Contabo free credits: None

Contabo offers no free credit and no free trial. As of 2026-08-21, its VPS plans start at EUR 4.40 per month, and servers are provisioned after the first payment. There is no signup grant, promo balance, or evaluation period on the official pages. This page records that negative finding with a date.

Pay first, then provision

Contabo’s flow is strictly paid: choose a plan, pay, then receive the server. There is no mechanism to test the platform at $0, which puts Contabo in the same no-credit group as Hetzner and Exoscale. Where Hetzner at least documents a promo code system, Contabo’s official pages describe none.

Why people look here anyway

Contabo’s appeal is raw specs per euro: its entry plans list several vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM for the price of a 1 vCPU droplet elsewhere. Whether that trade holds up, including the promotional-rate fine print and setup fees, is examined in detail in Contabo vs DigitalOcean, which puts both entry plans side by side. The short version: the headline EUR 4.40 is a multi-year promotional rate, so read the term length before comparing it against per-second billing.

What to use instead

If you want to evaluate a provider before any money changes hands, two tracked entries fund a real month. Civo gives new accounts a $250 signup credit valid for 31 calendar days, one of the largest verified grants in this catalog, though resources stay blocked until a valid card is verified and prepaid cards are not accepted. OVHcloud, another European provider, runs a US$200 Public Cloud trial for one month from your first project, with one sharp edge: once the credit is used, further usage bills automatically to your payment method. Neither matches Contabo’s raw specs per euro on paid terms, but both answer the question Contabo will not: what the platform is like at $0.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Contabo if you have already decided to pay for a big always-on box and want maximum specs per euro; skip it entirely if you want to try before paying, in which case DigitalOcean’s $5 signup credit at least funds a short test. Every grant I track, including negative findings like this one, is on the credits index.