Dear Customer,
We need to talk about Scaleway Elements prices. Again. But this time to harmonize with the ultimate pricing model in line with industry standards: per hour (on-demand), dynamic pricing (SPOT), short-term (pre-emptive) and long-term (reserved).
What?
Because your time is precious, here are the hard facts and numbers that will come into effect on November 1, 2020:
monthly capping will no longer apply
hourly prices will be reduced for the following Elements:
- Bare Metal, Load Balancer, and Block, Object and Cold storage by 33%
- Managed Databases by 13%
all customers with a non-zero October 2020 bill will receive a non-cumulative 25% discount on Elements for 12 months starting on November 1, 2020
important reminder: despite all these changes, our pricing remains twice as cost-effective as our main competitors.
Why?
Now if you have some time, here is the rationale: as you know, on-demand public cloud pricing is complex because of the many components that drive a full-stack application around 3 types of commodities: compute, storage and transit. Your invoice is calculated at the end of the month depending on what you have used and for how long. This is different from dedicated server or VPS pricing where resources are reserved and pre-paid for the month to come. Six years ago, Scaleway was launched with a hybrid model, using a capped number of hours per month as a proxy for monthly pricing - logical at the time for typical VPS usage.
Monthly capping is no longer relevant, in fact we are the last cloud provider to use this structure. This model causes many constraints on top of creating negative usage patterns from users who no longer need the resources after hitting the cap, which in turn is energy-inefficient. It is incompatible with a dynamic cloud and multi-cloud approach. In short, this prevents us from growing and offering a better public cloud to all. It also prevents us from introducing two frequently requested features: spot pricing (dynamic and volatile if you need this sort of arbitrage) and reserved instances (which will be paid ahead of time, for a longer period of time, monthly or yearly). Spoiler alert: we are actively working on both!
How?
So capping has to go. It will be gone on November 1, 2020. This will have zero impact for most clients whose architecture is fully orchestrated and elastic. Mechanically, it will impact others, but it varies wildly. To compensate for this change to our pricing policy, we will lower the pricing of Bare Metal, Load Balancer, and Block, Object and Cold storage by 33% and Managed Databases by 13%. With these updates, the impact to some of you will in fact be highly beneficial, for example on expanding storage use cases.
And to thank you for your loyalty, we will also be applying a non-cumulative 25% discount to all our active customers for 1 year on all Elements invoices. By active, we mean customers with a non-zero Elements bill for October 2020. Tip: tell your friends, because if they sign up now and start deploying in October, they will automatically get a 25% discount for the year to come, just like you!
We are convinced that these changes will bring you more flexibility, efficiency and transparency when scaling your business with us. We also know that we remain very competitive, in many cases twice as cost-effective as our main competitors.
While I have your attention, I thought that you would appreciate this one more thing: in November, and by popular demand, we will be introducing a disruptive entry level DEV1-XS with a price to die for ;-) Stay tuned!
Should you have any questions regarding these changes, do not hesitate to call us on +1 (616) 712-9471 or +33-1 84 13 00 50 for further information. You can also consult our FAQs section here.
Best regards,
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Yann Lechelle
CEO
Scaleway, the cloud that makes sense