4 ms·
Building a SaaS in 2026 Using Only EU Infrastructure
- pixel_popping 6mo agoMight want to add ClouDNS for DNS management (based in EU).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- no_wizard 6mo agoI think they’re looking for companies to advertise[0] rather than purely being a neutral resource. Which is fine, but I don’t imagine they’ll list a company that hasn’t paid for it. [0]: https://eualternative.eu/advertise/ https://eualternative.eu/advertise/
- Normal_gaussian 6mo agoThe best bit: > A subtle, high-visibility banner
- sheiyei 6mo agoI 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.)
- psychoslave 6mo agoICANN as no European equivalent though.
- spicyusername 6mo agoCompetition is good. 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.
- dmk 6mo agoGood 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- tmpz22 6mo agoWhat are some useful ways SaaS companies are using AI? Great way to axe your customer support team.
- sheiyei 6mo agoGreat ways to get buzzwords on your investor slides!
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoI make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".
- 6mo ago
- kburman 6mo ago[dead]
- kisamoto 6mo agoIt'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.
- mhitza 6mo agoThat doesn't sound right. https://docs.hetzner.com/general/company-and-policy/data-protection-at-hetzner#locations-outside-the-eu--third-country-transfers https://docs.hetzner.com/general/company-and-policy/data-pro... 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.
- sneak 6mo agoDo you really think German intelligence authorities don’t do what the US asks them to do?
- tux3 6mo agoThat is not the CLOUD act, that is shifting the goalpost to some sort of defeatist helplessness.
- alex_duf 6mo agoAt 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.
- PeterStuer 6mo agoDo you really think there is 0 difference?
- LarsKrimi 6mo ago
- sarimkx 6mo agoWhy not add Adyen for payments?
- nozzlegear 6mo agoI'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".
- eterm 6mo agoYeah. 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.
- j45 6mo agoOne thing Azure offers that other clouds don't is so many customers already in it consuming other Microsoft products. While I'm cloud agnostic, this unique difference for Azure should not be overlooked compared to the other clouds.
- cadamsdotcom 6mo agoI might be misreading but I think you’re saying “go to a popular restaurant, it’ll be better”. But popular restaurants can be better, and they can be worse..
- 6mo ago
- icy 6mo agoMight also want to add Codeberg and Tangled for EU-hosted code forges.
- Epa095 6mo agoBoth of which unfortunately only supports open repos :-/
- captn3m0 6mo agoMollie itself is hosted on GCP: https://cloud.google.com/customers/mollie https://cloud.google.com/customers/mollie
- cuu508 6mo agoAlso, TFA says: > 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.
- pan69 6mo agoThis 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.
- mariopt 6mo agoThe 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.
- omnimus 6mo agoThis might be true for some type of companies but in general it's absolutely not true. Not in my experience anyway.
- sparkling 6mo agoCheck 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.
- motsarnt 6mo agoExactly. 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nicoortizai 6mo ago[dead]
- 100ms 6mo agoNo 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
- alex_duf 6mo agoThe one EU service I can't find is an easy OIDC provider, like okta or auth0, to manage the users of a SAAS. Any recommendations?
- lylo 6mo agoHere's what I do with pagecord.com, including costs. https://olly.world/what-it-actually-costs-to-run-pagecord-march-2026 https://olly.world/what-it-actually-costs-to-run-pagecord-ma...
- Shailendra_S 6mo agoYeah the LLM dependency is the elephant in the room for anyone serious about going full EU. But honestly there's another layer people don't talk about — even the idea validation stage is US-dependent now. Most founders are just pasting their idea into ChatGPT before they build anything. If you're truly sovereignty-conscious that's worth factoring in too, not just the infra you deploy on.