I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

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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.

"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.

The more adoption the better it gets

Isn’t it always harder than we think? 🙃

The hard part is not on the SWE side.
We already have alternatives for most service, not as good as they dont have enough money/users to scale up. But its something that can change later.
And if we want to rely on opensource tools, we should also give some times to push opensource solutions (either by contributing directly or working arround)
Just for information, Tutanota is not safe.
<a href="https://fixupx.com/cryptocyberia/status/2019062136400474366?s=61" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://fixupx.com/cryptocyberia/status/2019062136400474366?s=61</a>

‘a bit of stubbornness’ right…