February 20, 2026
Euro cloud, euro chaos
"Made in EU" – Building a Startup on European Infrastructure
Founder dumps Big Cloud for EU tools — comments erupt over email, GitHub and price tags
TLDR: A founder built a privacy-friendly, EU-first tech stack and proved it works, but commenters say email and GitHub are the heartbreaks. The thread split between praising Scaleway, warning about Gitea, and admitting bulk email still favors US giants—showing going EU is doable, just not drama-free.
The post promised a clean break from American cloud giants, but the comments? Pure soap opera. One founder built a full European stack—think Hetzner for servers, Scaleway for extras, Bunny.net for speed and protection, and self-hosted tools for control—and the crowd split fast. The loudest cheers hailed Scaleway as the sleeper hit, with one fan stunned it “doesn’t come up more often.” Another camp came swinging at Gitea, pushing Codeberg and Forgejo as the “actually EU” alternatives, turning a tool choice into a mini-identity war.
Email was the drama queen. The founder says transactional email (the boring-but-critical “your receipt/order” kind) was a pain in Europe, and commenters piled on: bulk marketing email in the EU? “None comes close to AWS,” sighed one. A side plot popped off around Mailjet’s acquisition by Mailgun—cue “is it still EU?” handwringing—while others grumbled about weirdly pricey domain names from EU registrars. Meanwhile, folks laughed in pain at the GitHub breakup metaphor—leaving felt like “moving out of a city,” muscle memory and all.
Through it all, the vibe was: Yes, you can go EU-first for privacy and independence—but you’ll still flirt with US gatekeepers like Google Ads and Apple’s developer fees. The community’s meme of the day: GDPR as a final boss, and self-hosting as the side quest that never ends.
Key Points
- •The author built a startup stack entirely on European infrastructure to prioritize data sovereignty and simplify GDPR compliance.
- •Core compute and storage run on Hetzner; Scaleway covers TEM, registry, observability, and domains; Bunny.net provides CDN, DNS, and security; Nebius supplies EU GPU inference; Hanko handles authentication.
- •Self-hosted services (Gitea, Plausible, Twenty CRM, Infisical) operate on Kubernetes managed by Rancher; Tutanota provides email and UptimeRobot handles monitoring.
- •Challenges included competitive EU transactional email options, migrating away from GitHub’s ecosystem, and higher TLD prices via European registrars.
- •Some U.S. dependencies remain unavoidable, specifically Google Ads and Apple’s Developer Program.