Scaleway vs Vultr

• Scaleway enters the market at a lower floor of $0.10/mo, whereas Vultr mandates a minimum $15.00/mo for managed database entry.
• Vultr provides larger base storage allocations, starting at 25 GB and scaling up to 12525 GB, while Scaleway standardizes on 20 GB across most tiers.
• Both providers align on storage overages at $0.12/GB, though Scaleway introduces a $0.01/GB egress fee that Vultr does not explicitly itemize in their base database pricing.
• Vultr offers higher compute density, reaching 96 vCPU cores compared to Scaleway’s cap of 48 vCPU cores for their managed instances.

Scaleway functions as a cost-efficient entry point for smaller projects, using a serverless-adjacent model that avoids the high upfront commitment of more traditional providers. Their RAM scaling up to 256 GB matches Vultr’s ceiling, but the underlying hardware profiles differ. Vultr targets enterprise-heavy workloads, utilizing high-performance NVMe storage arrays that justify their premium pricing tiers reaching up to $26880.00/mo. While Scaleway is better suited for development environments or internal tooling where egress is predictable, Vultr is built for sustained, high-IOPS applications that require substantial disk headroom and consistent connection limits.

The choice hinges on whether your workload is storage-bound or compute-bound. If you are running massive transactional tables that require significant NVMe throughput, Vultr’s higher price ceiling provides the necessary hardware headroom. Conversely, if you are managing smaller, intermittent database loads and want to avoid the high monthly baseline, Scaleway’s pricing structure is more forgiving for lean infrastructure budgets.