An entrepreneur details the complex reality of replacing AWS with European providers, driven by data sovereignty and a desire to reduce reliance on US hyperscalers. The project aimed to prove a viable EU-only stack was possible, though the journey involved significant friction beyond a simple provider swap. This required deep technical exploration and acceptance of certain trade-offs.

The final stack relies on Hetzner for cost-effective compute and storage, Scaleway for email and registry services, and Bunny.net for CDN and DNS. AI inference uses Nebius, while Hanko manages European-based authentication. Critical services like source control (Gitea), analytics (Plausible), and CRM (Twenty) are self-hosted on a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster, maximizing data control.

Major hurdles emerged. Finding a transactional email competitor to Sendgrid with comparable deliverability and ecosystem was difficult. Leaving GitHub's integrated world meant rebuilding CI/CD and losing familiar workflows. Domain pricing also showed unexpected regional markups. Some American dependencies are unavoidable, including Google Ads, Apple's App Store, and frontier AI models like Claude.

The effort delivered lower costs and a clean data residency story but demanded constant maintenance and faced thinner community support. The EU ecosystem is maturing, but opting for it remains an active, labor-intensive choice against the industry's default pull toward America.