# Scaleway Instances

> French cloud provider: fixed-size virtual machines from €6.55 a month for a 2 vCPU DEV1-S before storage and IPv4, billed hourly with a 60-minute minimum, where powering off stops the compute meter but storage and the IPv4 keep billing.

Website: https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/  
Guide page: https://botperch.com/providers/scaleway/  
Checked: 2026-10-30

**Short answer:** One always-on personal agent (2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB) costs about $22.59 a month here, the 9th cheapest of the 22 providers that run it as described. The AI model adds about $1.88 a month on top (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (1017), 30 requests a day at 40k tokens each, median zero-retention price; from $0.46 at the cheapest host). Fits well: An agent that is idle most of the day: a powered-off DEV1-M costs $2.11 of block storage (or $0.80 of local SSD) and $4.06 of IPv4 a month, not the $17.21 of compute.

Scaleway Instances are fixed-size virtual machines (vCPU, RAM and a bandwidth cap in one offer) sold by the hour from data centres in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. Storage is not part of the offer: you attach a block volume or, on DEV1 and GP1, a local SSD, and pay for the provisioned size.
It is an ordinary Linux server product rather than a sandbox service. You get root, SSH, your own kernel, Docker if you install it, a flexible public IPv4 and a security group. There is no prompt endpoint, no memory snapshot, no idle sleep and no session limit.
The ranges in this card are the shared-CPU ones a reader would actually rent: Development (STARDUST1, DEV1, PLAY2) and General Purpose (BASIC3, BASIC2-A on Arm, PRO2, GP1). Dedicated STANDARD3 and POP2, the compute- and memory-optimised ranges, GPU Instances and Elastic Metal are outside it.
The billing shape is the interesting part. Unlike most VPS providers, powering an Instance off stops compute billing: you keep paying for storage and for any reserved flexible IPv4, but not for the vCPUs. Short tasks are the opposite problem, because every resource is billed for at least 60 minutes.

**Who it is for:** People who want an ordinary always-on Linux server in the EU, priced in euros, from a French provider with ISO 27001 and HDS, and who value a cheap idle state: a machine that is powered off between sessions costs storage and its IP rather than a full monthly plan. It suits a personal agent, a chat bot, n8n, a small MCP server or a coding box. It is a poor fit for many short runs, because the 60-minute minimum makes a ten-minute task cost a full hour.

**Isolation:** A VPS (virtual private server), not a sandbox built for agents. A full virtual machine per Instance with its own kernel, disk and public IP: root, Docker inside, real SSH, any TCP port. The hypervisor is never named and nested virtualisation is not documented. GPU Instances are a separate, much more expensive range on the same platform.

**Sizes and regions:** Fixed offers only, no custom CPU/RAM split. Shared and development ranges run from 1 vCPU / 1 GiB (STARDUST1-S) to 48 vCPU / 256 GiB (GP1-XL), with 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps of public bandwidth. Disk is separate: block volumes from 5 GB to 15 TB, up to 16 per Instance, or local SSD up to 600 GB on GP1. The boot volume must be at least 10 GB. Resizing means changing offer with a reboot of up to five minutes.

## How it charges

- model: Pay-as-you-go per resource: the Instance by the hour, the volume by provisioned GB-hour, and the flexible IPv4 by the hour. No plan fee, no commitment, no monthly cap. Prices are published in EUR before tax and invoiced monthly.
- meter: Hourly, with a minimum of 60 minutes per resource per start and stop event. DEV1-M is €0.0202/hour (about $0.0225), so an always-on month is 730 hours; the pricing page's 'approx. per month' is exactly the hourly rate × 730, not a cap.
- stopped: Powering off releases the hypervisor and stops compute billing. Attached storage (local kept or archived, or block volumes) and any reserved flexible IPv4 keep billing. Standby mode is different: the Instance stays allocated and is billed in full.
- planFee: None. There is no subscription and no minimum commitment; Savings Plans are an optional discount for an hourly spend commitment, not a fee.
- minimum: A credit or debit card is required at signup. New Business customers with a valid payment method and no prior invoice get a €100 voucher, redeemable once. No Instance size is free, and default per-type quotas are small (DEV1-M 8 with a validated payment method, 15 with identity validated).

Fixed-size Instances billed by the hour with a 60-minute minimum, where powering off stops the compute meter but block storage and a flexible IPv4 keep billing; disk is a separate block volume, not part of the shape.
- Currency: Scaleway publishes EUR only and bills in euros; no USD list was found. These USD rates are the EUR list multiplied by the ECB reference rate for 29 October 2026, 1 EUR = 1.1130 USD. Prices are before tax; French VAT at 20% (or the EU customer's local rate) is added on the invoice.
- The Instance price excludes storage and the public IPv4. A flexible IPv4 is €0.005/hour (€3.65 a month) and is billed while it is reserved, including while the Instance is powered off; IPv6 is free. The card does not include it: the engine's perMachine field follows billed machine hours, so it would drop the IPv4 for a stopped machine. Add $4.06 per machine-month, or $5.57 for 1,000 one-hour tasks.
- Each resource is billed for a minimum of 60 minutes per start/stop event, so a 10-minute task pays a full hour of compute, storage and IPv4. minimumSeconds applies that floor to compute only; the calculator's storage and IPv4 lines for tasks mode are understated by the same minimum (see the provider notes).
- There is no monthly cap: the 'approx. per month' on the pricing page is the hourly rate × 730. An always-on month therefore costs 730 hours at the hourly rate.
- Powering an Instance off stops compute billing; attached storage and any reserved flexible IPv4 keep billing. Standby mode is different: the Instance stays allocated and is billed in full.
- Disk is a separate volume and the card prices Block Storage 5K for every shape at €0.000130/GB/hour. That is the only storage option on BASIC3, PLAY2, PRO2 and BASIC2-A, and a valid option on DEV1, GP1 and STARDUST1. Those three ranges can attach local SSD instead at €0.000049/GB/hour, which is 2.65× cheaper: the engine has one disk rate per plan and one stopped rate for the whole card, so pricing both classes in one card would misprice stopped block volumes. On local SSD, B would be 0.86 instead of 4.15 and C .88 instead of .20.
- Snapshots, images and Object Storage are separate products and are not in the calculator. Snapshots and unified snapshots are €0.000049/GB/hour; creating an image is free but its snapshots bill.
- STARDUST1-S is included at its list price (€0.0006/hour, about €0.44 a month) although it is absent from the default Instance quota table read on 2026-10-30; its availability on a new account is unconfirmed.
- The 15K block tier, GPU Instances, dedicated-vCPU STANDARD3/POP2 ranges, Elastic Metal and Savings Plans (up to 25% off for an hourly commitment) are outside this card.
- BASIC2-A shapes are arm64 (Ampere); the calculator may pick one for large workloads, so check that the agent binaries exist for Arm.
- Default per-type quotas are small (DEV1-M 8 Instances with a validated payment method, 15 with identity validated; PLAY2-NANO 5/10; GP1-XS 1/4), so a fan-out of hundreds of simultaneous machines is not available without a quota increase.
- Savings Plans cut up to 25% for an hourly spend commitment but are not modelled.
- Parent integration, 2026-10-30: the flexible IPv4 is priced as perMachine at €0.005/h (US$0.005565 at the card's ECB rate), capped at €3.65 (US$4.0625) a month, and the engine now bills it, and the 60-minute minimum on block storage for short tasks, through stopped hours as Scaleway's billing FAQ describes.

## Monthly cost for each preset workload

- A personal agent that stays on (Hermes, OpenClaw): $22.59
- A coding agent for one developer: $15.92
- A code interpreter inside your product: $589.89
- A browser agent for a small team: $884.83
- Self-hosted n8n for a small team: $22.59
- A Discord or Slack bot for one server: $12.41
- Claude Code for a team of five: $79.58
- A scraper that runs four times a day: $2.04
- Your own remote MCP server: $5.61
- A: 1,000 short tasks: $29.49
- B: one always-on box: $44.15
- C: three hours a day: $8.20

## Fits well

- An agent that is idle most of the day: a powered-off DEV1-M costs $2.11 of block storage (or $0.80 of local SSD) and $4.06 of IPv4 a month, not the $17.21 of compute.
- An always-on small agent: DEV1-M at $22.59 a month including block storage and IPv4, or DEV1-S at $12.41 for a chat bot or MCP server.
- EU residency with a French legal flavour: four EU regions, ISO 27001, HDS, a published DPA and no US CLOUD Act exposure.
- No egress bill: Instance prices include egress and there is no per-GB charge, only the shape bandwidth cap.
- A coding box that is used eight hours a day: DEV1-L costs $15.92 a month at 160 hours plus disk and IP, because the stopped hours do not bill compute.

## Fits badly

- Many short runs: every task under an hour pays a full hour of compute, disk and IPv4, so 1,000 ten-minute tasks cost $29.49 instead of about $5.
- Bursty parallel fan-out: default quotas are single-digit per offer type, so hundreds of simultaneous machines need a support request.
- Anything that needs a memory-preserving pause, an idle sleep, a wake-on-request, a preview URL or a sandbox API.
- Workloads that need a written SLA: DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 and PRO2 have no SLO at all.
- Arm-averse software: the BASIC2-A offers are arm64 and the calculator may pick one for large sizes.

## Features

- **Isolation** (yes): Full VM; root, Docker, SSH. A full KVM virtual machine per Instance with its own kernel, disk and public IP. Docker is a one-click InstantApp and any container runtime can be installed. Nested virtualisation is not documented either way, the hypervisor is never named, and GPU Instances are a separate, much more expensive range. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-an-instance/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/concepts/)
- **Sizes and regions** (yes): 48 vCPU / 256 GiB; 4 EU countries. Fixed offers only: shared and development ranges run from 1 vCPU / 1 GiB to 48 vCPU / 256 GiB, with dedicated STANDARD3 and POP2 up to 64 vCPU outside this card. Disk is separate, up to 15 TB per block volume and 600 GB of local SSD. No custom CPU/RAM split, no live resize, and not every offer exists in every zone. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instances-datasheet/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instances-datasheet/)
- **Lifecycle** (partly): Off stops compute; disk and IP stay. Powering off releases the hypervisor and stops compute billing; attached storage and any reserved flexible IPv4 keep billing. Local storage can be kept or archived on stop. There is no memory-preserving pause, and standby mode keeps the machine allocated but is billed in full, so it saves nothing. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- **Snapshots and forks** (partly): Disk snapshots; no memory, no fork. Volume snapshots and whole-Instance images are manual, kept until deleted, and can be exported or imported as QCOW2. They never include RAM, there is no copy-on-write fork of a running machine, and there is no automatic backup schedule: Scaleway documents a do-it-yourself one built on Serverless Jobs. Snapshots bill at €0.000049/GB/hour. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-a-backup/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-a-backup/)
- **Storage** (yes): Volumes to 15 TB; disk kept. Two storage designs: block volumes (network-attached, 5 GB to 15 TB, up to 16 per Instance, persistent without the machine) and local SSD on DEV1, GP1 and STARDUST1 (up to 600 GB, tied to the host, kept or archived on stop). The boot volume must be at least 10 GB. Object Storage is S3-compatible but has no native mount. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- **Idle and waking** (yes): No idle timer or session limit. There is no idle timeout, auto-stop or maximum session length, so an always-on agent is safe from the provider but pays for every idle hour. The same absence means there is no wake path: a stopped Instance stays stopped until something calls the API, and standby mode bills in full. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-standby-mode/)
- **Reaching it** (yes): Public IPv4/IPv6, any port, SSH. A flexible IPv4 routed to the Instance, a free flexible IPv6, any port opened through a stateful or stateless security group, and a real SSH daemon. There is no provider-issued preview or private token URL, and the browser console is a serial TTY for troubleshooting rather than a day-to-day shell. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-flexips/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/connect-to-instance/)
- **Custom domains** (partly): Your DNS; TLS via LB or Caddy. A fixed public IP makes a custom domain a DNS record, and Scaleway sells Domains and DNS. Managed Let's Encrypt certificates belong to the Load Balancer and Edge Services, which front a Load Balancer, Object Storage or a Serverless Container, not an Instance directly. On a plain Instance you install and renew the certificate yourself. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/edge-services/concepts/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/edge-services/how-to/configure-custom-domain/)
- **Outbound network** (yes): No egress fees; SG allowlist. Instance list prices include egress and Scaleway states there are no egress fees; the meter is the shape's public bandwidth, 100 Mbps to 16 Gbps. Security groups filter outbound traffic as well as inbound, an Instance can be created without a public IPv4, and a private network gives it no internet path. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-security-groups/)
- **Keys and secrets** (partly): Secret Manager; agent can read. Secret Manager is a separate product with versioned, path-scoped secrets, ephemeral policies, single-access secrets and a TTL of up to a year. It is not injected into an Instance at boot, and there is no proxy that lets the agent use a key it cannot read. API keys are properly scoped through IAM policies and permission sets. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/secret-manager/concepts/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/secret-manager/concepts/)
- **Ways to drive it** (yes): Console, CLI, API, SDKs. Console wizard, documented REST API with OpenAPI specs, official CLI and SDKs for Python, Go and JavaScript/TypeScript, plus a Terraform provider. No official MCP server, no PTY endpoint and no file API, so an agent driving the platform uses HTTP or SSH. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers)
- **Built-in agents** (no): None; Docker and web apps only. InstantApps are Docker, GitLab, Nextcloud, WordPress and OpenVPN, and the Marketplace adds more infrastructure images. No coding agent, no Hermes, no OpenClaw, no prompt API and no browser image. Scaleway's OpenClaw content is about pointing OpenClaw at its Generative APIs from a local machine or Mac mini, not hosting the Gateway on an Instance. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/)
- **Teams and accounts** (partly): IAM, SAML SSO, audit; alerts not caps. Organizations, Projects, Members, groups, applications, fine-grained permission sets with CEL conditions, SAML SSO with SCIM, and Audit Trail with a 90-day export. Billing alerts only notify: there is no hard spending cap, and default per-type Instance quotas are small rather than spend-based. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/policies-permissions/permission-sets/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/concepts/)
- **Billing models** (partly): Hourly, 60-min minimum; off = storage. The meter is the allocated shape by the hour of uptime, with a 60-minute minimum per resource per start and stop, and no monthly cap. Powering off stops compute billing while storage and a reserved flexible IPv4 continue. That makes idle time cheap compared with a VPS that bills while off, but short tasks expensive compared with per-second sandboxes. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/faq/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/faq/)
- **Trials and free tiers** (partly): €100 Business trial; card required. New Business customers with a valid payment method and no prior Scaleway invoice receive a €100 voucher by email within 24 hours, which must be redeemed. No ongoing free tier covers Instances, prepaid cards are refused, and a card is required even when SEPA is used. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/scaleway-vs-aws/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/scaleway-vs-aws/)
- **The company** (yes): ISO 27001, HDS; 99% on BASIC3 only. Scaleway SAS of Paris, a subsidiary of the iliad Group, operating four EU regions. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and HDS certified, SecNumCloud under assessment, DPA published with the contracts, public status page. The Instance SLA gives 99% to BASIC3-X and BASIC2-A, 99.5% to dedicated ranges, and no SLO to DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 or PRO2. No SOC 2 is listed. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/) [docs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/)

## Capabilities

- Its own virtual machine: yes (Full VM, own kernel) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-an-instance/)
- Root access: yes (Root by SSH key) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/connect-to-instance/)
- Docker inside: yes (Docker InstantApp) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/)
- Nested virtualisation: not-published (Not documented) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instances-datasheet/)
- Your own image: yes (QCOW2 import/export) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/api-cli/snapshot-import-export-feature/)
- Any size you like: no (Fixed offers only) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/resize-instances/)
- Large machines: yes (48 vCPU / 256 GiB) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instances-datasheet/)
- Resize while running: partly (Change offer; reboot, 5 min). Resizing is a change of offer that reboots the Instance with up to five minutes of downtime, and it needs block storage rather than a local volume. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/resize-instances/)
- GPUs: yes (L4, L40S, H100, B300) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/gpu/)
- Choose the region: yes (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Milan) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/faq/)
- Runs in the EU: yes (France, Netherlands, Poland, Italy) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/about-us/)
- Pause keeps memory: no (Standby bills in full) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-standby-mode/)
- Pre-started pools: partly (Fixed-size autoscaling group). An autoscaling group can hold a fixed number of identical Instances behind a load balancer, but there is no way to claim one of them for a single task. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-manage-instance-groups/)
- Starts in under a second: no (Seconds, not under one) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/scaleway-vs-aws/)
- Snapshots of files: yes (Volume snapshots, kept) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-a-backup/)
- Snapshots with memory: no (Disk only) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- Copy a running machine: no (Snapshot, then new Instance) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- Pick an older snapshot: yes (Kept until deleted) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- Reusable templates: yes (Immutable Instance templates) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-manage-instance-templates/)
- Automatic backups: no (Manual images and snapshots) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-a-backup/)
- Files survive a stop: yes (Disk kept or archived) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- Separate volumes: yes (15 volumes, to 15 TB each) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- One volume, several machines: no (One Instance at a time) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/how-to/attach-a-volume/)
- Mount outside storage: partly (S3 API, no native mount). Object Storage speaks the S3 API, but Scaleway offers no native mount: you add s3fs, rclone or a similar client yourself, with the latency and consistency that implies. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/storage/)
- Large disk: yes (15 TB per volume) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/faq/)
- Can stay on indefinitely: yes (No timer or session limit) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- Choose the idle timeout: no (No idle timeout) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- Wakes on a request: no (No wake path) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- Scheduled runs: no (No provider scheduler) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-manage-instance-groups/)
- Public link to a port: yes (Public IPv4/IPv6, any port) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-flexips/)
- Private link: no (No token links) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-flexips/)
- Real SSH: yes (ssh root@IPv4 or IPv6) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/connect-to-instance/)
- Terminal in the browser: yes (Browser serial console) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-serial-console/)
- Tunnel to your computer: yes (ssh -L over real SSH) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/connect-to-instance/)
- Non-web ports: yes (Any TCP or UDP port) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-security-groups/)
- Your own domain: yes (Point DNS at the IP) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-flexips/)
- Automatic HTTPS: partly (Load Balancer or Caddy). Automatic HTTPS is not a property of an Instance: you either run Caddy or certbot on the server or put a paid Load Balancer (optionally with Edge Services) in front for a managed Let's Encrypt certificate. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/edge-services/concepts/)
- Outbound data included: yes (No egress fees) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/)
- Allow only some sites: yes (Security group outbound rules) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-security-groups/)
- Turn the internet off: yes (No public IP, private only) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/understanding-instance-pricing/)
- Fixed outgoing IP: yes (Flexible IPv4, reserved) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/understanding-instance-pricing/)
- Stored secrets: yes (Secret Manager) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/secret-manager/concepts/)
- Secrets the agent cannot read: no (No injection the agent can't read) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/secret-manager/concepts/)
- Limited API keys: yes (IAM policies, per application) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/concepts/)
- Create from the website: yes (Console wizard) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/create-an-instance/)
- Command-line tool: yes (scw CLI) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/api-cli/cli-cheatsheet/)
- Python SDK: yes (scaleway-sdk-python) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/scaleway-sdk/python-sdk/)
- TypeScript SDK: yes (@scaleway/sdk) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/scaleway-sdk/js-sdk/)
- Documented HTTP API: yes (Documented REST API) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers)
- MCP server: no (None official) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers)
- Interactive terminal over the API: no (No PTY endpoint) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-serial-console/)
- Files over the API: no (No file endpoint) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers)
- Coding agents preinstalled: no (None) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/)
- Send it a prompt: no (None) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/developers)
- One-click Hermes: no (Not an InstantApp) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/)
- One-click OpenClaw: no (Model API only, not an app) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-content/integrate-with-openclaw/)
- Browser built in: no (Install it yourself) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/images-and-instantapps/)
- Desktop for computer use: partly (Windows + RDP only). There is a Windows Server image with Remote Desktop, but no managed desktop for computer-use agents; a Linux desktop means installing X, VNC or a remote-desktop stack yourself. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/creating-a-windows-golden-image/)
- Runs other platforms' agents: partly (OpenClaw as API client only). Scaleway documents OpenClaw only as a client of its model API on a local machine, and publishes no Instance guide for OpenClaw or Hermes; a third-party guide recommends DEV1-M. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-content/integrate-with-openclaw/)
- Team workspace: yes (Organizations and Projects) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/concepts/)
- Roles and permissions: yes (Permission sets and policies) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/policies-permissions/permission-sets/)
- Single sign-on: yes (SAML SSO; OAuth2 for Owner) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/user-provisioning/set-up-sso-with-authentik/)
- Hard spending cap: no (Alerts only, no cap) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/how-to/use-billing-alerts/)
- Usage alerts: yes (Budget alerts, 10 per account) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/how-to/use-billing-alerts/)
- Audit log: yes (Audit Trail, 90-day export) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/audit-trail/concepts/)
- Billed per second: no (60-minute minimum) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/faq/)
- CPU billed only while working: no (Allocated while it runs) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/faq/)
- Paused costs only storage: yes (Off: storage + IP only) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- No monthly fee: yes (No plan, no commitment) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/understanding-instance-pricing/)
- Flat monthly price: partly (Hourly × 730, no cap). There is no monthly price cap: the 'approx. per month' figure is simply the hourly rate multiplied by 730, so an always-on month costs exactly that and a partial month costs the hours used. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/faq/)
- Ongoing free tier: no (None for Instances) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/concepts/)
- Free starting credit: yes (€100 Business trial) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/scaleway-vs-aws/)
- Try without a card: no (Card required) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/faq/)
- Public status page: yes (status.scaleway.com) [source](https://status.scaleway.com/)
- Uptime promise (SLA): partly (99% BASIC3 only; none on DEV1). The cheap ranges have no service-level objective at all: DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 and PRO2 are listed as 'No SLO', and only BASIC3-X among the shared ranges carries 99%. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/sla/)
- SOC 2 report: no (ISO 27001 and HDS instead) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/)
- Data processing agreement: yes (DPA in the contracts page) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/privacy-policy/)
- Open source or self-hostable: no (Proprietary platform) [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/)

## Usability

- Dashboard: Yes: the console creates Instances, volumes, snapshots, images, flexible IPs, security groups, private networks and templates, with an estimated cost before you confirm, a consumption view and billing alerts.
- Without code: Partly. Creating the machine is clicking, and Docker or WordPress can be preselected as an InstantApp, but everything that makes it an agent host — the agent, the database, the certificate, the service unit — is a terminal.
- Signup: A Scaleway account with a validated payment method; a credit or debit card is required, prepaid and virtual cards are refused, and identity validation raises the default quotas. Business accounts can claim a €100 voucher.
- Docs: Extensive: docs.scaleway.com covers Instances, Block Storage, IAM, billing and troubleshooting, with OpenAPI specifications, an official CLI, Python/Go/JS SDKs and a Terraform provider. The billing pages contradict each other on the IPv4 price and the old per-second wording survives in third-party guides.
- Trips people up: Every resource is billed for a minimum of 60 minutes, so a ten-minute task pays a full hour of compute, storage and IP.
- Trips people up: A powered-off Instance still bills its disk and its flexible IPv4; only deleting them ends those charges.
- Trips people up: Standby mode sounds like a pause but is billed in full.
- Trips people up: The Instance price excludes storage and the IPv4, which together can be a third of a small machine's bill.
- Trips people up: The cheap DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 and PRO2 ranges have no SLA.
- Trips people up: The first-party pages disagree on the flexible IPv4 price: the FAQ says €0.004/hour, the pricing page and the June 2026 price update say €0.005/hour.
- Trips people up: The console's 'approx. per month' is hourly × 730, not a cap.
- Trips people up: Arm (BASIC2-A) offers can be the cheapest fit for large sizes.

## Company

- Legal entity: Scaleway SAS, 8 rue de la Ville-l'Évêque, 75008 Paris, France; SIREN 433 115 904 RCS Paris; VAT FR 35 433115904; share capital €142,050. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/legal-notice/)
- Ownership: A subsidiary of the iliad Group (the French telecoms group founded by Xavier Niel); no separate stock listing or venture round is published for Scaleway. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/about-us/)
- Regions: Four multi-AZ EU regions: Paris (fr-par, three AZ), Amsterdam (nl-ams), Warsaw (pl-waw) and Milan (it-mil), with Sweden and Germany announced. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/about-us/)
- Certifications: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and HDS (French health-data hosting); SecNumCloud qualification is under assessment. No SOC 2 report is listed. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/)
- Status and SLA: A public status page, and an Instance SLA that gives 99% to BASIC2-A/BASIC3-X, 99.5% to dedicated and specialised ranges, and no SLO at all to DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 and PRO2. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/sla/)
- Data protection: A Data Processing Agreement is published with the contracts and governs data processed on the customer's behalf; the privacy policy names it explicitly. [source](https://www.scaleway.com/en/privacy-policy/)

## Caveats

- **The 60-minute minimum decides the cost of short work** (open): Scaleway's billing FAQ says each resource is billed for a minimum of 60 minutes per start and stop event. A ten-minute task therefore pays a full hour of compute, a full hour of volume and a full hour of IPv4. Some third-party guides still describe per-second billing; no current first-party page does, and the Instances FAQ says CPU Instances are billed per hour of uptime. If the older per-second behaviour were still in force, workload A would fall from $29.49 to about $4.90.
- **Two first-party prices for the flexible IPv4** (contradiction): The Instances FAQ says each Instance's flexible IPv4 costs €0.004/hour, while the network pricing page lists an Instance IPv4 at €0.005/hour and the 1 June 2026 price update moved Zonal Flexible IPv4 from €0.004 to €0.005. This guide uses €0.005/hour (€3.65 a month), the newer figure confirmed by two pages.
- **A stopped Instance is cheap, not free** (open): Compute billing stops on power-off, which is unusual for a VPS and makes idle time cheap. Storage and any reserved flexible IPv4 continue, so a small stopped machine still costs about $4.86 a month, most of it the IPv4. Standby mode is worse: it keeps the machine allocated and bills it in full.
- **The engine cannot bill a per-machine IPv4 through stopped hours** (open): RateCard.perMachine follows billed machine hours, so with billedWhileStopped false it would charge the IPv4 only for the 90 running hours of workload C, not the 730 hours the address is reserved. The card therefore leaves the IPv4 out and the provider cost adds it by hand. The smallest fix is one line in cost.ts: compute perMachineHours from run + stopped rather than run + stoppedBilled, and apply minimumSeconds to the tasks branch. A regression test on a stopped machine with a per-machine fee would cover it.
- **No SLA on the ranges this card prices cheapest** (open): The Instance SLA lists DEV1, GP1, PLAY2 and PRO2 as 'No SLO'; only BASIC2-A and BASIC3-X get 99%. A buyer who needs a contractual availability promise has to move up to a dedicated range or accept the risk.
- **STARDUST1-S is priced but missing from the default quota table** (open): STARDUST1-S is listed at €0.0006/hour (about €0.44 a month) on the pricing page and appears in the zone's product API, but it is absent from the default Organization quota table read on 2026-10-30, which lists DEV1, PLAY2, GP1, PRO2, BASIC2-A and POP2. Its orderability on a new account is unconfirmed, so the MCP route quotes it with that caveat and offers DEV1-S as the safe alternative.
- **One storage class is priced for every shape** (open): The card prices Block Storage 5K at €0.000130/GB/hour on every shape, because it is the only option on BASIC3, PLAY2, PRO2 and BASIC2-A and a valid option on DEV1, GP1 and STARDUST1. Local SSD on those three ranges costs €0.000049/GB/hour, 2.65× less: on local storage B is 0.86 instead of 4.15 and C is .88 instead of .20. The engine has one disk rate per plan and one stopped rate for the whole card, so a two-class card would misprice stopped block volumes; pricing one class keeps every printed number valid.

## Sources

- [Virtual Instances (product)](https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/)
- [Virtual Instances pricing (EUR, PAR-1)](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/)
- [Storage pricing (block 5K/15K, snapshots)](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/storage/)
- [Network pricing (Additional IP)](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/network/)
- [GPU Instances pricing](https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/gpu/)
- [Price update effective 1 June 2026](https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/a-transparent-update-on-scaleway-pricing/)
- [Instances FAQ](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/faq/)
- [Understanding Instance pricing](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/understanding-instance-pricing/)
- [Instance states](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instance-states/)
- [Standby mode](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-standby-mode/)
- [Instances datasheet](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/reference-content/instances-datasheet/)
- [Block Storage FAQ](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/faq/)
- [Block Storage concepts](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/block-storage/concepts/)
- [Security groups](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-security-groups/)
- [Flexible IPs](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/how-to/use-flexips/)
- [Billing FAQ](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/billing/faq/)
- [Default Organization quotas](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/organizations-and-projects/organization/organization-quotas/)
- [IAM concepts](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/concepts/)
- [IAM permission sets](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/policies-permissions/permission-sets/)
- [SAML SSO with Authentik](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/iam/user-provisioning/set-up-sso-with-authentik/)
- [Audit Trail concepts](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/audit-trail/concepts/)
- [Secret Manager concepts](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/secret-manager/concepts/)
- [Edge Services concepts](https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/edge-services/concepts/)
- [Instance SLA](https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/sla/)
- [Security and compliance](https://www.scaleway.com/en/security-and-compliance/)
- [Legal notice](https://www.scaleway.com/en/legal-notice/)
- [About Scaleway](https://www.scaleway.com/en/about-us/)
- [Free trial terms](https://www.scaleway.com/en/scaleway-vs-aws/)
- [Status page](https://status.scaleway.com/)
- [ECB euro reference rate](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml)