Scaleway 7: Getting Started with Scaleway – Free Credits, Trials, and First Steps
The earlier posts in this series covered the data sovereignty case, the service comparison, the cost picture, and the migration process. This final post focuses on the practical starting point: how to create an account, what credits are available, and how to begin evaluating Scaleway against your current AWS setup.
Creating a Scaleway Account
Scaleway offers two account types: Personal and Business. If you are planning to run production workloads or give a team access, Business is the right option.
A new Scaleway Business account comes with €100 in free credit at signup. That credit can be used across any Scaleway service, and it is not just a short lived trial. It is real usable credit that gives you room to run actual workloads and evaluate performance before making a commitment.
Creating an account only requires an email address, a business name, and a payment method for verification. The card is not charged until the free credit has been used up. The signup process takes just a few minutes, and there is no sales call needed to get access to the platform.
The Startup Programme
If you are building a new product or running a startup that has not yet raised significant funding, Scaleway’s startup programme can give you more credits on top of the initial €100.
The programme has two tiers: Early Stage for pre seed and seed stage companies, and Growth for later stage startups. Early Stage offers substantial compute and storage credits. Growth offers significantly more, enough to support a meaningful production workload without infrastructure spend for the early period of use.
Applications are reviewed by Scaleway. Eligibility depends on the stage of the company, its funding position, and the intended use case. The programme is aimed at startups building software products, rather than services businesses simply trying to lower cloud costs.
First Steps: Spinning Up a Virtual Instance
The quickest way to evaluate Scaleway compute is to create a Virtual Instance through the Scaleway console. If you are already familiar with AWS EC2, the process will feel very familiar and the concepts map across quite naturally.
- Log in to the Scaleway console at console.scaleway.com.
- Create a new Project, which is broadly equivalent to an AWS account within an organisation.
- Go to Compute → Instances → Create Instance.
- Choose a region, whether Paris, Amsterdam, or Warsaw, then select an instance type and an OS image.
- Assign an SSH key and click Create.
- The instance should be up and running within 60 to 90 seconds.
The PLAY2 range, such as DEV1-S and DEV1-M, works well for evaluation and development. For production workloads, the PRO2 or GP1 range is usually the better fit.
Connecting to Object Storage
Scaleway Object Storage is S3 compatible, so you can connect to it using the AWS CLI by setting the endpoint URL to the Scaleway Object Storage endpoint for the region you choose.
Creating a bucket and uploading files with the AWS CLI or rclone works without any code changes. In most cases, the only things that need to change are the endpoint URL and credentials. That makes the initial evaluation very straightforward: point your existing tooling at a Scaleway bucket and confirm that everything behaves as expected.
Setting Up a Managed Database
Scaleway Managed Database is available in the console under Managed Services → Databases. Creating a PostgreSQL or MySQL instance follows much the same pattern as RDS: choose an instance type, a storage size, a database version, and a region.
Connection credentials are available as soon as the instance is created. You can use your existing database client tools to connect and verify that everything is working. Benchmarking performance against your RDS equivalent is also a sensible evaluation step.
Terraform and Infrastructure as Code
Scaleway provides an official Terraform provider. If your current AWS infrastructure is managed with Terraform, migrating the configuration usually means replacing AWS provider resources with their Scaleway equivalents. The Scaleway Terraform documentation covers the supported resources clearly.
Pulumi and Ansible are also supported. For teams using other infrastructure as code tools, the Scaleway API is well documented and follows a straightforward REST model.
Getting Help
Scaleway’s documentation covers its services in depth. The community Slack workspace is active and full of technically capable people. For production workloads that need SLA backed response times, enterprise support plans are also available.
If you are planning a migration from AWS and want experienced guidance on the process, whether that is service mapping, data migration, timeline planning, or compliance considerations, iWorks can help. We have worked on AWS to Scaleway migrations for clients in Ireland and across Europe, and we can help you structure the project in a way that reduces risk and avoids unnecessary downtime.
Summary: Why Scaleway
- 100% European owned, with no CLOUD Act exposure.
- SEAL 3 certified — legally outside US jurisdiction, with no CLOUD Act exposure.
- EU Commission’s €180 million sovereign cloud contract in April 2026.
- A full-stack cloud platform covering compute, storage, databases, Kubernetes, messaging, monitoring, and DNS.
- Significantly cheaper than AWS for most standard workloads.
- No egress fees within the Scaleway network.
- A free Kubernetes control plane.
- €100 in free credit for new Business accounts.
- Nine availability zones across Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw.
This series has covered the case for moving, service comparison, legal risk, cost picture, migration process, and compliance implications. The next step is an account and a conversation. We are happy to help with both.
Ready to Have a Conversation?
If you have read this series and recognised your organisation in it, the next step is simple. Get in touch. We will have a chat, ask a few questions, and give you an honest view of what is involved. No charge. No obligation.
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