European Alternatives for Popular Services
european-alternatives.eu
european-alternatives.eu
Significantly more convincing privacy story than US providers (especially as the US authorities start to look increasingly unpredictable) but also just genuinely excellent service, UX & pricing.
It is worth looking beyond the standard providers, nobody ever got fired for picking AWS, but that doesn't make it the best option.
I have a soft spot for HP for reasons, but I‘d never even think about buying their printers (the real HP is Agilent, Philips and probably more companies, anyway…).
Also Dailymotion is YouTube alternative from France.
They are great with bare metal, vm's, very interesting "storage boxes" offer, but that's not exactly full alternative to major public clouds.
I doesn't have all of the same features as heroku, but the features that are there work really well. For instance the UI is better and more responsive than heroku's.
On top of that it isn't more expensive than heroku and does not have pricing traps the way heroku does. Their live chat is also an upgrade over support tickets.
I'd definitely give it a go if I were on the hunt for a European PAAS provider.
But I can go to the settings and turn autorenew back off again (how it was) if I have to.
I went into the settings and made sure there was no saved payment information, and lowered how much I trust and respect them.
I've had them agree refunds, then take 6 months to get around to doing it
(by which point it had already been chargebacked)
This thread reminds me that it's around.. a year (?) and I was able to get back 1/3 of what I overpaid.
I still think they are a decent player with reasonable prices, but the cost of dealing with their insane portals and random issues like above is just too much for individual.
Every EU company I ever worked for, from big multinationals to start-ups, mostly used US software and/or US/Chinese products anyway, even though engineers already knew there are FOSS/European alternatives. It all feels futile, kind of like pissing in the ocean.
Because the end goal of any business is to produce and sell as many products as possible, as quickly to market as possible, for as high margins as possible, not focusing if the tools they use to accomplish that goal are European, American, Indian, etc. Usually the more resources you focus on straying from the beaten path to niche solutions or rolling out your own solution, the more resources you waste from the goal of shipping the end product.
Therefore the SW devs and bean counters are still gonna go for Office 365, Azure, Google Workspaces, etc, instead of some no-name European alternative.
When you buy a house do you care if it was built using Bosch, Makita or Milwaukee power tools? Likewise, your customers don't care what SW tools you used either, they care about price, performance, speed and value.
If your competitors can beat you to market by using US/Chinese tools while you focus on using exclusively EU tools, you'll be selected out by the free market, unless some laws and tariffs are enacted against non-EU SW which I don't see happening in Europe.
Still, I would flag use of US services as a major risk for non-US businesses right now. Having previously run a >200 person software company, I probably wouldn't immediately move all services to non-US alternatives, but I sure would have a migration plan ready and alternative explored and selected in case shit hit the fan for US software.
Given the current state of things, I think it's entirely plausible that US services are either hit with things like tariffs, or end up suffering US state censorship at some point.
You had a higher risk for that with the democrats, remember the AI videos that upset Kamala and Gavin?
European countries have a far worse track record of censorship.
> Still, I would flag use of US services as a major risk for non-US businesses right now.
> Given the current state of things, I think it's entirely plausible that US services are either hit with things like tariffs, or end up suffering US state censorship at some point.
Who made your phone, your computer and the OS your computer is running?
They are making too many dumb and potentially dangerous laws, just look at the cookie consent laws that accomplish nothing but erased millions of euros.
They AI laws and aspirations make me not even consider making any software that runs AI in the EU. I don't want to harm people, but it's next to impossible to make the distilled LLM I'm using to not say occasionally dumb shit. Just because an AI is "dangerous" doesn't mean you cannot use it in a place where it poses no real risk.
Note too that places like OVH have data centres in multiple countries, just like AWS and Azure do. I can't comment on taxes for companies registered in the EU as I don't live there, but again, where you are headquartered as a business is up to you, and there are many choices.
In terms of being competitive, some European services like OVH, Gandi, and Mistral are absolutely competitive internationally. For AI, Mistral is up there with the best of them.
Let's say to that I want to develop something that uses an "evil" AI and I only want to sell to countries outside of the EU, I just can't do that because during development I would be suffocated by unhelpful regulations while someone in the US doing the same would be not.
> Most software businesses operate internationally, so the EU regulation is something you'll have to deal with no matter where you host, assuming you sell into the EU.
Having my whole business being at risk is not the same thing as only having a significant market being at risk.
> where you are headquartered as a business is up to you, and there are many choices.
Yes and the problem I was pointing out is that I would unlikely to pick an EU country because broken legislation that would hinder me is not something I want to deal with.
The EU problem is that legislation that is not around manufacturing is very knee-jerky, I don't feel like it would be a safe place for my potential software business, because legislation seems to be driven by headlines rather than rationality and the people making the legislations don't look too competent based on the end results.
> In terms of being competitive, some European services like OVH, Gandi, and Mistral are absolutely competitive internationally
Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean, ChatGPT, Meta, DeepSeek are a league of their own.
You know that quotes have a meaning, a knife can kill people, but it can also be used to make tasty food, the EU wants to ban the knife because it can kill people in this case.
> And if you really think that Mistral is not competitive then you clearly know so little about the AI landscape that it's hilarious that you think you're going to go develop some "evil" AI company.
Making up childish nonsense does not advance your argument.
I've bookmarked it. You should.
It reads like a simple list to me.
makes sense to me