Interesting fact, it seems that their price catalog is a PDF https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240814_STA... and not the usual price calculator other providers offer

That feels on-brand for an organization that's still selling to each customer rather than providing a self service offering. If you need to talk to a person to get their services they'll surely be helping you understand your pricing.

Pricing calculator was easy to find https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...

Menu -> Compute Engine -> Pricing

> You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first.

This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner.

For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers.

So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.

Even the article doesn't claim any connection between Lidl and Gaia-X.