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European Alternatives for Popular Services
- Yeul 2y agoI needed a new printer. Instead of HP I bought a Brother because it was a Japanese firm. Small battles.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoI also wear a 12 Euro Casio instead of an Apple Watch. The battery life alone on that will outlive any Apple or any other smart-watch .
- Tomte 2y agoI thought everybody already bought Brother, at least for laser printers in private use. I have a soft spot for HP for reasons, but I‘d never even think about buying their printers (the real HP is Agilent, Philips and probably more companies, anyway…).
- whiplash451 2y agoEdit: interesting to see so many alternatives to these common services. Would have been great to explain how they differentiate.
- suddenlybananas 2y agoWhat do you mean?
- whiplash451 2y agoI mean that they don’t provide any insight in terms of why the alternatives are better. It reads like a simple list to me.
- brabel 2y agoThey did not say the alternatives are better. They say they are European alternatives, that's it. For some, that makes them automatically better, but that's not stated explicitly anywhere.
- LastTrain 2y agoI'm not following this comment at all, can you attach subjects to your predicates? That is, which website is a horror show and to which fight are you referring and who picked it?
- blibble 2y agofor some reason the UK doesn't count as European, but Ukraine does makes sense to me
- jemmyw 2y agoOne of them doesn't want to be part of Europe and the other really really does
- blibble 2y agodespite the European Commission's attempt to claim the term Europe for itself, the EU and Europe are not the same thing
- Rexxar 2y agoIf you are from USA, I will suggest you to think about the name of your country and your continent and compare the situation with Europe.
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoOne of them regrets it didn't want to be part of Europe
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoIt's cool they're trying to draw attention to European alternative but who is this information targeting anyway? Bean counters and execs have the final say in these decisions and they never read stuff like this. Every EU company I ever worked for, from big multinationals to start-ups, mostly used US software and/or US/Chinese products anyway, even though engineers already knew there are FOSS/European alternatives. It all feels futile, kind of like pissing in the ocean. Because the end goal of any business is to produce and sell as many products as possible, as quickly to market as possible, for as high margins as possible, not focusing if the tools they use to accomplish that goal are European, American, Indian, etc. Usually the more resources you focus on straying from the beaten path to niche solutions or rolling out your own solution, the more resources you waste from the goal of shipping the end product. Therefore the SW devs and bean counters are still gonna go for Office 365, Azure, Google Workspaces, etc, instead of some no-name European alternative. When you buy a house do you care if it was built using Bosch, Makita or Milwaukee power tools? Likewise, your customers don't care what SW tools you used either, they care about price, performance, speed and value. If your competitors can beat you to market by using US/Chinese tools while you focus on using exclusively EU tools, you'll be selected out by the free market, unless some laws and tariffs are enacted against non-EU SW which I don't see happening in Europe.
- suddenlybananas 2y agoThings can change.
- tensor 2y agoI recently moved my software business mostly off US services. Diversifying away from the US is one of the most important things all of us outside the US can do for the free world right now.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoHow big is your business? Is it relevant in the grand scheme of thing, or a rounding error in statistics?
- mainecoder 2y agoIf only the EU alternatives were integrated with the other EU alternatives, it seems that Europe by design of its institutions cannot allow or have a big player
- dvh 2y agoAny cheap PCB manufacturers?
- wronex 2y agoAisler is pretty good for prototyping. Wurth also supplies PCBs (with fantastic quality.)
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- jodrellblank 2y agoOVH emailed me yesterday to say they’ve decided to help themselves to my bank account whenever they want without my consent and they’re just letting me know. But I can go to the settings and turn autorenew back off again (how it was) if I have to. I went into the settings and made sure there was no saved payment information, and lowered how much I trust and respect them.
- blibble 2y agoOVH billing is like something out of the 70s I've had them agree refunds, then take 6 months to get around to doing it (by which point it had already been chargebacked)
- szszrk 2y agoI paid for a VPS for like 5 years ahead. They cancelled the whole offer (line of VPSs) completely and simply sent me an email it will be deleted in a few months. No migration, no refund, no alternative. This thread reminds me that it's around.. a year (?) and I was able to get back 1/3 of what I overpaid. I still think they are a decent player with reasonable prices, but the cost of dealing with their insane portals and random issues like above is just too much for individual.
- pfoof 2y agoWhy is Hetzner not listed as AWS/GCP/Azure alternative, especially that it's mentioned in "About" section as a hosting platform for various services. Also Dailymotion is YouTube alternative from France.
- szszrk 2y agoProbably because it doesn't really do the same thing. They not a typical managed cloud solution. Yeah, they have their object storage now, but not much else. They are great with bare metal, vm's, very interesting "storage boxes" offer, but that's not exactly full alternative to major public clouds.
- tensor 2y agoIn looking for non-US alternatives, I think the thing that surprised me most is a lack of solid github/gitlab competitors. The only serious alternative for businesses is a managed gitlab or gogs (gitea).
- buildfocus 2y agoI found Scaleway & Bunny through this list a while back (as a managed cloud & CDN provider respectively) and I've been extremely happy with both, having migrated there from a mix of Netlify/Digital Ocean/Cloudflare. Significantly more convincing privacy story than US providers (especially as the US authorities start to look increasingly unpredictable) but also just genuinely excellent service, UX & pricing. It is worth looking beyond the standard providers, nobody ever got fired for picking AWS, but that doesn't make it the best option.
- jeppester 2y agoOne alternative that we are using is scalingo as a replacement for heroku. I doesn't have all of the same features as heroku, but the features that are there work really well. For instance the UI is better and more responsive than heroku's. On top of that it isn't more expensive than heroku and does not have pricing traps the way heroku does. Their live chat is also an upgrade over support tickets. I'd definitely give it a go if I were on the hunt for a European PAAS provider.
- thefz 2y agoForever I will be thankful (and supporter) for OsmAnd.