"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.
Hacker News
February 20, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure was more challenging than anticipated, despite the allure of data sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and reducing reliance on American hyperscalers. The author shares their journey of swapping AWS for EU-based providers like Hetzner, Scaleway, and Bunny.net, highlighting both the benefits and unexpected hurdles encountered along the way.
The core of the setup revolves around Hetzner for compute resources, including load balancers, VMs, and S3-compatible storage, praised for its cost-effectiveness and performance. Scaleway filled gaps with services like transactional email, container registry, and observability tools, simplifying billing across multiple services. Bunny.net provided a comprehensive CDN, DNS, and security features, while Nebius offered GPU compute for AI tasks. Hanko handled authentication, though it didn’t entirely eliminate dependencies on US-based services.
Self-hosting was another layer of complexity, with the author using Rancher to manage Kubernetes clusters for tools like Gitea, Plausible Analytics, Twenty CRM, Infisical, Bugsink, and more. While self-hosting ensured data control and independence from provider pricing changes, it required significant time and effort compared to SaaS solutions.
One surprising challenge was finding reliable transactional email services in Europe that matched the ease and affordability of US-based options like SendGrid. Scaleway’s TEM service worked but lacked ecosystem support. Additionally, leaving GitHub’s ecosystem for Gitea meant rebuilding CI/CD pipelines and adapting to a less integrated environment.
The author also encountered baffling domain pricing discrepancies for certain TLDs through European registrars, which were inexplicably more expensive than elsewhere. Despite these issues, the journey proved that building on European infrastructure is possible, though it requires careful planning and acceptance of some unavoidable US dependencies like Google Ads and Apple’s Developer Program.
This story matters to tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs as it highlights both the opportunities and challenges of decentralizing cloud reliance and aligning with EU data sovereignty goals. While not without hurdles, the experience underscores the growing strength of European tech providers and the importance of considering alternative infrastructure for startups and businesses looking to reduce vendor lock-in.
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Originally published on Hacker News on 2/20/2026