So you are building something on the side and don't want to burn through your hard earned euros. You'd like to spend close to nothing on infrastructure until you have proof anyone wants what you are making. How close to zero can you actually get on a 100% EU infrastructure stack?
We only list providers that, at the time of writing this post, offer a permanent* free tier, not just a 14-day trial.
*Obviously, terms and conditions may change, free plans may be deprecated at some point.
No serious EU cloud provider gives away permanent free compute. What you get instead is very cheap compute.
Hetzner Cloud's CX33 server configuration is the sweet spot at around €7 a month for 4 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 80 GB of disk. That is enough to run a Django or Rails app with a Postgres database, Redis for caching, background workers - with plenty of headroom. If your idea finds traction, you scale up vertically for a long time before you have to think harder about it. For your average boring CRUD-style app, this server configuration could even be considered overkill.
Netcup is the runner-up with similarly cheap VPS plans starting under €5 a month. Slightly less polished console, but the price-performance is excellent and they have been around since 2003.
Password resets, magic links, receipts, the email confirming an order. Every app needs to send this kind of email, and three EU providers have genuinely usable free tiers.
Google Analytics is a GDPR nightmare, needs a ugly cookie banner and probably it is overkill for someone tracking their first hundred visitors anyway. Luckily, there are several EU options that are simple and free.
Simple Analytics offers a free plan for small projects, with a clean privacy-friendly dashboard and no cookies. TelemetryDeck has a generous free tier and is particularly nice if your product is a mobile or desktop app.
A small but useful layer that bootstrappers often forget until something breaks.
For uptime monitoring, UptimeRobot gives you 50 monitors on the free plan, which is more than you will need. Healthchecks.io is the better choice for cron jobs and background tasks: 20 checks free, and you can self-host the open source version if you want to.
Tally has an unusually generous free plan with unlimited forms and unlimited responses. Formbricks is open source with a free hosted tier, useful if you want in-app surveys rather than standalone forms.
You can roll your own with Django, Rails, or Laravel and it will work fine. If you would rather not, Hanko offers a free tier with passkeys, the modern way to handle login that gets rid of password resets entirely. It is open source and self-hostable if you want to avoid hosted plans altogether.
There is no truly "free" payment processor, but the bootstrapper-friendly version means: no monthly fees, you only pay when you actually make a sale.
Mollie is that. The closest thing to a EU clone of Stripe.
If you sell digital products and want a Merchant of Record to handle global VAT compliance and sales tax collection for you, Creem is worth a look. They take a higher percentage cut than a traditional payment processor, but it saves you tax headaches.
The only fixed cost here is your compute (the VPS). The Hetzner server at €7 per month. And honestly, you could get even lower with a smaller server config.
When you start hitting free-tier limits, you have a real product. At that point, the cheapest upgrades are usually a few extra euros, not a switch to a different stack. Ahasend at the next tier, a larger Hetzner box, Sender.net's first paid plan, and so on. The stack scales with you smoothly because each layer has a normal paid plan above the free tier.
The bootstrapper version of digital sovereignty is not ideological. It is just the cheapest credible way to ship something today without putting your card on file with a US hyperscaler before you even have a single user. The EU ecosystem is finally good enough that you can build the whole thing on the equivalent budget of a coffee per month.
Yes, for longer than most people assume. A CX33 with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM comfortably runs a Django or Rails app, a Postgres database, a Redis instance, and a background worker, serving thousands of daily users. You will outgrow it eventually, but vertical scaling on Hetzner stays cheap for a long time. The next tiers up are still well under €20 a month.
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