Out Plane vs sota.io: EU Data Centers, Delaware LLC — the CLOUD Act Doesn't Care Where the Servers Are

Most of the jurisdiction gaps we've written about go one direction: a platform picks an EU data center region while the company itself stays incorporated in the US (Railway, Render, Fly.io) or somewhere with no adequacy relationship to the EU at all (InstaPods, incorporated in India). Out Plane is the same gap from a slightly different angle, and worth covering because the marketing runs directly counter to the legal paperwork: the homepage carries an EU flag and a "GDPR Compliant" badge, and its own privacy policy says workloads are hosted primarily in the EU — but the company behind it is a plain Delaware LLC, and its own Terms say so in one sentence.

What Out Plane is

Out Plane positions itself as a "next-generation cloud platform for developers" — deploy from a GitHub repo or a container image, per-second/per-minute metered billing, managed Postgres bundled in. Its site lists partnerships with AWS, Cloudflare, Redis, and Neon, and its own blog post comparing itself to Railway leads with a bigger trial credit ($20 vs. Railway's $5) and finer-grained billing.

That February 2026 blog post also describes a "permanent [and] free" Hobby tier, "supporting up to three running instances." Checking Out Plane's own pricing page as of this writing (August 2026), that tier is gone: the FAQ answers "No" outright to the question of a free plan and states "plans start at $9 a month." Whether that's a deliberate product change or an inconsistency between an old post and the current page, the two don't agree — worth knowing if you're evaluating Out Plane based on search results that surface the older post.

Pricing, as it stands today

Out Plane's current structure is a base plan fee plus metered compute, not a single flat number:

Compute is billed separately, per minute, across eight fixed instance sizes:

There's no instance sized exactly at the 2 vCPU / 2 GB benchmark we use across these comparisons — the closest available tier above that spec is op-46 (2 vCPU / 4 GB) at $36.50/mo. Running that on the Starter plan works out to roughly $36.50/mo all-in once the $9 included credit offsets the $9 base fee — more than 4x sota.io's target price point once GA pricing lands, for a spec with double the RAM we'd be comparing against.

Managed PostgreSQL is included on every plan per Out Plane's own FAQ, including Starter — a genuine point of parity with sota.io. Redis is not managed the same way: per the same FAQ, "Redis included, runs as an ordinary application from a container image alongside the rest of your services" — meaning you deploy and operate it yourself inside your own compute allocation, not a provisioned managed service with its own line item.

The jurisdiction question

Out Plane's own Terms name the operating entity directly: "Out Plane LLC", registered at 131 Continental Dr, Suite 305, Newark, DE 19713, US — a standard Delaware registered-agent address. The governing-law clause is unambiguous: "These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles," with disputes falling to Delaware state and federal courts.

At the same time, Out Plane's Privacy Policy states: "We primarily host platform workloads and managed databases on infrastructure located in the European Union." Its own blog names five data-center locations: Nuremberg, Helsinki, Ashburn (Virginia, US), Hillsboro (Oregon, US), and Singapore — so "primarily EU" sits alongside two US regions and one in Asia, not an EU-only footprint. For personal-data transfers outside the EEA/UK, the policy points to "an adequacy decision or the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses" — the standard GDPR Chapter V mechanism — but the sub-processor list itself isn't published; the policy says only that "a current list is available on request."

None of that changes who the CLOUD Act reaches. The statute (18 U.S.C. §2713) compels a company subject to US jurisdiction to produce data it controls, regardless of where the servers physically sit — it attaches to the entity, not the data center. Out Plane LLC, as a Delaware company under Delaware law, is squarely inside that reach for whatever it controls (account data, billing records, and — depending on what's covered by a given legal request — customer application data it processes), even for the workloads it hosts on its Nuremberg or Helsinki infrastructure. Marketing an EU flag and a "GDPR Compliant" badge describes where the bytes live, not which country's courts and law-enforcement requests the company answers to.

sota.io's setup doesn't have that gap: it's operated by mamarx GmbH, registered in Berlin (HRB 213877 B, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg), German VAT ID DE281648002. The DPA is governed by German law with Berlin as exclusive jurisdiction, states plainly that "all personal data is processed and stored exclusively within the European Union" with "no transfer to third countries," and publishes every sub-processor by name — Hetzner Online GmbH for hosting, Supabase Inc. for EU-region auth, Stripe Payments Europe Ltd. for billing, and Anthropic PBC under EU Standard Contractual Clauses for the opt-in Claude MCP connector, with the transfer basis (Art. 49(1)(a) GDPR, customer opt-in) spelled out rather than left to an on-request list.

To be fair to Out Plane

The infrastructure partnerships (AWS, Cloudflare, Redis, Neon) and the instance range running up to 32 vCPU / 64 GB at $584/mo suggest a platform built for real scaling headroom that sota.io doesn't offer today — sota.io's current plan structure doesn't publish anything close to that ceiling. Per-minute billing granularity across eight distinct instance sizes gives finer cost control than a single flat tier for teams whose workloads genuinely vary in size. And having a real presence outside the EU (Virginia, Oregon, Singapore) is a legitimate answer if your actual requirement is global latency rather than EU data residency — that's a customer sota.io, EU-only by design, isn't built for. Neither company holds a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and neither claims to; that's parity, not an edge for either side.

Availability

Out Plane is self-serve today: sign up, get $20-$150 in trial credit depending on plan, deploy. sota.io is not — per its own pricing page, "sota.io is currently invite-only. Full pricing is published with general availability." Developer and Team tiers are marked "available at GA" and sit behind a waitlist; only Enterprise — "dedicated capacity on EU infrastructure... migration support from US clouds" — is open for business now, at info@sota.io. If the test is "can I deploy in the next ten minutes without talking to anyone," Out Plane passes it today and sota.io's self-serve tiers don't yet.

Side-by-side

The actual trade-off

If your workload needs a real US or Asia-Pacific presence alongside Europe, or you want per-minute billing across a wide range of instance sizes up to 64 GB of RAM, Out Plane's infrastructure footprint covers ground sota.io doesn't touch. If EU-only jurisdiction for both the data and the company controlling it is the actual requirement — not just an EU data-center checkbox — Out Plane's own Terms put a Delaware LLC in the room regardless of which region your app runs in, and that's not something an EU flag on the homepage changes.

See also: InstaPods vs sota.io: EU servers don't mean an EU company · Upsun/Platform.sh vs sota.io: EU region selection vs. EU infrastructure · Bunnyshell vs sota.io: BYOC doesn't fully sidestep the CLOUD Act