I'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".
Yeah. 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.
Indeed Azure & AWS use complexity (e.g. their terrible docs) and convoluted non-standard terminology, approaches and non-interop to keep developers in their platform silo and competitors, who provide the same advantages with better DX and less complexity, away from their money cows.
Good 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.
I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter).
The AWS Sovereign Cloud is still owned 100% by Amazon Inc. in the US. Not saying that rules it out for all use cases, but something that should be mentioned. "Sovereignty" is a somewhat vague term.
<American Company> European means nothing. They are all subject to the US Cloud Act, and the moment you start using their services, it inevitably has one or two services that end up contacting us-east-1 anyways. And that's without taking into account that they are all trying to fuck you over from.behind anyways as they sign data exchange agreements between Europe and the US.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
I haven't looked into the details but I remember from the announcement that the EU cloud is owned specifically by an EU entity headed by EU citizens. There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US.
I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so.
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast.
I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".
In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field!
It'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.
I can tell you why. It's not the cost (even though it certainly helps)
For my company it's about the "pulling the plug" usecase. We create a SaaS product for semi-critical infrastructure - we don't need 99% uptime but more than a few hours and it's problematic.
Sure, most cloud/VPS providers have sites in the US as well, but worst case only those places would be affected if the US decided to do a Special Military Operation on Greenland for example.
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.
No 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
I 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.)
The 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.
Check 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.
I'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".
Yeah. 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.
Indeed Azure & AWS use complexity (e.g. their terrible docs) and convoluted non-standard terminology, approaches and non-interop to keep developers in their platform silo and competitors, who provide the same advantages with better DX and less complexity, away from their money cows.
Good 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.
I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c...
I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter).
Apparently AWS's European Sovereign Cloud has Bedrock, so that could be an option.
The AWS Sovereign Cloud is still owned 100% by Amazon Inc. in the US. Not saying that rules it out for all use cases, but something that should be mentioned. "Sovereignty" is a somewhat vague term.
<American Company> European means nothing. They are all subject to the US Cloud Act, and the moment you start using their services, it inevitably has one or two services that end up contacting us-east-1 anyways. And that's without taking into account that they are all trying to fuck you over from.behind anyways as they sign data exchange agreements between Europe and the US.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
I haven't looked into the details but I remember from the announcement that the EU cloud is owned specifically by an EU entity headed by EU citizens. There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US.
... And this entity is again owned by AWS. And so the cloud act still applies.
> There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US.
Of course: It gives (both sides) a narrative that let's them pretend everything is alright.
No it's not owned by AWS. It's a separate legal entity with EU based board and they license the technology from the US company.
I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so.
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast.
Openrouter gives you exactly what you want and your choice of a huge number of models.
What are some useful ways SaaS companies are using AI? Great way to axe your customer support team.
I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
Great ways to get buzzwords on your investor slides!
I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".
I mostly meant getting to call your product barely used AI toilet paper instead of just barely used toilet paper.
In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field!
Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind.
It'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.
I can tell you why. It's not the cost (even though it certainly helps)
For my company it's about the "pulling the plug" usecase. We create a SaaS product for semi-critical infrastructure - we don't need 99% uptime but more than a few hours and it's problematic.
Sure, most cloud/VPS providers have sites in the US as well, but worst case only those places would be affected if the US decided to do a Special Military Operation on Greenland for example.
That doesn't sound right. 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.
Do you really think German intelligence authorities don’t do what the US asks them to do?
That is not the CLOUD act, that is shifting the goalpost to some sort of defeatist helplessness.
No 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
Competition 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.
Might also want to add Codeberg and Tangled for EU-hosted code forges.
Mollie itself is hosted on GCP: https://cloud.google.com/customers/mollie
Might want to add ClouDNS for DNS management (based in EU).
I 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/
I 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.)
The best bit:
> A subtle, high-visibility banner
ICANN as no European equivalent though.
Why not add Adyen for payments?
The 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.
This might be true for some type of companies but in general it's absolutely not true. Not in my experience anyway.
Check 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.