AWS vs Scaleway

• Scaleway offers a significantly wider performance ceiling, scaling up to 256 GB of RAM and 48 vCPU cores, whereas AWS RDS entry-level tiers cap out at 8 GB of RAM and 2 vCPU.
• Storage overages are identical for both providers at $0.12/GB, meaning neither platform holds a cost advantage for ballooning datasets that exceed provisioned disk limits.
• Bandwidth costs represent a major delta, with Scaleway charging $0.01/GB for excess egress, while AWS RDS remains significantly more expensive at $0.09/GB.
• Scaleway includes a base of 20 GB of storage in their managed instances, which provides a predictable baseline compared to the modular pricing structure often required when configuring EBS volumes for RDS.

AWS RDS operates on a premium model where the cost of entry sits at $11.68/mo for a modest 1 GB RAM footprint. While this is reliable for small-scale applications, the architectural overhead of managing IOPS and specific instance classes can inflate monthly spend quickly. Scaleway targets the opposite end of the spectrum with options ranging from $0.10/mo to $1861.50/mo. By utilizing ARM-based instances and proprietary high-performance storage blocks, Scaleway provides a more cost-effective path for high-throughput databases that generate significant network traffic.

The decision between these two centers on egress volume and hardware requirements. AWS RDS provides a mature, globally distributed environment that integrates into existing VPC structures, though it carries a heavy tax on data transfer. Scaleway is the more aggressive choice for high-RAM workloads and data-intensive applications where the $0.08/GB savings on egress overages translates into substantial long-term savings for teams running heavy analytical queries or large-scale data synchronization tasks.