 with and without Teams, with regulated minimum price gaps — is one of the very few moments in recent history when a hyperscaler bundle has been opened up enough to show what a component actually costs. The fact that this took an EU competition investigation and the threat of a multi-billion-euro fine to achieve says most of what needs saying about how voluntary that transparency is.
The "European is more expensive" claim has been repeated long enough, by parties with the marketing budgets to repeat it, that it has hardened into received wisdom. What buyers are mostly paying for is not better service. It is the cost of not having checked.