STACKIT 4: STACKIT Pricing vs AWS — What You Actually Save
STACKIT’s main value lies in data sovereignty and compliance, not just lower cost. But the two are not at odds with each other. For standard workloads, STACKIT pricing is meaningfully lower than AWS across the services that typically make up most of a cloud bill.
This post uses percentages instead of specific figures. Cloud pricing changes regularly, and any exact numbers published today can look outdated quite quickly. Treat these percentages as directional guidance, then check STACKIT’s current pricing pages and compare them directly with your AWS bills before building a migration case.
Compute: Compute Engine vs EC2 STACKIT
Compute Engine instances are typically priced around 30 to 45% below equivalent AWS EC2 instance families with the same vCPU and RAM profile. That difference tends to hold across both general-purpose and compute-focused configurations.
STACKIT uses hourly billing, with per-second granularity for instances that run for less than an hour. Stopped instances do not continue to generate compute charges. Storage is billed separately and clearly.
For workloads with predictable patterns, such as development and staging environments that only run during working hours, or batch jobs that run overnight, that finer grained billing can reduce waste compared with an EC2 setup where reserved instances often encourage keeping things running all the time whether they are needed or not.
Object Storage vs S3
STACKIT Object Storage pricing is broadly in line with S3 Standard when you look only at storage. The more noticeable difference comes with data transfer, which is where many European cloud providers have an advantage.
AWS charges for data egress from S3, with rates that vary by destination and volume. At scale, those charges can become a significant part of the total bill. STACKIT does not charge egress fees for data moving within the STACKIT network, such as traffic between Object Storage and Compute Engine or Kubernetes clusters in the same region.
For data-heavy workloads such as media processing, analytics pipelines, and backup or restore operations, removing those internal egress charges can reduce the storage and transfer portion of the bill by around 20 to 35%.
Managed Databases vs RDS
STACKIT’s Flex database model lets you configure CPU, RAM, and storage independently, which makes it easier to match resources to the actual workload. That is different from RDS, where fixed instance types often mean paying for capacity you do not fully use.
For comparable specifications, STACKIT-managed databases such as PostgreSQL Flex and MariaDB Flex are typically around 40 to 55% lower in cost than similar RDS setups. In practice, the real saving can be higher again because the Flex model avoids paying for the next fixed tier above what you actually need.
MongoDB Flex is priced similarly against Amazon DocumentDB, and Redis on STACKIT comes in below ElastiCache at equivalent cache sizes.
Kubernetes: Control Plan Cost
STACKIT Kubernetes Engine, or SKE, does not charge separately for the control plane. AWS EKS does, at roughly €0.10 per cluster per hour, which works out at about €73 per cluster per month.
If you run separate clusters for production, staging, and development, those EKS control plane fees add up quickly. On STACKIT, that cost is not there. The more clusters you run, the more noticeable the difference becomes.
Overall Bill Comparison
For a standard web application stack made up of compute, object storage, a managed database, a Kubernetes cluster, and internal data transfer, businesses moving from AWS to STACKIT will often see total cloud spend fall by around 35 to 50%.
The exact savings depend on your service mix, your usage patterns, and how well your current AWS estate has already been right-sized. In most cases, compute and database pricing drive the biggest reduction. For data heavy workloads, the removal of internal egress charges can also make a real difference.
Where to Be Careful
STACKIT does not currently offer a direct equivalent to AWS Savings Plans or Reserved Instance pricing. If you are already committed to long-term reservations on AWS, you need to factor in the remaining commitment, any exit cost, and the timing of a migration into the model.
For workloads that rely heavily on AWS Lambda or other serverless services, STACKIT’s equivalents are less mature. Moving those workloads into containers and running them on SKE is possible, but it does add complexity to the migration.
The most reliable way to compare costs is to take the last three months of AWS Cost Explorer data and map each service line to its STACKIT equivalent. STACKIT’s pricing calculator supports this kind of modelling.
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