I've posted this a couple times before when EU tech + Hetzner comes up (and probably will again):
I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
Yeah. Azure is such a weird platform for not actually having a competitive way to just cheaply deploy a simple .NET app, it's a weird design decision.
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.
Indeed Azure & AWS use complexity (e.g. their terrible docs) and convoluted non-standard terminology, approaches and non-interop to keep developers in their platform silo and competitors, who provide the same advantages with better DX and less complexity, away from their money cows.
It's worth considering why you are choosing a European stack.
Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.
If you spin up your servers in EU locations they are under German ownership and EU regulation. Others, such as those in the US, are owned by a subsidiary and those are subject separately on the Cloud Act. Correct me if I'm wrong.
At the rate things are going, yeah there will be a point where intelligence services aren't going to be happily cooperating across the Atlantic, that is unless there is a clear mutual benefit in doing so.
I can tell you why. It's not the cost (even though it certainly helps)
For my company it's about the "pulling the plug" usecase. We create a SaaS product for semi-critical infrastructure - we don't need 99% uptime but more than a few hours and it's problematic.
Sure, most cloud/VPS providers have sites in the US as well, but worst case only those places would be affected if the US decided to do a Special Military Operation on Greenland for example.
This is so weird to me. So many tech writers seemed to suddenly decide this was a possibility at the same time, and based on what? How much energy was wasted on this thought experiment? And if the US does pull the plug and disconnects Europe, how likely do you think it is that you'll be unaffected?
I'm a resident of a country regularly mentioned by the commander in chief who has recently bombed a head-of-state and his family with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and captured the head of state of a neighbouring state by military means.
All without congressional approval. And apparently without the US population knowing about it.
Why risk using US tech?
It costs more, and the people running it likely may not be my friends
In your case, being cut off is a real possibility. In the EU case it's just larping and the author of every one of those articles is probably still using Claude, cloudflare and a dozen other companies.
Good list but the biggest missing piece for most new SaaS products right now is AI/LLM APIs. If you're building anything with AI features you're calling OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar - all US. Mistral exists but the ecosystem around it is much thinner. That's probably the hardest US dependency to drop in 2026 that I can think of.
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter).
I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so.
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast.
I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
Do you folks know any support bot which is actually useful to the customer? No, I don't mean cheap for the company, I mean helping, I mean fulfilling the goal for which (at least according on the powerpoints) it exists?
In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field!
I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".
The AWS Sovereign Cloud is still owned 100% by Amazon Inc. in the US. Not saying that rules it out for all use cases, but something that should be mentioned. "Sovereignty" is a somewhat vague term.
<American Company> European means nothing. They are all subject to the US Cloud Act, and the moment you start using their services, it inevitably has one or two services that end up contacting us-east-1 anyways. And that's without taking into account that they are all trying to fuck you over from.behind anyways as they sign data exchange agreements between Europe and the US.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
I haven't looked into the details but I remember from the announcement that the EU cloud is owned specifically by an EU entity headed by EU citizens. There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US.
Edit: Looks like the below is not true. However, such setup is technically possible and if they were serious about making it truly isolated from US influence, it can be done.
Original comment: No it's not owned by AWS. It's a separate legal entity with EU based board and they license the technology from the US company.
Hmm I'm not sure how to interpret that page but it looks like you are right, I'll edit my comment. I was told by GCP PMs that is how the GCP/tsystems setup is structured (see sibling comment) and that it mirrored AWS setup, but maybe that was not correct.
How difficult would it be for the "independent" licensor to exfiltrate data from the "sovereign cloud" via logging or replication?
The control-planes have to be completely independent for anything approaching real independence, not just some legal fiction that's lightly different[1] from the traditional big-tech practice of having an Irish subsidiary licensing the parent company's tech for tax optimization purposes.
1. No different at all, according to sibling comment.
It is completely separate. There isn't a shared control plane. You don't manage this in the GCP console, its a separate white-label product.
Any updates GCP wants to push are sent as update bundles that must be reviewed and approved by the operator (tsystems). During an outage, the GCP oncall or product team has no access and talks to operator who can run commands or queries on their behalf, or share screenshots of monitoring graphs etc.
(This information is ~3 years stale, but this was such fundamental design principle that I strongly doubt it has changed)
No love for Gcore Labs? They're seemingly completely unknown but their free DNS product is rock solid. They also have a FaaS platform I've never gotten around to trying. Some of their products have a high premium but the range available under one roof is very broad
> If you have used Stripe before, Mollie is the closest thing to that experience in the EU.
But Mollie does not even properly support recurring payments, a pretty important feature for SaaS. It does not track subscription state and does not retry failed payments.
This is actually important to understand. What are the dependencies of your dependencies? I.e. if your goal is to be sovereign than knowing how far the turtles go, and who the turtles are, is quite important.
I don't get that impression from that page. It definitely doesn't say you can't buy a tailored recommendation list to promote your product specifically, but I don't believe all of the listed products have paid for their existence on the site (for now. That might be the end goal though.)
The EU providers are simply not on par with AWS, CloudFlare, GCP, etc.
Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.
There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.
You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.
Check out Scaleway (France). They have by far the broadest range of managed services with full permissions/IAM integration etc. - it is the closest EU match to AWS. Yes, if your entire existing setup depends on once specialized AWS service (i.e. DynamoDB) you still will need to go with AWS, but when building from scratch it's a different story.
Exactly. Look at hetzner, 0 services, everything they tried to do sucked, they still have no managed k8s and their s3 attempt was horrible. This is one of the leading Cloud platforms in the EU and developer experience sucks.
They don't seem t care as well.The mindset is different.
I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.
While I'm cloud agnostic, this unique difference for Azure should not be overlooked compared to the other clouds.
But popular restaurants can be better, and they can be worse..
Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.
If you spin up your servers in EU locations they are under German ownership and EU regulation. Others, such as those in the US, are owned by a subsidiary and those are subject separately on the Cloud Act. Correct me if I'm wrong.
For my company it's about the "pulling the plug" usecase. We create a SaaS product for semi-critical infrastructure - we don't need 99% uptime but more than a few hours and it's problematic.
Sure, most cloud/VPS providers have sites in the US as well, but worst case only those places would be affected if the US decided to do a Special Military Operation on Greenland for example.
All without congressional approval. And apparently without the US population knowing about it.
Why risk using US tech?
It costs more, and the people running it likely may not be my friends
Wonder if any large geopolitical rifts happened eh. I soul would not host my application in Russia either for instance
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c...
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
> There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US.
Of course: It gives (both sides) a narrative that let's them pretend everything is alright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Original comment: No it's not owned by AWS. It's a separate legal entity with EU based board and they license the technology from the US company.
https://openregister.de/company/DE-HRB-G1312-40853
The control-planes have to be completely independent for anything approaching real independence, not just some legal fiction that's lightly different[1] from the traditional big-tech practice of having an Irish subsidiary licensing the parent company's tech for tax optimization purposes.
1. No different at all, according to sibling comment.
It is completely separate. There isn't a shared control plane. You don't manage this in the GCP console, its a separate white-label product.
Any updates GCP wants to push are sent as update bundles that must be reviewed and approved by the operator (tsystems). During an outage, the GCP oncall or product team has no access and talks to operator who can run commands or queries on their behalf, or share screenshots of monitoring graphs etc.
(This information is ~3 years stale, but this was such fundamental design principle that I strongly doubt it has changed)
Having a global monopoly on these kinds of things is part of what has let U.S. companies get away with being so anti-consumer for so long.
> If you have used Stripe before, Mollie is the closest thing to that experience in the EU.
But Mollie does not even properly support recurring payments, a pretty important feature for SaaS. It does not track subscription state and does not retry failed payments.
https://olly.world/what-it-actually-costs-to-run-pagecord-ma...
Which is fine, but I don’t imagine they’ll list a company that hasn’t paid for it.
[0]: https://eualternative.eu/advertise/
> A subtle, high-visibility banner
Any recommendations?
Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.
There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.
You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.
They don't seem t care as well.The mindset is different.