Scaleway Pricing & Billing Policy

How am I billed for Scaleway services?

All our on-demand cloud resources (compute, storage, IPs, …) are billed per hour.

Except for support subscriptions , which are proposed under a plan pricing scheme, and are billed for a whole month at a time.

Which resources are billed?

Five resource classes are currently billed:

• Compute instances,
• IP addresses,
• Volume storage,
• Snapshots,
• Support subscriptions’flat-fee component.

The following resources are currently not invoiced but will be soon:

• Support subscriptions’ variable rate,

IMPORTANT: Each of these un-billed resources will be charged in the upcoming months. An exact date is not known yet, but this notice will be updated once details are sorted out.

Is there a difference in pricing depending on the geographical region?

No, prices stay the same regardless of the location of your resources.

Are the prices VAT exclusive?

Prices announced on our site exclude all taxes .

When are invoices issued?

Invoices are Issued each month.

Our reference billing period is the definition of a calendar month in the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) timezone.

As for payments, they occur in the first few days of a month, once the invoice is properly Issued.

How do I take advantage of the reduced monthly price?

We advertise two sets of prices for each resource class:

1. an hourly rate,
2. a monthly fixed price.

Here is how the two prices articulate with each other:

• Phase 1: The resource is billed by the hour. Each additional hour of usage increase the total price of the resource.
• Phase 2: Once a running resource reaches the cap of 500 hours of continuous usage, the monthly rate is applied. The resource’s price is frozen to the fixed price for the rest of the month and doesn’t increase your costs.

The monthly cap counter of each resource is reset at the start of a month.

How much is a server?

All compute instances are billed depending on how long you are running them, at either:

• an hourly rate (price given per 60 minutes),
• or a monthly fixed price.

Here are the rates per instance types:

IMPORTANT: The price given here is the raw, un-bundled unit price of a compute instance. Running a compute instance alone doesn’t make any sense. You need additional resources (IPs, storage, …) to use the instance as a proper server.

Why is the compute price lower in this FAQ compared to the one advertised?

A standalone compute instance is of no use if you can’t access it from the network, or without a disk from which to boot from. You need to attach IP address and storage resources to use your instance in the real world.

Prices for a C1 server announced on our pricing page include an additional IP and volume. The total cost of this package is reached by adding up prices from each individual resource:

Each resource class you’re consuming under this package will be billed and featured separately on your invoice.

Am I billed when my server is powered off?

Stopping a server (off status) is not enough to stop billing since the resource stays allocated to your account. You need to archive the server or eventually delete it if you do not want to be billed for it.

IMPORTANT: Beware that powering off, archiving or deleting a server keeps its associated volumes and reserved IP addresses allocated to your account, for which you will be invoiced. Be careful to properly stop or remove these dependent resources to prevent any surprising over-consumption.

How much are IP addresses?

Dynamic IPs and reserved IPs are priced the same, at:

• an hourly rate of €0.002 per 60 minutes,
• or a monthly fixed price of €0.99 per month.

How much is a volume?

Volumes are billed depending on their size and how long you keep them:

• an hourly rate of €0.002 Euros per 50 gigabyte-hour,
• or a monthly fixed price of €1.00 per 50 gigabyte-month.
• The volume of a START1-XS instance is billed at an hourly rate of €0.001 Euros per 25 gigabyte-hour,
• or a monthly fixed price of €0.50 per 25 gigabyte-month.

How much is a snapshot?

Snapshots are billed depending on their size and how long you keep them:

• an hourly rate of €0.00004 per gigabyte-hour,
• or a monthly fixed price of €0.02 per gigabyte-month.

Should I pay to use your images?

No, images from our ImageHub are free.

If images are free in themselves, you still need resources to run them on (compute instance, storage, IPs…). These resources are billed as usual.

Images or Volumes created from a Snapshot are billed like regular snapshots.

When does the billing is started and stopped?

Here is a detailed list of what is considered as start and stop billing events for each resource class:

Each uninterrupted period between a start and a stop billing event will be considered as a unique resource. It’s the number of these unique resources seen within a month that is displayed in the consumption table of your invoice.

How can I estimate my current costs?

Once you start consuming resources, a Draft invoice will be produced for the current month, and you’ll receive a notification by mail.

This invoice is then regularly updated through the month to mirror your usages and associated costs.

Where are my invoices?

Your current and past invoices are all available from the control panel:

1. Log in to the Control Panel.
2. Open the drop-down menu on your account name and click on “My Account”.
3. In the “Billing” section, select the invoice to view.

How to read my invoice?

Here is an example of a typical invoice:

It reads like this:

1. Your account information:
   • Recipient name
   • Customer unique ID (i.e. your organization’s UUID)
   • Email address
   • Phone number (if provided)
   • VAT number (if set)
   • Postal address of your fiscal residence
2. Invoice’s issuer (us, i.e. Scaleway, a business unit of the Online.net company).
3. Your unique invoice number.
4. Invoice metadata:
   • Status of your invoice
   • Billing period (always covers a full month)
   • Date of invoice’s last update
5. Consumption table of resources.
6. Invoice’s grand totals:
   • Discount details (if applicable): un-discounted total, discounted (and untaxed) total.
   • Tax details: VAT amount and rate in Euros, VAT of non-eurozone countries in local currency, and total taxes.
   • Total due for usage in the month.

How can I change the recipient name?

The legal name of the customer, recipient of the invoice, depends on the B2B or B2C status of the organization.

As such, the name featured on the invoice ends up being the organization or the user who created the organization (i.e. signed-up for a Scaleway account).

Make sure to provide the correct recipient name as well as the account type (B2C or B2B), as this information can not be modified.

How can I change my postal address?

The postal address is a piece of required billing information as it is used to compute taxes depending on your place of purchase.

Setting up your postal address is part of the sign-up process, and you can’t start consuming resources until you provide it.

Once in place, the postal address can’t be changed freely from your account page. This is a protective measure to lower fraud because the address has fiscal implications.

If for some reason you’d like to change or fix your billing address, please open a support ticket and tell us about the reason of your change and the new address.

Will my updated information be taken into account?

Any changed administrative data like recipient name and postal address will be applied during the next update cycle to your current invoice as long as it is not Issued yet.

When are my invoices refreshed?

We’re trying our best to provide estimates of your current month’s usages. This process is not real-time (yet). In the meantime, your consumption and administrative details might not be perfectly reported on your invoice.

This is expected and temporary. The invoice will self-correct if you let it refresh itself after a couple of update cycles.

In doubt, check the Last update field on your PDF. If it’s set in the past, precluding an action, then everything’s normal: your invoice hasn’t seen yet the effect of said action.

This situation only affects Draft invoices. Once a month ends and the invoice gets Issued, all the underlying details are locked-down to make the invoice non-repudiable.

How to read the consumption table?

The consumption of each resource class is detailed by five columns:

1. Services & operations: List resource classes grouped by service (purple lines), variants (gray lines) and operations (white lines). At the lowest operation level, we provide the total number of unique resources seen within a month.
2. Period: The aggregated date range over which the first resource of that kind was started and the last one stopped. If there are resources still running the end date of the period gets aligned to the last update, rounded to the resource time granularity.
3. Billed quantity: The total usage of consumed resources. This quantity is adjusted to include the monthly reduced pricing. As such it might not strictly match your raw usage, in which case the equivalent discount is displayed below.
4. Untaxed unit price: The unit price applying to the billed quantity. Doesn’t include taxes.
5. Total: The total price, without taxes, of your resource consumption. Also grouped by service, variants and operations.

What does the status of my invoice mean?

The status of an invoice can be:

• Draft: Only concerns invoices from the current month, with resources still running.

• Stopped: Same as Draft but no resources are still running over the corresponding billing period. All invoices for previous months not Issued yet ends up in this state.

• Outdated: Same as Draft and Stopped, only that we know for sure underlying usages have been updated, but the invoice doesn’t take them into account yet. A refresh of the invoice is imminent.

• Incomplete: Generally means billing details or payment information are missing or incorrect.

IMPORTANT: If you find your invoice in the Incomplete state, you should take action as soon as possible. Fix your profile as your account is in danger of being terminated for administrative reasons.

• Issued: The invoice is final, has a unique number, and is non-repudiable. A payment request is being processed.

• Paid: The invoice has been fully paid, we received your payment. Everything is in order.

IMPORTANT: All consumptions and amounts are considered as estimates, but in Issued and Paid states, for which the invoice is frozen and immutable.

How can I be billed for 3 resources of each class but only have 1 server running?

Counters on your dashboard effectively show that you currently have 1 server running (i.e. 1 compute instance, 1 IP address, and 1 volume):

On the other hand, the consumption table of your invoice features 3 resources of each class:

This difference appears because the resources reported on your invoice consist of the total number of unique resources seen within the month. Unlike your dashboard, which displays the instantaneous value of currently running resources.

The other resources referred to in the invoice are most of the time contiguous sessions resulting from several start-stop cycles. If you’re looking for the underlying details, see how we account for start and stop billing events.

Why is my invoice reporting 5 server resources while I only ever used the same unique server?

Same thing as above: you started and stopped your server 5 times which produced 5 server sessions.

A session is a continuous run of a server instance, and that’s what we account as a resource on your invoice. This means stopping then starting the same server will produce two sessions, and as a result, two resources will be shown on your invoice.

See how we account for start and stop billing events for more details.

Why my resource's start and stop dates are misreported?

Each resource class possess its own temporal granularity and their usage’s start and stop dates are aligned to these:

Let’s take for example a resource whose granularity is hour, like IP reservations. If you start the reservation at 04:13:34, its usage start date will be rounded down to the closest hour at 04:00:00 in UTC timezone.

Same thing when a resource is stopped. A cancellation of IP reservation at 21:32:47 will see its corresponding usage stop date rounded up to the closest inclusive hour at 21:59:59 in UTC timezone.

As a result, you can’t consume less than the natural granularity of a resource. A start of an IP reservation immediately followed by a stop will account for a whole indivisible hour of usage.

These quantized, rounded timed events are those displayed on your invoices and explain the perceived discrepancies between your action and their reported dates.

Why is the billing quantity inflated compared to the period?

Let’s starts with this invoice consumption table:

Looking at the underlying raw telemetry, the C1 session started at 2015-10-05 18:40:35+0000 and was stopped at 2015-10-05 18:49:02+0000. Which is reported on your invoice under the October 5, 2015 at 6:40:00 PM +0000 → October 5, 2015 at 6:49:59 PM +0000 time range, because of the resource time granularity.

Now if we take the time range quantized to the minute, it effectively accounts for 10 plain minutes of continuous C1 usage. These 10 minutes are referred to as the raw quantity.

The price of C1 compute instances are not attached to this raw quantity but to what is called a bundled quantity. This quantity is derived from the raw quantity, but quantized, at the resource level, to the unit quantity of the resource class.

That’s how by the way we are in a position of billing a sliding window of 1 hour instead of slots of indivisible hours.

In the case of C1, the unit quantity is of 60 minutes. As a result, you should be effectively invoiced for 60 minutes of usages. So why the 300 reported minutes instead of 60? At the hourly price of €0.002, it should cost you €0.002 × 1 hour = €0.002.

The thing is, we can’t feature an invoice line below the currency precision (2 decimals for Euro). So we’re rounding up the total price to €0.01 to make our accountants and auditors happy.

Now invoicing good practices requires us to explicitly have an untaxed invoice line total made up from a quantity multiplied by a unit price. As we don’t want to alter the unit price, we adjust the quantity until we reach the total of the line. This adjusted quantity is what we call the billed quantity and is what’s featured on your invoice.

The same mechanism applies for the IP and storage resource classes, only that the time granularity is different.

All in all, the reason you are noticing these discrepancies is because you are operating at the lower edge of the consumption domain. Only tiny invoices below the currency decimal precision amplify the effect of scalar quantization.

IMPORTANT: Note that the raw quantity and bundled quantity are not featured on your PDF invoice to make it more readable. However, these two intermediate quantities are going to be exposed in billing’s API soon.

I just deleted all my resources. Why my costs are still increasing?

We’re trying our best to provide estimates of your current month’s usages. This process is not real-time (yet). Your actions on resources need to percolate from the hardware to the invoice level.

While events propagate, the consumed quantity on invoices might not be perfectly in sync with the state of your resources. Most of the time you’ll not notice the delay.

But in some rare cases, you’ll observe an artificially inflated invoice. That’s because a resource’s stop event has not yet been received or accounted for. The pricing algorithm will then report the resource as still running, thus increasing costs.

This is expected and temporary. The invoice will self-correct if you let it refresh itself after a couple of update cycles, while it’s catching up with new resource events.

I didn't use any resource this month. Will I get an invoice?

No. Invoices are only generated once you start consuming resources.

I have a 6004 error code when I tried to pay my invoice, what should I do?

In most cases, you get a 6004 error if you try to process a payment too many times in a short time frame. The 6004 error is generated by our payment provider to prevent abuses and induce a soft-lock on your account that prevent you to add a new card and process payment for the next 24 hours. Note that this period is extended every time you try to pay during the soft-lock period time frame and will be pushed further

If you face this situation, please make sure to contact your bank and confirm that they are not blocking the payment on their side and then re-try one the soft-lock period is over. If it’s not the case, we encourage you to try processing your payment with another card after the soft-lock period.

I have a `Basic` account. Why did you send me an invoice anyway?

You are confusing the support service level with our server bundles.

You think you have a Basic account. But what you’re referring to is, in fact, a basic-level support subscription. And indeed, the Basic support level is for free. But any resources consumed under this plan are still invoiced.

How additional taxes are charged?

Because we’re a European company, we are required to charge VAT on all purchases made by European individual customers (B2C).

The appropriate VAT rate is automatically applied on your invoice depending on your fiscal residence. Just make sure your administrative details on your profile (postal address, recipient name, phone number, …) are in order.

No other additional taxes but European VAT is collected. If you are not located in one of the 28 member states of the European Union, no other tax will be added to your invoice, per application of EU laws.

I am a European company, how to recover VAT?

European B2B customers are exempted from VAT, as long as they provide a registered VAT number. Just fill-in your VAT registry number on your profile and your invoice will be updated accordingly.

If you fail to provide a valid VAT number, you’ll be considered as a regular individual customer (B2C) and the local rate will apply.

When are invoices `Issued`?

At the start of each new month, all invoices from the previous month are fully updated and ends up either in the Stopped or Incomplete state.

Then we double check the consumption of each resource and make sure all usages are in sync and accounted for. Next, we issue the definitive invoice of the previous month.

IMPORTANT: Once Issued, an invoice is non-repudiable and it is content can’t be altered. Amounts are definitive and can’t be revoked. If you’d like to contest the billing of your resources, please act before invoices are Issued, as we are not in capacity of offering a refund .

How can my invoice be already `Issued`, while the current month as not ended yet?

Billing periods are aligned to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) timezone.

So if you live in a place whose timezone is set before UTC (i.e. western zones, with a negative UTC-XX:XX offset), the billing month might end up to 12 hours before the end of your local perceived month.

How do I know I have new invoices?

You’ll receive a mail notification each time a new Draft invoice is created for the current month with an estimation of your consumption :

Another notification is send when an invoice from last month gets Issued and is due:

Can I specify the email address to send invoices to?

Unfortunately not. But all mail notifications related to the billing are send from the following identity: Scaleway billing <billing-noreply@scaleway.com>. Which makes it easier to re-route them with any standard email client or server.

Why did I get an email telling me I have issues on my invoice?

You probably misread the following notification email:

Issued is part of the accounting vocabulary and means your last month invoice is final, non-repudiable.

For details, see invoice states explanation from this FAQ.

Why did you not replied to my emails?

If you replied to a mail notification we sent you, then that expected. These are sent from billing-noreply@scaleway.com. See the noreply there? It means nobody on this planet is going to read your reply.

If you need support by direct emails, please subscribe to the appropriate support plan .

Where is the billing API documentation?

Our Billing’s API is not public yet. We plan to release it in the coming months.

How can I pay my invoices?

We automatically initiate one, and one only, payment transaction from your active credit card at the start of each new month, right after invoices are Issued.

What forms of payment do you accept?

We currently support credit and debit cards from the following networks:

• Visa
• MasterCard
• American Express

When more than one card is registered in your account, you can designate which one should be billed by default.

IMPORTANT: Due to a large number of fraudulent sign-ups using virtual, prepaid or electron cards, we currently do not accept these payment methods. When using one of these card types for payment, you might end up with a failed payment and unpaid bill.

Do you support any other form of payment?

Not yet, but we’re investigating other options.

How do you store my credit card information?

Credit card data are sensitive data which are required by law to be securely stored.

To comply with such international and local regulations, we rely on an external payment service that is fully certified under the following framework:

• PCI DSS v3.0
• VISA trusted third party
• ACPR accreditation.

Why are you charging me on credit card registration?

When you register a card, we initiate what is called an authorization charge of €2. This is a dummy transaction to check the validity of the card. While it has an amount, this transaction never ends up by a charge.

This procedure is quite common in the world of payment processors but is not standardized. Depending on your bank, this transaction is going to be reported differently on your bank account statement.

Some banks will show you a debit of €2 followed by a credit of the same amount at a later time. Some other banks will never show the transaction at all.

To know when the authorization charge will be credited back, please contact your bank. They are in control of the execution speed, and from our experience, it takes from 1 to 3 weeks for the transaction to materialize in your statements.

Whatever happens, the €2 are never charged, nor debited from your bank account.

These limitations only affect authorization charges. Monthly payments of your invoices are not going to suffer these constraints.

Can I use the same card on different accounts?

No. A card is strictly personal and can’t be shared between accounts. A card is associated with one account and one only, forever.

Can I register several credit cards?

You can register as many cards as you need.

I have several credit cards. Which one will be charged?

The selected, active card is going to be your preferred mean of payment.

Anytime we’ll initiate a transaction, only the one you selected will be considered.

If your active credit card expires, is rejected or became invalid, we’ll never fall-back to another one. Even if the others you registered are perfectly fine. That way, you stay in total control of which payment method takes priority.

How can I pay in another currency?

Euro is our reference currency of accounting and as such, all prices and invoices are given in Euros.

This doesn’t prevent you to pay in the natural currency of your active credit card. The conversion from your currency to Euros should be transparently handled by your bank.

IMPORTANT: Additional currency exchange fees might be charged by your bank.

Do you offer refunds?

Issued invoices are non-repudiable and immutable. We can’t offer a refund on them.

Still, if we found out that you were incorrectly billed for resources you haven’t used, we can offer you a discount on your next invoice.

Will I get charged for an invoice of €0?

With discounts applied to your invoice, you might end up with a grand total of €0. In this case, your invoice is going to be Issued as usual but no payment will be initiated on your active credit card.

How much time do I have to pay an invoice?

Once an invoice is Issued, you have 7 days to pay it (see section 6.3 of our Terms of Service).

As a reminder, the due date of payment is displayed on each invoice once Issued.

IMPORTANT: If you are unable to settle your invoice after the due date, your account is going to be suspended and your resources unreachable.

Can you spread the payment over time? Over several methods of payment?

No, the total due for a month is not allowed to be split. Your invoice must be paid in full, with a single transaction.

How many months can you purchase in advance?

Because your monthly invoice depends on your consumption profile, we have no way to predict your consumption in advance. To avoid managing a credit balance and keep the billing simple, we do not accept any purchase in advance.

How can I fix a failed payment?

Once your invoice is Issued, an automatic payment from your active credit card is triggered by our system. If the transaction succeeds, your invoice is now fully paid.

But this transaction might fail, most of the time because of your credit card expired, was rejected or has insufficient funds.

Whatever the reason, we’re not going to re-initiate the failed transaction after the first automatic attempt. Only you have the power to retry a failed payment.

In this situation, you’ll be notified by mail of a payment failure, and invited to initiate a new transaction from your account.

If after several manual attempts you can’t manage to trigger a successful payment, you have the alternative of adding another credit card. But don’t forget to make this card the active one and re-initiate a payment transaction.

IMPORTANT: Don’t waste time when you are notified about a failed payment. You are required to pay before the due date. If you can’t manage to make a successful payment transaction, contact our support team and/or your bank.

What happens if I do not pay my invoice?

Any unpaid invoice triggers the automatic closing of your account and the deletion of your resources after a couple of days.

If your resources are garbage-collected, the account in itself is not closed and might be re-open.

How can I clear outstanding invoices?

Some accounts might have been locked-down and still have unpaid invoices attached to them. These accounts can be re-opened by sending a payment for each outstanding invoice.

As for failed payments, login to your account, and click on the link on top of your dashboard, you’ll be redirected to a list of all outstanding invoices waiting for a payment:

Why I can't find you in my bank statement?

All charges we initiate are going to appear on your bank account statement under the SCALEWAY label.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for American Express accounts, for which our payment requests will bear the ONLINE~SAS PARIS label. This refers to Online.net, Scaleway’s parent company, but Scaleway really is behind these transactions. We’re currently working on this tiny glitch so in the future our own label will be used instead.

What's your favorite town?

Billings, Montana.