Is it? It doesn't sound outragous to me, given that they provide you with however much power you need, ans also networking and people to maintain the facility.

I asked ChatGPT to estimate how much darwing 15W continuously in Amsterdam would cost you per month, and it came up with a range of 2.58€-3.41€ per month. So that's potentially more than half of their fee.

If your laptop is particularly power efficient, you'd also be subsidizing higher-powered laptops. As far as I see there's nothing preventing you from sending a 400W gaming laptop and mining crypto or running an LLM agent 24/7.

€7/month is both too much and too little.

The cheapest USB KVM-over-IP costs about €50 - that's 8 months of colo fees gone.

Colo 'remote hands' in western countries can cost €120/hour, once all expenses and overheads are taken into account. Admittedly, that's for someone to drop what they're doing and rush to your sever. But getting that laptop unpacked, checked over, labelled, installed in a rack, associated to a customer account, powered up and working is going to cost 3 months of fees at least.

One laptop gets lost or damaged during shipping, or shows up mysteriously broken when the customer claims it worked when they sent it? That's a €200 device gone, 28 months of colo fees. You can argue your way out of it, but the guy doing the arguing is the €120/hour remote hands guy.

It'd be easy to lose money on this.