AWS vs Fransys: what does your cloud infrastructure really cost in 2026?

When you are launching a startup, every euro counts. Cloud infrastructure is often the second-largest expense after salaries, and your choice of provider can double or triple your bill — or worse. AWS is the default reflex for many CTOs. But the gap between the advertised price and the actual invoice is often brutal.

This article compares the real costs of AWS with those of Fransys, a managed Kubernetes platform deployed on European hosting providers (Hetzner, Scaleway, OVH). Every figure can be checked. The aim: to give you what you need to make an informed decision.

Two very different pricing philosophies

Before comparing numbers, it helps to understand why the bills diverge so much. AWS and Fransys do not charge in the same way, and that difference in model explains most of the gap.

AWS: fragmented pricing that is hard to predict

On AWS, every building block has its own price list. You pay separately for compute (EC2), orchestration (EKS), networking (NAT Gateway, data transfer, Load Balancer), storage (EBS), monitoring (CloudWatch), certificates, IP addresses, the image registry (ECR)... Each service is billed along several dimensions: per hour, per GB, per request, per capacity unit.

The result: even an experienced CTO struggles to predict an AWS bill before it arrives. "Bill shocks" are documented across the industry — startups discovering NAT Gateway charges of several thousand euros a month, or data transfer costs that exceed compute.

Fransys: transparent, predictable pricing

Fransys takes the opposite approach. The cost breaks down into two readable layers:

Layer 1 — The European hosting provider's cost, billed at list price. You choose Hetzner, Scaleway or OVH. The server price is passed on as is, with no hidden margin. At Hetzner, a 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM server costs around €5.49/month, traffic and IPv4 included.

Layer 2 — Fransys management fees, fixed and predictable:

• €6 per vCPU / month
• €3 per GB of RAM / month
• €0.10 per GB of storage / month
• €1 to €5 per IP / month
• €20 per Load Balancer / month

These fees cover the entire management layer: managed Kubernetes, built-in CI/CD (GitHub, GitLab), 24/7 monitoring, centralised logs, observability dashboards, automatic backups, automatic SSL/TLS certificates and human DevOps support. In short: everything that would normally require a dedicated DevOps engineer.

Default support (chat, 48-hour SLA, infrastructure monitoring) is included in the price. For more demanding needs, Business support (€500/month, 24-hour SLA, 5 days a week) or Enterprise support (bespoke, 2-hour SLA, 24/7, dedicated engineer) is available.

The numbers: 3 startup scenarios

On to the figures. For each scenario, the AWS cost is calculated in the eu-west-3 (Paris) region, on-demand, and includes the networking charges and ancillary services that are often forgotten. The Fransys cost is calculated with Hetzner as the hosting provider (the most competitive), adding Hetzner's list price to the Fransys management fees.

Scenario 1 — MVP / side project

A web app, an API and a PostgreSQL database. A few hundred users. Your first real production deployment.

On AWS:

• 1× EC2 t3.medium (2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM): ~€35/month
• 1× RDS PostgreSQL db.t3.micro: ~€14/month
• Application Load Balancer: ~€15/month
• EBS storage (30 GB GP3): ~€3/month
• NAT Gateway (1 AZ): ~€30/month
• Data transfer, IPv4, CloudWatch, miscellaneous: ~€15/month

AWS total: ~€112/month

On Fransys (Hetzner):

• 1× Hetzner CX33 server (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 20 TB traffic included): ~€5.50/month
• Fransys fees: 4 vCPUs × €6 + 8 GB × €3 + 80 GB × €0.10 = €24 + €24 + €8 = €56/month
• 1× IP: €1/month
• PostgreSQL deployed on the same cluster: included
• Monitoring, CI/CD, SSL, backups: included

Fransys total: ~€63/month

Saving: ~€49/month (44%) — and with Fransys you get a genuine production-ready Kubernetes cluster with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM (twice the AWS specs), plus monitoring, CI/CD and support included. On AWS, you would still have to configure and maintain all of that yourself.

Scenario 2 — Growing startup

Microservices, a dedicated PostgreSQL database, Redis, CI/CD, full monitoring. Several thousand active users. The infrastructure is starting to get serious.

On AWS (EKS):

• EKS control plane: ~€67/month
• 3× EC2 t3.large (2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM each): ~€170/month
• RDS PostgreSQL db.t3.medium: ~€60/month
• ElastiCache Redis (cache.t3.micro): ~€40/month
• NAT Gateway (2 AZs): ~€60/month
• Application Load Balancer: ~€15/month
• EBS storage (200 GB total): ~€16/month
• Data transfer (500 GB outbound): ~€42/month
• CloudWatch, ECR, miscellaneous: ~€40/month

AWS total: ~€510/month

(Not counting the DevOps time needed to configure and maintain EKS, security groups, auto-scaling, backups...)

On Fransys (Hetzner):

• 3× Hetzner CPX22 servers (2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD): ~€23/month
• Fransys fees: 6 vCPUs × €6 + 12 GB × €3 + 240 GB × €0.10 = €36 + €36 + €24 = €96/month
• 1× Load Balancer: €20/month
• 2× IPs: €2-10/month
• PostgreSQL + Redis: deployed and managed on the cluster, included
• 24/7 monitoring, CI/CD, SSL, automatic backups, DevOps support: included

Fransys total: ~€145 to €153/month

Saving: ~€360/month (70%) — and the gap widens further once you factor in the human cost. On AWS, configuring and maintaining a production EKS cluster easily takes 2 to 4 engineer-days a month in routine maintenance. At €600/day for a freelance DevOps engineer, that is an extra €1,200 to €2,400. On Fransys, it is included.

Scenario 3 — Scale-up / SME in production

Multi-service infrastructure, high availability, sizeable databases, 10+ services in production, autoscaling required. The kind of setup that would normally justify a full-time senior DevOps engineer.

On AWS (EKS) + dedicated DevOps:

• AWS infrastructure (19 nodes, EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, NAT, ALB, storage, monitoring...): ~€8,000 to €12,000/month
• 1× senior DevOps engineer (total employer cost): ~€7,000 to €9,000/month

AWS + DevOps total: €15,000 to €22,000/month

On Fransys (Hetzner / Scaleway) — the same 19-node infrastructure, deployed on European hosting providers through Fransys, with full management, 24/7 monitoring, support and maintenance included:

Fransys all-inclusive total: €8,000 to €10,000/month

Saving: €4,000 to €13,000/month, or €50,000 to €150,000 a year.

This scenario is based on a real customer case documented by Fransys. The saving varies with the exact complexity of the infrastructure, but the order of magnitude — 30 to 60% lower total cost of ownership — is consistent with what we see in the field.

Summary

• MVP (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM) — AWS: ~€112/month → Fransys: ~€63/month → Saving: 44%
• Growing startup (6 vCPUs, 12 GB RAM, 3 nodes) — AWS: ~€510/month → Fransys: ~€150/month → Saving: 70%
• Scale-up (19 nodes, DevOps included) — AWS + DevOps: ~€18,500/month → Fransys: ~€9,000/month → Saving: 51%

Averaged across these three profiles, Fransys cuts total infrastructure cost by 55%. And that average is conservative: it does not account for the time your engineering team spends managing AWS infrastructure instead of building the product.

Where do the savings come from?

There is nothing magical about the price gap. It comes down to three concrete, verifiable factors.

1. The raw cost of European infrastructure

European hosting providers such as Hetzner charge 40 to 80% less than AWS for equivalent specs. A 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM server costs ~€5.50 at Hetzner versus ~€70 on AWS (t3.xlarge). And at Hetzner, traffic (20 TB), IPv4 and DDoS protection are included. At AWS, every networking service is billed separately.

2. No hidden networking charges

On AWS, the NAT Gateway alone costs €30 to €100/month before a single byte is transferred. Outbound data transfer is billed at $0.09/GB. Inter-AZ traffic is billed in both directions. These charges, often underestimated at the sizing stage, commonly account for 15 to 25% of the total AWS bill. With the hosting providers Fransys uses, traffic is included in generous allowances (20 to 60 TB/month). There simply is no "network tax".

3. Shared DevOps

This is the biggest saving for startups without a dedicated DevOps team. A senior DevOps engineer costs €70,000 to €110,000/year in France (total employer cost). Even with a part-time freelancer, expect €1,000 to €2,000/month for the routine maintenance of a Kubernetes cluster.

Fransys spreads this cost across its customers: 24/7 monitoring, security updates, certificate management, backups, auto-healing and support are handled by a shared DevOps team. The result: you get the service level of a senior DevOps engineer for a fraction of the cost — because that expertise is shared across the whole customer base.

What the Fransys price includes (and the AWS price does not)

For a fair comparison, you need to list what is included in the Fransys price and comes at an extra cost (in money or in time) on AWS:

• Managed, pre-configured Kubernetes — On AWS, the EKS control plane costs €67/month, and the initial setup (networking, RBAC, ingress, autoscaling) takes several engineer-days. On Fransys, everything is ready in a few clicks through the drag-and-drop interface.
• Built-in CI/CD — Connect your GitHub or GitLab repo and Fransys handles the Docker image build and the deployment. No need to set up CodePipeline, GitHub Actions or ArgoCD.
• 24/7 monitoring and observability — Metrics, dashboards, centralised logs, alerting. On AWS, that means CloudWatch (€0.50/GB of logs ingested) or third-party tools such as Datadog (a significant extra cost).
• Automatic backups — Daily backups of your databases, including point-in-time recovery on PostgreSQL. On AWS, RDS offers backups, but with an additional storage cost.
• Automatic SSL/TLS certificates — Let's Encrypt built in, with automatic renewal. On AWS, ACM is free for public certificates but requires manual configuration with your Load Balancer.
• Kubernetes auto-healing — Crashed pods are restarted automatically. Automatic rollback kicks in if a deployment fails. On AWS, this is native to Kubernetes, but you still have to configure it correctly.
• Production-ready security by default — Every Fransys deployment is configured with security best practices, whatever the setup. No risk of accidentally leaving a security group open to the world.
• Human DevOps support — A real team that watches your infrastructure and steps in when something goes wrong. Not a chatbot.

Taken individually, each of these items looks "minor". Added together, they amount to the daily work of a DevOps engineer — and that work is what the Fransys management fees cover.

When AWS still makes sense

Let's be honest: AWS is not always the wrong choice. There are cases where the AWS premium is justified.

You need very specific managed services. SageMaker for ML, Kinesis for real-time streaming, DynamoDB for global NoSQL, Lambda for pure serverless... If your product depends on proprietary AWS services with no equivalent, migrating makes no sense.

You have to serve users all over the world with minimal latency. AWS covers 30+ regions. The European hosting providers Fransys uses are concentrated in Europe (France, Germany, Finland). For a product with a global audience and strict latency constraints, the AWS network is a real advantage.

You already have a DevOps team and negotiated Reserved Instances. With 1- or 3-year RIs and a team that knows how to optimise the bill, the gap narrows. Large companies with an Enterprise Agreement can obtain significant discounts.

For most European startups and SMEs — those running a classic stack (web app, API, PostgreSQL, Redis) with a mainly European audience — none of these cases apply. And it is precisely for this profile that the cost gap with Fransys is widest.

Flexibility as a bonus: no lock-in, migration built in

One aspect that cost comparisons often overlook: freedom of movement. On AWS, managed services (RDS, ElastiCache, EKS to some extent) create a technical dependency that makes migration expensive. AWS outbound data transfer fees — even though recent exemptions exist for migrations — add a further cost on the way out.

Fransys takes the opposite stance, with three concrete guarantees:

• Full export available — Your Kubernetes manifests, your Helm files, your Docker configurations, your CI/CD: everything can be exported in open standards. If you leave Fransys, you take everything with you.
• Choice of hosting provider — You are not tied to a single vendor. Hetzner, Scaleway, OVH: you choose, and you can switch.
• Built-in migration between providers — Need to move your infrastructure from one European hosting provider to another? Fransys handles that migration directly from the platform, with no manual rebuild.

This flexibility also has an economic impact. It protects you against a vendor's price increases and gives you permanent negotiating leverage. With AWS, once your stack is built around RDS, ElastiCache, SQS and Lambda, migrating costs months of engineering. With Fransys, you stay because it works well and the price is competitive — not because you are trapped.

Key takeaways

On average, Fransys cuts total infrastructure cost by 55% compared with AWS, once AWS hidden charges and the cost of DevOps management are included. The saving ranges from 44% for a small MVP to more than 70% for a growing startup with Kubernetes needs.

The gap comes from three cumulative factors: European hosting providers' pricing, 40-80% cheaper; the absence of hidden networking charges (NAT Gateway, data transfer); and the DevOps cost being shared through the Fransys management fees.

The Fransys price includes what costs money or time on AWS: managed Kubernetes, CI/CD, 24/7 monitoring, backups, SSL, auto-healing and human support. No surprises on the invoice.

Choosing Fransys does not mean giving up flexibility. Helm export, choice of hosting provider, built-in migration between providers: you keep full control with no vendor lock-in.

Want to check these figures against your own setup? Create a free Fransys account with €5 of credit included, no credit card required. Deploy your stack on the hosting provider of your choice and compare it with your current AWS bill. If you are migrating existing infrastructure, our DevOps team will help you assess the potential savings and plan the transition.