Solo builder migrated analytics, email, compute, storage, and AI APIs from US providers to European alternatives over two months with manageable friction.
Key Takeaways
Stack swaps: Google Analytics to self-hosted Matomo, Gmail to Proton Mail, AWS S3 to Scaleway object storage, SendGrid to Lettermint, OpenAI to Mistral API.
Scaleway matched DigitalOcean on developer experience and adds CO2 emissions display per server location; OVH object storage undercuts Backblaze B2 on cold storage cost once lifecycle rules are configured.
Bugsink accepts Sentry’s SDK directly, one config line change, but lacks performance monitoring and session replay; suitable only for basic stack-trace alerting.
Four deliberate exceptions held: Cloudflare (public traffic only, feature gap with Bunny CDN), Stripe (migration complexity and higher Mollie cost), Claude Code (Anthropic safety posture over jurisdiction), GitHub (NPM package network effects).
Proton Mail limits hurt multi-domain operators: no email body filtering and a three custom-domain cap even on the Duo plan.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters with EU enterprise exposure report a sharp, fast shift in the past 8 months: procurement now routinely requires full EU or in-country hosting, a demand barely visible two years ago.
Skepticism runs strong that Europe is a safe harbor: the EU has repeatedly attempted to restrict end-to-end encryption, is pushing IP-address logging mandates, and age-verification laws are seen as a wedge toward full ID requirements.
A recurring technical catch: .com domains route through Verisign’s US-controlled root infrastructure, undermining jurisdictional arguments regardless of where compute sits.
Notable Comments
@chinathrow: Points out that .com DNS depends on US-controlled Verisign root servers, puncturing the sovereignty claim for anyone not on a ccTLD.
@aurareturn: Self-hosted Matomo loses funnel analysis and most useful features behind a paid tier; cloud plan is 22 euros for 50k hits/month, impractical with modern crawler traffic.
