Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play
Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort
Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure sounds like a nice sovereignty flex right up until you actually try it and realize the real price gets paid in time, tinkering, and slowly unlearning a decade of GitHub muscle memory.
That's the takeaway from a blog post published on Friday in which one founder lays out what happened when they decided to ditch the US hyperscalers and piece together a "Made in EU" stack instead.
The experiment eventually turned into hank.parts, a cross-border car parts marketplace where buyers post what they need and sellers from around Europe pitch offers.
The motivation won't surprise anyone who's followed the sovereignty debate: keep data in Europe, avoid putting everything in the hands of a few US cloud giants, and see if a homegrown stack can actually hold up. Turns out it can – just with a few more hurdles along the way.
Compute ended up running on Hetzner, with Scaleway filling in gaps like email and container registries. Bunny.net handled CDN and edge duties, Nebius provided GPU capacity for AI inference, and German identity outfit Hanko took care of authentication. A long tail of tools – analytics, secrets management, CRM, error tracking – was self-hosted on Kubernetes, with Rancher acting as the control tower.
"Is self-hosting more work than SaaS? Obviously. But it means my data stays exactly where I put it, and I'm not at the mercy of a provider's pricing changes or acquisition drama," the founder said.
The trade-off is that every self-hosted component becomes your responsibility when something breaks, and the documentation rabbit hole can get pretty deep at the worst possible moment.
What really stands out in the post isn't the infrastructure choices so much as the ecosystem's pull.
"If you live in GitHub's ecosystem Actions, Issues, code review workflows, the social graph... walking away feels like leaving a city you've lived in for a decade," they wrote. "You know where everything is. Gitea is actually excellent, and I'd recommend it without hesitation for the core git experience. But you'll miss the ecosystem."
Not everything can be local, though. Getting an app onto phones still means handing a cut to Apple and Google, and finding users still tends to run through Google Ads. Social logins also keep bouncing through US systems because that's what people expect. And if you want the newest AI models, you're still making a call across the Atlantic.
It doesn't come across as a warning so much as a reminder of where things stand. Europe's cloud scene is clearly capable, but going all-in today still means a bit more hands-on work and fewer shortcuts. You get more control and often lower bills, but with a little less of the "it just works" magic.
Europe can run your stack perfectly well. It just hasn't quite figured out how to make it the default path yet. ®