“Made in EU” – it was harder than I thought. When I decided to build my startup on European infrastructure, I thought it would be a straightforward swap. Ditch AWS, pick some EU providers, done. How hard could it be? Turns out: harder than expected. Not impossible, I did it, but nobody talks about the weird friction points you hit along the way. This is that post. Why bother? Data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, not having your entire business dependent on three American hyperscalers, and honestly, a bit of stubbornness. I wanted to prove it could be done. The EU has real infrastructure companies building serious products. They deserve the traffic. The stack Here’s what I landed on after a lot of trial, error, and migration headaches. Hetzner handles the core compute. Load balancers, VMs, and S3-compatible object storage. The pricing is almost absurdly good compared to AWS, and the performance is solid. If you’ve never spun up a Hetzner box, you’re overpaying for cloud compute. Scaleway fills the gaps Hetzner doesn’t cover. I use their Transactional Email (TEM) service, Container Registry, a second S3 bucket for specific workloads, their observability stack, and even their domain registrar. One provider, multiple services, it simplifies billing if nothing else. Bunny.net is the unsung hero of this stack. CDN with distributed storage, DNS, image optimization, WAF, and DDoS protection, all from a company headquartered in Slovenia. Their edge network is genuinely impressive and their dashboard is a joy to use. Coming from Cloudflare, I felt at home rather quickly. Nebius powers our AI inference. If you need GPU compute in Europe without sending requests to us-east-1 , they’re one of the few real options. Hanko handles authentication and identity. A German provider that gives you passkeys, social logins, and user management without reaching for Auth0 or Clerk. More on this in the “can’t avoid” section — it doesn’t eliminate American dependencies entirely, but it keeps the auth layer European. Self-hosting: Rancher, my beloved This is where things get fun… and time-consuming. I self-host a surprising amount: Gitea for source control Plausible for privacy-friendly analytics Twenty CRM for customer management Infisical for secrets management Bugsink for error tracking All running on Kubernetes, with Rancher as the glue keeping the whole cluster sane. Is self-hosting more work than SaaS? Obviously. But it means my data stays exactly where I put it, and I’m not at the mercy of a provider’s pricing changes or acquisition drama. For email, Tutanota keeps things encrypted and European. UptimeRobot watches the monitors so I can sleep. The parts that were extra hard Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway’s TEM works, but

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