"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.
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A founder's firsthand account of building a startup entirely on European infrastructure, covering the full stack chosen (Hetzner, Scaleway, Bunny.net, Nebius, Hanko) and self-hosted tools (Gitea, Plausible, Rancher, Infisical). The post details unexpected friction points: thin ecosystems around EU transactional email, the pain of leaving GitHub, and unexplained TLD pricing markups. It also honestly acknowledges unavoidable US dependencies — Google/Apple for ads and app distribution, social OAuth flows, and frontier AI models like Claude. The conclusion: EU-only infrastructure is achievable and cost-effective, but requires deliberate effort against industry defaults.
Table of contents
Why bother?The stackSelf-hosting: Rancher, my belovedThe parts that were extra hardWhat you realistically can't avoidWas it worth it?5 Comments
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