"Made in EU" – Building a Startup on European Infrastructure
5 days ago
- #Startup Tech Stack
- #Data Sovereignty
- #European Infrastructure
- The author built their startup entirely on European infrastructure to ensure data sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and reduce dependence on American hyperscalers.
- Key components of the stack include Hetzner for compute, Scaleway for additional services, Bunny.net for CDN and security, Nebius for AI inference, and Hanko for authentication.
- Self-hosting was used for various services like Gitea, Plausible, and Twenty CRM, running on Kubernetes managed by Rancher.
- Challenges included finding competitive transactional email services, transitioning from GitHub to Gitea, and dealing with higher domain TLD pricing in Europe.
- Some dependencies on American services like Google Ads, Apple's Developer Program, and AI models from Anthropic were unavoidable.
- The effort was worthwhile, resulting in lower infrastructure costs, better data residency, and a deeper understanding of the stack, though it required more maintenance and had fewer community resources.