Building a Startup Entirely on European Infrastructure: Challenges, Trade-offs and Lessons Learned

In this article, the author recounts his experience building a startup entirely on European infrastructure rather than relying on dominant American hyperscalers such as AWS. Motivated by concerns about data sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and reducing dependency on US-based tech giants, he set out to prove that a fully European stack was viable. What he discovered was that while it is possible, it requires deliberate effort and a willingness to accept trade-offs.

His final stack includes Hetzner for core compute, Scaleway for complementary services like transactional email and container registry, Bunny.net for CDN and edge services, Nebius for AI inference workloads, and Hanko for authentication. He also self-hosts several tools on Kubernetes using Rancher, including Gitea for source control, Plausible for analytics, and other services for CRM, secrets management, and error tracking. This approach gives him tighter control over data and costs, but increases operational responsibility.

The most challenging aspects included finding competitive EU-based transactional email services, migrating away from GitHub’s deeply integrated ecosystem, and dealing with unexpectedly high domain pricing for certain TLDs via European registrars. Despite these obstacles, he managed to create a fully functional European-first stack.

However, he acknowledges that some dependencies are unavoidable. User acquisition through Google Ads, mobile distribution via Apple’s App Store, social logins through Google and Apple, and access to leading AI models like Claude still require interaction with US companies. Ultimately, he concludes that building ‘Made in EU’ is feasible and financially competitive, but demands intentional choices and ongoing maintenance.