https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...
Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
What exactly were you looking for? APIs?
Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.
EU regulation requires such settings.
While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.
Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.
Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.
In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.
Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.
Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.
In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.
But nevertheless a nice posting.
It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.
Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...
I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.
Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.
By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.
Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.
I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.
Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?
I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
> Mollie for UK
- 1.2% + 20p for standard cards
- 2.90% + £0.20 for corporate and European
- 2.50% + £0.20 for Amex
- 3.25% + £0.20 for international
> Stripe for UK
- 1.5% + £0.20 for standards cards inc Amex
- 1.9% + £0.20 for corporate uk cards
- 2.5% + £0.20 for international within Europe
- 3.25% + £0.20 for International + 2% if fx conversion
[0]https://www.mollie.com/gb/pricing#psp-block
[1]https://stripe.com/gb/pricing. (scroll down for list)
They do cards with airlines where the customer can earn free flights and other such reward schemes to attract customers.
I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
> Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times.
I was investigating this 5 months ago and the answer their slop machine gave was:
> Does Mollie retry failed payments (dunning) and track subscription states? Mollie does not currently provide automatic dunning or retry logic for failed subscription payments. Subscription states like active or past due are tracked, but you need to implement retry and notification logic in your system. This is a common feature request and may be on the roadmap, but no official release date is available.
From your link, note though:
> If your subscription payment does not succeed, Mollie may attempt it again up to 5 times (once a day), depending on the failure reason. After all retries have been exhausted, the subscription will be cancelled.
If there's a payment issue, I would not consider cancelling the subscription 5 days after the first failure as reasonable. I would expect the subscription to go into "past due" state, and to keep retrying.
But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so.
Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1].
Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS.
They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.
Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed
I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.
And you know their infra generally works, you know when it's not on fire.
And when it is, well you are not going to be the only one down.
For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good.
You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far.
> Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users.
If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box.
Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases.
US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings.
Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.
After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today.
Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.
I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't.
Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
> god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US
What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU.
This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?
> If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU
Starting a US company from EU costs a few hundred dollars depending on the broker etc. and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients). This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US. So it depends.
Maybe things are easier from Sweden but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example? Do you by chance require residence and have residence-related obligations and costs? Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
And in Sweden it's free, if that somehow would stop anyone anyways.
> and indeed you may find it much more useful depending on how you do business(who you employ, what you sell and where are your clients
Agreed, if you have US clients, US customers and generally like the vibe of the US, then makes a lot of sense to incorporate in the US. For basically anything else, it doesn't.
> This is because EU single market isn't that single at all, you will need to figure out pensions, social contributions taxes etc across the EU borders for example
You misunderstand what "EU single market" is referring to if you think it's supposed to mean pensions and similar stuff is shared across the entire EU. Of course it isn't, and no one of us who actually live and work here have that fundamental misunderstanding you seem to have.
> example but if you incorporate in US, life becomes much more easier as there are already many services geared to fascinate the trade between EU and US
Your arguments here make zero sense. Say I'm a Swedish resident, open up a company in Sweden and hire a Finn, now I need to ensure this employment is fully legal. Same goes if the company is in the US, and in fact, would add additional things to do, as suddenly it's not only within EU and EEA, but the legal entity is outside.
> but then why not Europeans start company in Sweden instead of dealing with Germany for example?
I don't know why you would? EU and Europe isn't like the US in that it's many states under one country, we're all different countries with our own laws and so on, there is no "EU-law" or whatever, it's just an umbrella for us to unite under. Why on earth would an German start a company in Greece, if there is nothing particular about Greece in their business? The question doesn't even make sense.
> Why Sweden isn't Europe's Delaware and EU is trying to create 28th regime and the EU-inc then?
Ireland and Malta are the "Delaware of Europe" which are popular to incorporate, but generally, I think people prefer to own businesses in countries where they already live, incorporating on the other side of the continent just doesn't make sense.
You can open a company in another EU country, but if you don't live there, your domestic tax agency may/will interpret the company to be under their jurisdiction based on your residency. Now you have double the paperwork, and likely a more complex tax situation to deal with.
Basically, depends on how you setup the company in regards to liabilities (which I'm guessing is true in the US too), and the exact terms of the loan.
USA population: 348 million
The problem is that many of europe's top talent moves to USA, and also that American funding for European startups is huge, and many are made to relocate/IPO in USA too.
Exactly, EU must guarantee that there's no going back even if the next US president is likable, cooperative politician and not this thing that Trump is. Otherwise all your investment can perish if switching to MS, Oracle or Palantir or something becomes acceptable again 2-3 years.
A Trump invasion or something just as hard to fix needs to seal the deal.
Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap...
So it's "nobody gets fired to buy IBM" all over again.
There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.
Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.
This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.
I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.
> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.
Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.
Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.
If the article was written by a human it would be valuable feedback for the author. Because the article was written by a LLM it was just the commenter being tricked to be engaged by generated noise.
Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :(
Can we start flagging shit like this, please?
However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.
Source: I have access to better data.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.
You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened).
The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
I live in an EU country and care deeply for the right to erasure and our consumer rights. The EU legislature does some good things on that front. I "care" for EU tech companies as much as I can care for any company currently. I think technological sovereignty is and will be important moving forward, for our economic resilience, infrastructure stability, among other things.
BTW "EU nationalist" just sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Or, to put it another way, do you think any Americans use Microsoft or Apple products out of patriotism or fear of being dependent on technology from other nations?
Yeah, I have to doubt your perceived reality here. Can you name some of these "hostile foreign influences"?
The big competitor to Apple is Google, whereas the big competitor to Microsoft is Linux/FOSS IMHO. I'm sorry to be blunt, but in the current political climate I couldn't care less what any Americans are using and for whatever reason. EU citizens on the other hand sure got a few reasons during the last decade due to foreign American politics.
The name is the European Union. It is the foreign entity to Europeans. If you doubt that there is a big portion of Europeans who aren't pro-EU, then I guess you doubt that there are Americans who aren't pro-Trump?
Anyway, there were referendums in many countries on the subject of joining the EU, and you can look at those and see that not 100% of the population voted yes.
So it is a false assumption that Europeans would by default have any loyalty or goodwill towards the EU, although I'm sure that a big portion of them do. Especially in some countries.
Well, call me surprised! Which democratic election ever achieves a one-sided 100%?
Still, the majority of the EU population seems to in favor of the EU, whereas the majority of the US citizens are pro-Trump, or they were during the last election at least. So I don't really understand what you're arguing for here.
But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated
Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.
There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.
> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.
Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.
I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.
However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.
Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed
There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.
TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...
There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.
I find it laughable.
Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.
Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?
Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?
Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.
But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.
People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.
And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?
Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
But then okay, say you want to do more.
Then do more. Not some letter from EU.
There is a focus here on office and javascript... why?
Okay if you want an EU M365, good luck.
We were and are the best.
And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.
Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.
IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
Didn’t even Microsoft say that they can’t guarantee that they can follow these laws? Because the US laws take over. So, legal entities are just some smoke screen. They don’t help if the US government wants access to something.
I’m not sure what has happened since then or the legal status of this issue.
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
or are european saying china is better than US ????
Not being able to stand on our own feet is going to be a major problem because of the implied soft power. It nerfs our ability to ever have a spine on any issue.
I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
or Tibet?
You are comparing sensational trolls with actual geopolitical history.
And admittedly I didn’t realize Taiwan was in Europe. Sorry.
Should we casually throw around all places the US invaded too?