I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.
However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.
Older members of HN will remember that Product Hunt probably came to life a lot because of HN and the submissions/comments from rrhoover (founder of Product Hunt). He's still active here, but before/during Product Hunt launch he was very active if I remember correctly.
Maybe a grander idea is a European Hacker News, that has the potential to spawn the European Product Hunts of tomorrow :)
I don't know that an EU Hacker News makes sense, a core EU idea is Freedom of Movement.
This started out as an ideal about Goods. You make a Doodad in Venice, clearly there should be as few obstacles as possible to prevent somebody in Dublin having that Doodad, so no export taxes between Venice and Dublin, shared regulatory framework so that your Venice "This Doodad won't choke a baby/ burn down a house/ spy on you/ etc." paperwork is valid in Dublin, and so on.
But immediately people who make goods said well this rule needs to include Capital, it's great that I can sell Doodads from Venice in Dublin, but if I want to build a Doodad factory in Venice but my money is in Dublin that should be easy too. And Workers realised if it's just Capital and Goods then it's a race to the bottom for Labour, the Capital and Goods will go where it's cheapest but the workers can't move. So very soon Workers can move freely too, in order that Hans the Doodad Engineer can move to Venice and the courts ended up deciding that in practice everybody gets this freedom, a 5 year old can't have a job and a 105 year old probably doesn't want one, but maybe Hans needs to support his 5 year old grand-daughter and his 105 year old grandfather, so Freedom of Movement must apply to all EU citizens.
So, with that idea in mind, I suspect the EU's perspective is that you should come to Europe and write software here, rather than that you should stay exactly where you are and if it's not an EU country then too bad, no EU Product Hunt for you.
I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Yes, a core idea is freedom of movement, but you make no case for why that makes EU Hacker News infeasible? It has nothing to do with where people write software. I'm using US Hacker News, and I'm in Europe, is that wrong/bad, or what's your argument here?
I don't think creating an invoice is "niche". It is such a common need for users that invoicing software should be included in the operating system application suite. (Which it is somewhat if you consider Pages invoice templates).
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.
However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.
I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes).
IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.
The site has a lot of open source projects though, in fact i found about copyparty[0] from it because it was listed as an alternative to file hosting services (though it was removed since then, probably because it isn't a service :-P but still there are various FLOSS projects).
Does this hook up with promotion of the EUPL [1] as a preferred license for software? Does it even make more sense for european FOSS authors over the GPL family?
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
That doesn't make Hacker News European. It is American. Y Combinator is American even if pg is originally British. Stripe is American but its founders are Irish.
Yeah i know, my response was a clarification that BenoitEssiambre was referring to the founder, not the site itself. My interpretation of the "so there's that" part of the message, was an acknowledgement that Hacker News is hosted in US, but if nothing else the founder is living in UK.
The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.
> You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
Yes, and that's precisely the irony. Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
A language is a tool, not a nationality or a border.
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
It has been edited to "average educated European". If going by tertiary education, that is about 30% to 35% of the European population. I wouldn't be surprised if that group speaks three languages. In Spain it is typical to speak three of Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque, Portugese, English. In The Netherlands basically anyone speaks Dutch and English plus a third language, usually Frisian, Limburgish, German, French, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic (various variants).
Neither is pedantry a sign of intelligence, a message many a contributor to this here site would be good to take to heart. As to the choice of language English is and will most likely remain the lingua franca (pun intended) in most of Europe as it is the language which is most often learned as a second language. While many Europeans are not fluent in this language they do manage to read and make themselves understood in it. This makes it not a bad starting point just like the grandparent stated.
Fun fact: The term Lingua Franca originally meant something closer to Portuguese than the French spoken at the time. Eventually though, the French language did become the Lingua Franca truly, for some time.
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
Keeping the lights on is sufficient for the immediate concerns.
We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.
Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
So, to be clear, your reasons for looking for EU alternatives (i.e. that "same reason" you refer to) is that some countries are not allowed to contribute to US projects?
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
People are still running on Java 1.8, which was released in 2014. If no more Java work happened, that'd be unfortunate, but realistically we'd all be fine.
For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?
On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
Edit: I concede my .net concerns do pull through to Linux. If you were selling Linux solutions to Government or big business, I fear Redhat might be chosen before Suse and Ubuntu
The EU is asking for information on how to support open source, as they currently do through NLNET. It seems to prefer decentralised open source to the hyper-capitalism we got from American tech. Both have their downsides, of course.
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives.
I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids.
And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.
Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.
European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.
But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.
Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.
So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?
> Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? [...] Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab [...]
While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.
Not really. The forging pan-European nation composed of many nationalities is a thing in all meaningful contexts. European civilization, European economy, European products, European voters etc.
Not really, no. Europe is neither a sovereign state nor a single political entity. It's a continent composed of many individual nations with a versatile history.
I mean sure, your example shows that the virtue of being "European" represents a certain demographic and a sovereign territory. Again, it's a continent, so what?
First of all, US is at the edge of a dictatorship. If US falls completely, Europe will likely too, but untangling ourselves from US is an attempt to prevent that.
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach
It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
> Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.
You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.
Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.
I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.
I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Indeed, but cost of life is different as well. People usually compare US Bay area net salaries to Western EU salaries - but there are so many different things to consider as well(rent, insurances, taxes, etc) which imo spoils any constructive comparasion.
That was true a few years ago, but not any more. Covid made a lot of US-based companies sack local developers and actually open offices in Europe. I have friends in Italy who, between 2022 and 2023, moved from local companies to US companies opening offices in Rome and Milano, and got a salary bump from ~30-35k to 80-90k plus bonus and RSUs. Same thing happening all over Europe.
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.
The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.
Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.
I doubt you break your leg every year though. The kind of companies that we're talking about (big tech that are national champions) offers health insurance (among other benefits) and 200-500k USD/year salaries.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
The thing is that in Europe, you don't need your employer to have health insurance. It's more beneficial for everyone in the end (well, obviously not for the private health insurance companies who care more about their margins than public wellness).
It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.
I am not saying you are wrong, but Trump has shown exactly how quickly a "culture" can crumble down. Despite "checks and balances" the American democracy has done nothing to slow down the slide into dictatorship.
This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc.
The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level.
So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”.
There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction.
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.
Thought I'd have another look at mail providers, but from what I can see, none support the features I use with fastmail (custom domain, security key, unlimited on-the-fly aliases for sending).
It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.
> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.
but
> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.
Alternatives to Amazon.com? I'm totally serious when asking about this. I think delivery apps (like the one comically named "Deliveroo") are all potential alternatives to Amazon, but I think they charge a premium.
The open web is your European alternative, not the Silicon Valley-approach but then in Europe. That just invites the same abuse of data, the same enshittification and the same rent-seeking behavior.
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.
A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
It was the German equivalent of the NSA, with the German equivalent of a National Security Letter, sent to Hetzner to force them to intercept this customer's traffic. The same thing happens in the USA.
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
You know why I have this screenshot? Because I literally tried to switch to "great European alternative" that is "as slick as DO".
After a third or a fourth screen, most of which felt completely isolated and disconnected from any previous ones, I gave up on the screen that couldn't handle a standard European address.
This was literally the point that I gave up.
So I went ahead... and signed up with Hetzner.
Edit
So I decided to try again. Literally the first page of account sign in tried to trick you into accepting tracking
Since I apparently had an account, I could login... So redirected to a subdomain with the same cookie popup. On a site that is solely for billing address collection
which then redirects you to a third domain with the a similar but different popup.
Which ends up on an empty page indistinguishable in "usability" from Hetzner (or worse)
That's the end of my experience of my "European DO that is Scaleway".
I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.
Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.
When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)
It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.
To clarify empowering the EU is literally the opposite of Nationalism or are you discussing the recent surge of 'American Exceptionalism' of the current US administration?
Brexit made to clear that for some people being in the EU is an important part of their identity so that enables EU nationalism for them.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?
It's a different social contract. It's not just the waitress, it's service in general. One trying to judge the other is never quite going to work because it rubs us wrong in some weird internal way.
Eg go into a big store brand in most of the US and the cashier will be all flashy smile asking how is your day, and you ignore it and ask your request, and that's the game. A french person would mostly hate that, feel the question as annoying.
You go to a similar french store and the cashier and yourself will say the bonjour / merci / ... yada yada game and if someone doesn't do his part he's considered rude; I found a lot of foreigner surprised by that, the fact that you're not answering "merci" or asking "s'il vous plait" because it's nice, but because not doing it puts you in unpleasant person territory.
Ok business meeting, even in tech. American are always super optimist and happy, and seeing a solution and the end goal, French are over realist bordering on pessimist.
It's not that black and white of course there is a lot of inter mingling and differences, but overall which one you feel "better" is very personnal and based around what you're used to.
I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It's a cool project but it is 'niche'.
I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.
However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.
Thanks for the comment. I hadn’t thought about this before, but it makes sense - I agree.
About European Product Hunt - very good idea.
I was thinking recently that we need more European social networks, messengers, etc.
It’s a very good time to build imo =)
> About European Product Hunt - very good idea.
Older members of HN will remember that Product Hunt probably came to life a lot because of HN and the submissions/comments from rrhoover (founder of Product Hunt). He's still active here, but before/during Product Hunt launch he was very active if I remember correctly.
Maybe a grander idea is a European Hacker News, that has the potential to spawn the European Product Hunts of tomorrow :)
I don't know that an EU Hacker News makes sense, a core EU idea is Freedom of Movement.
This started out as an ideal about Goods. You make a Doodad in Venice, clearly there should be as few obstacles as possible to prevent somebody in Dublin having that Doodad, so no export taxes between Venice and Dublin, shared regulatory framework so that your Venice "This Doodad won't choke a baby/ burn down a house/ spy on you/ etc." paperwork is valid in Dublin, and so on.
But immediately people who make goods said well this rule needs to include Capital, it's great that I can sell Doodads from Venice in Dublin, but if I want to build a Doodad factory in Venice but my money is in Dublin that should be easy too. And Workers realised if it's just Capital and Goods then it's a race to the bottom for Labour, the Capital and Goods will go where it's cheapest but the workers can't move. So very soon Workers can move freely too, in order that Hans the Doodad Engineer can move to Venice and the courts ended up deciding that in practice everybody gets this freedom, a 5 year old can't have a job and a 105 year old probably doesn't want one, but maybe Hans needs to support his 5 year old grand-daughter and his 105 year old grandfather, so Freedom of Movement must apply to all EU citizens.
So, with that idea in mind, I suspect the EU's perspective is that you should come to Europe and write software here, rather than that you should stay exactly where you are and if it's not an EU country then too bad, no EU Product Hunt for you.
I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Yes, a core idea is freedom of movement, but you make no case for why that makes EU Hacker News infeasible? It has nothing to do with where people write software. I'm using US Hacker News, and I'm in Europe, is that wrong/bad, or what's your argument here?
I don't think creating an invoice is "niche". It is such a common need for users that invoicing software should be included in the operating system application suite. (Which it is somewhat if you consider Pages invoice templates).
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
Same here.
Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.
However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.
1. GitHub: https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
Make sense.
Btw tirreno looks very cool, just starred on GitHub :)
Thanks so much!
I've seen the same thing, the site accepts submissions but there's no one to either approve or reject them.
Unfortunately they did really well at SEO at one time, and more active alternatives appear far below in the search results.
Do you know any good alternatives?
I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes). IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.
The site has a lot of open source projects though, in fact i found about copyparty[0] from it because it was listed as an alternative to file hosting services (though it was removed since then, probably because it isn't a service :-P but still there are various FLOSS projects).
[0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty
Yes, make sense.
I plan to add a paid “pro” version with more features, but the current functionality will remain free.
Same, can’t get https://mailpace.com listed, no idea why
> template=stripe
Maybe this was enough to not include it?
What is the problem with “/?template=stripe”…?
=)
Does this hook up with promotion of the EUPL [1] as a preferred license for software? Does it even make more sense for european FOSS authors over the GPL family?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence
This is great. Since the greenland crisis I'm busy replacing all my us software and other products (e.g. no Heinz, no Apple...)
Same submission from a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627097
What's insightful to me is how fast the list of alternatives are growing.
The list is much better now than 2021 and we still have a long way to go.
Also Constantin Graf needs to add a new Category: "LLM Clients" or "AI Tooling"
Doing my bit: migrating my small company's db this weekend from AWS RDS to Hetzner VPS + volumes. Fingers crossed!
Already done: replaced SendGrid with Sweego.
Later: move domains from US registrar to EU based.
The difficult bit is the Microsoft Office because we are also using Azure DevOps for code, tickets, wiki and ci/cd.
One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.
We’ve been seeing a surprising amount of leads come through this site, clearly the demand for a EU alternative is high.
Wanted to submit my CMS, Val, but there's no CMS category yet?
I tried to create a category here if it is useful for others as well: https://european-alternatives.eu/admin/category-votes/3daefd...
Oh, and here's the product page: https://val.build
GitHub is here: https://github.com/valbuild/val
Is there a European alternative for this website?
journalduhacker.net (in french)
Its founder lives in europe so there's that.
I think he means Hacker News rather than EU Alternatives.
Paul Graham lives in UK.
That doesn't make Hacker News European. It is American. Y Combinator is American even if pg is originally British. Stripe is American but its founders are Irish.
Yeah i know, my response was a clarification that BenoitEssiambre was referring to the founder, not the site itself. My interpretation of the "so there's that" part of the message, was an acknowledgement that Hacker News is hosted in US, but if nothing else the founder is living in UK.
I also mean Hacker News
techposts.eu i reckon
Perhaps Lemmy may count based on distributed ActivityPub protocol with some servers in Europe.
The irony is that European alternatives are still in English, when no European country (since the departure of the U.K. from Europe) actually uses that language.
The amount of things wrong is impressive
You're confusing Europe and the EU
You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
> You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
Yes, and that's precisely the irony. Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
The english language has ceased to be something unique to the anglocultural world a while ago. You're making this out to be much more than it is
We actually already use Globish that has different idioms and so on. End we can express different kind of informations there.
> You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
And how does that change anything to what is being said ? English is only one of the official languages of the UN or NATO or the WHO or ...
Mae hyn yn wir o fewn y DU hefyd.
:P
A language is a tool, not a nationality or a border.
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
> Your average European speaks at least three
ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate
It has been edited to "average educated European". If going by tertiary education, that is about 30% to 35% of the European population. I wouldn't be surprised if that group speaks three languages. In Spain it is typical to speak three of Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque, Portugese, English. In The Netherlands basically anyone speaks Dutch and English plus a third language, usually Frisian, Limburgish, German, French, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic (various variants).
The UK did not leave Europe. Just the EU. But also English fluency is widespread, so it’s not a bad starting point.
> But also English fluency is widespread, so it’s not a bad starting point.
Being able to string together a couple of sentences is not "being fluent." By that standard, all of America would be fluent in Spanish.
Neither is pedantry a sign of intelligence, a message many a contributor to this here site would be good to take to heart. As to the choice of language English is and will most likely remain the lingua franca (pun intended) in most of Europe as it is the language which is most often learned as a second language. While many Europeans are not fluent in this language they do manage to read and make themselves understood in it. This makes it not a bad starting point just like the grandparent stated.
English is also the lingua franca (French language) of computers.
Fun fact: The term Lingua Franca originally meant something closer to Portuguese than the French spoken at the time. Eventually though, the French language did become the Lingua Franca truly, for some time.
It has been around 300 million years since the UK drifted away from continental Europe but it is still very much part of it!
The British isles were still connected to the continent 20k years ago.
Technically they reconnected 31 years ago with the tunnel.
Ireland and Malta.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
The UK is still in Europe. They didn't move from the continent.
Except for Ireland.
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors
Open source generally meets the needs of the first two. There's barely any proprietary toolchains left in common use; maybe Oracle Java is one of the last?
Hardware you can buy from China. Distant, predictable authoritarianism that doesn't make annoying social media posts is sadly preferable to .. whatever is going on over there.
Only if there are European resources to keep the lights on.
Java is FOSS by the way, however it is also a good example, its runtime capabilities isn't the product of long nights and weekends.
Keeping the lights on is sufficient for the immediate concerns.
We can worry about feature growth later, if at all. It may be age finally changing my preferences, but so much of what I've seen sold as "new" in tech in recent years has been either worse than what I already had or a reinvention of something that already existed. Like, contactless payments were already a thing before they were available in phones, and social media didn't start with FB and twitter, and Apple's API updates in the last few years feel like as much of a downgrade to me as their icons seem to be to UI blogs.
FWIW Free Pascal and Lazarus communities and developers are largely European and there isn't a single company behind them. Though at the same time there are also several devs from outside EU so i do not think it can be called a "EU alternative" - which is the case for most FLOSS projects actually.
Some projects, especially high profile ones, do have US companies behind them (e.g. Google, etc) so you could claim they are US-centric, but at this point it becomes a question of why you are looking for an EU alternative. If it is to help EU businesses (like others mentioned), then unless you financially support these US companies (either directly or indirectly via, e.g., your data) it doesn't matter if the FLOSS project you are using is made by them or not.
For the same reason people on the wrong countries aren't allowed to contribute to US projects.
The way things are going it becomes a national security issue where those PR are coming from.
So, to be clear, your reasons for looking for EU alternatives (i.e. that "same reason" you refer to) is that some countries are not allowed to contribute to US projects?
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
Hardware vendors is a different issue
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
People are still running on Java 1.8, which was released in 2014. If no more Java work happened, that'd be unfortunate, but realistically we'd all be fine.
For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?
On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
Edit: I concede my .net concerns do pull through to Linux. If you were selling Linux solutions to Government or big business, I fear Redhat might be chosen before Suse and Ubuntu
The EU is asking for information on how to support open source, as they currently do through NLNET. It seems to prefer decentralised open source to the hyper-capitalism we got from American tech. Both have their downsides, of course.
For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/
I recently discovered these: https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/
They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register
Thanks
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.
Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.
Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?
What are global alternatives? Every company is connected to some country, there are no global alternatives. I live in EU and want to use EU services mainly because I want this part of the world to prosper. I want to leave my money and incentivise innovation in this part of the world because this is where I live and I want a better life here for me and my kids. And alternatives are always good, especially that they’re not closed. People in the US can use services from EU companies as well :) why not?
Theoretically possible in a distributed way, though usually inefficient. IPFS is a good example.
It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.
Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.
European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.
But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.
Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.
So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?
No,not sad, centralisation is always problematic even if well meaning. The presence of diverse alternatives is a feature, not a bug.
As long as they're actual alternatives of course, rather than just another monopoly but at a smaller scale.
> Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? [...] Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab [...]
While I agree with your sentiment, European and nationalistic are two contradicting positions, unlike the other three mentioned superpowers.
Not really. The forging pan-European nation composed of many nationalities is a thing in all meaningful contexts. European civilization, European economy, European products, European voters etc.
Not really, no. Europe is neither a sovereign state nor a single political entity. It's a continent composed of many individual nations with a versatile history.
I mean sure, your example shows that the virtue of being "European" represents a certain demographic and a sovereign territory. Again, it's a continent, so what?
yet
First of all, US is at the edge of a dictatorship. If US falls completely, Europe will likely too, but untangling ourselves from US is an attempt to prevent that.
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
The European alternatives are not restricted to Europe.
Competition is always good. It's sad that there's been so little alternatives in the past. I'm glad that this is now slowly changing.
What we should work towards, though, is interoperability and open source solutions.
> Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach
It's not even that. We euros were more than willing to look the other way (see the umpteen attempts to reconcile our privacy-friendly legislation with the free-for-all of American services, ongoing for decades) in the name of convenience and fundamentally shared values. The turning point was really in 2024/2025, when those shared values were summarily swept away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
> Besides, the "global alternatives not subjected to power-hungry overlords" are actually very much subjected to the worst of humanity, and wide open to exploitation from such overlords.
This is, in fact, what "overlord" means!
Nothing against global standards and similar. But even "global alternatives" are usually rooted somewhere locally, and that starts to matter more and more, it seems.
I think the opposite as you. These global companies often act as a nation with laws unto themselves. Most of them don't actually have real support that can do anything unless you make a lucky Twitter post or something. Having a local company that is realistically beholden to local laws and local politicians that you can actually potentially go and talk to if needed is a major feature.
I'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.
This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.
You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.
Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.
I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.
I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.
I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.
Tech jobs in IT in Moscow are paid(net) relatively similar to what you could get in EU.
So not US salaries.
Indeed, but cost of life is different as well. People usually compare US Bay area net salaries to Western EU salaries - but there are so many different things to consider as well(rent, insurances, taxes, etc) which imo spoils any constructive comparasion.
But why? What's unsustainable about an email service, for example, run by competent European engineers at European salaries?
The huge influx of competent European engineers to the US is a real thing.
That was true a few years ago, but not any more. Covid made a lot of US-based companies sack local developers and actually open offices in Europe. I have friends in Italy who, between 2022 and 2023, moved from local companies to US companies opening offices in Rome and Milano, and got a salary bump from ~30-35k to 80-90k plus bonus and RSUs. Same thing happening all over Europe.
That might not be the case any more if things get to the point where someone in Europe must use a European alternative.
Will this continue?
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.
The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.
Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.
I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.
I doubt you break your leg every year though. The kind of companies that we're talking about (big tech that are national champions) offers health insurance (among other benefits) and 200-500k USD/year salaries.
I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.
The thing is that in Europe, you don't need your employer to have health insurance. It's more beneficial for everyone in the end (well, obviously not for the private health insurance companies who care more about their margins than public wellness).
It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.
I am not saying you are wrong, but Trump has shown exactly how quickly a "culture" can crumble down. Despite "checks and balances" the American democracy has done nothing to slow down the slide into dictatorship.
So how long will the culture last?
I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.
Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.
[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.
Not sure about Ireland, but Switzerland used to be true, but now it is also far behind since 5+ years.
See, Google Zurich vs Seattle
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Hm, after carefully reviewing the entries seem more or less the same, Zurich slightly lower.
Considering the low taxes and lower cost of living in Zurich (yes, lower than Seattle), and the much higher quality of life, Zurich is a no-brainer.
The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.
This talking point went out the window After America threatened to invade Greenland.
After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.
Funny, the first 3 are web analytics, cloud computing and CDN. So surveillance.
I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
This list is very impressive, but it is the wrong approach. We simply need an EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon etc.
The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level.
So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”.
Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?
There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
A few friends and I have thought similarly, although we focused on Apple first and the Google/Office suite second. We wrote our thoughts here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/ and the alternatives here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html
I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
Excellent question and great to see you thinking in the same direction.
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
Hmm, I wouldn't say it would take a "massive" amount of capital. EU is rich enough and they don't pay developers as well, correct? Most of the building blocks already exist.
Yes, but integrating them seamlessly and securely is still a huge undertaking.
> EU alternative to Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon
This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen".
I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.
You don't have to do all five at once, and a proper replacement based on the integration of a number of partial solutions should in principle be workable. What is required is the capital and the will to do it. If someone pulls this off they can count on my company as a subscriber and I think there are many more like me.
Thought I'd have another look at mail providers, but from what I can see, none support the features I use with fastmail (custom domain, security key, unlimited on-the-fly aliases for sending).
They don't, but you shouldn't feel too bad as fastmail is australian, ie not american, which (at least personally) is where we're trying to divest.
Their servers are in the US
Do they have any plans to move off the US?
US servers, though.
It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.
Is this only for companies within the EU or EFTA? I can't spot a single UK company listed, even though there are plenty that would fit.
On https://european-alternatives.eu/about the listing criteria state:
> The company is based in an EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country or in the UK.
but
> For hosting providers: It is not allowed that a hosting provider is simply a sub-hosting provider of a company that is not based in an EU or EFTA member country.
https://european-alternatives.eu/about
It's all clarified here. If you think it's missing some great companies add them!
If you want an EU-made (and repairable!) e-bike battery, check what we're building at https://infinite-battery.com :)
an European energy sector (mainstream or industrial) HN would be great btw
ps: congrats on your success
Alternatives to Amazon.com? I'm totally serious when asking about this. I think delivery apps (like the one comically named "Deliveroo") are all potential alternatives to Amazon, but I think they charge a premium.
In DE probably Otto.de is the closest you get (?).
In NL I remember Bol was quite good.
For clothes Zalando is a big one.
Beyond that it gets fragmented into companies serving only a few markets. Alza, Cool Blue, and Media Markt are some that come to my mind.
Wow, nice! Great resource, thanks a lot!
The open web is your European alternative, not the Silicon Valley-approach but then in Europe. That just invites the same abuse of data, the same enshittification and the same rent-seeking behavior.
Last time this came up I decided to try Scaleway which is at the top of their "cloud computing" list.
"European alternative" that doesn't know that European addresses have non-ASCII characters: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.
A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
That was 2024 (still inexcusable), they managed to fix it at one point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734771
Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
Was it Hetzner, or was it an attacker hosting on Hetzner/Linode?
It was the German equivalent of the NSA, with the German equivalent of a National Security Letter, sent to Hetzner to force them to intercept this customer's traffic. The same thing happens in the USA.
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
You know why I have this screenshot? Because I literally tried to switch to "great European alternative" that is "as slick as DO".
After a third or a fourth screen, most of which felt completely isolated and disconnected from any previous ones, I gave up on the screen that couldn't handle a standard European address.
This was literally the point that I gave up.
So I went ahead... and signed up with Hetzner.
Edit
So I decided to try again. Literally the first page of account sign in tried to trick you into accepting tracking
Since I apparently had an account, I could login... So redirected to a subdomain with the same cookie popup. On a site that is solely for billing address collection
which then redirects you to a third domain with the a similar but different popup.
Which ends up on an empty page indistinguishable in "usability" from Hetzner (or worse)
That's the end of my experience of my "European DO that is Scaleway".
They did fix the addresss boxes, kudos to them
we should have also claude-alternatives like projects that are entirely built by vibe-coders.
Ugh, back to nationalism.
I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.
Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.
When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)
It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.
Can you imagine, knowing so little of the rest of the world, you call this nationalism without irony.
Sir, please read up on Wikipedia what the EU is. What Europe is. Also, this is a very mild response to a "American first" new world order.
To clarify empowering the EU is literally the opposite of Nationalism or are you discussing the recent surge of 'American Exceptionalism' of the current US administration?
Brexit made to clear that for some people being in the EU is an important part of their identity so that enables EU nationalism for them.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
>One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.
You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.
And who's to say it's not going to happen again in 2030?
Using a French server has been a pain. Their level of customer service is much worse than that in the US sadly
"French server", what is that? Usually we judge customer service on the company, not the nationality of the hardware, care to share exactly where you had a bad experience?
I like it. No fake smiles, no tip required. They can be a bit grumpy but French food is amazing which makes up for it.
That's what I like in the US: the servers are so friendly... and yes, I know it’s all for the tip.
Well they're not friendly then are they? It's an act to get a tip - and if you don't you get chased down the street.
It's a different social contract. It's not just the waitress, it's service in general. One trying to judge the other is never quite going to work because it rubs us wrong in some weird internal way.
Eg go into a big store brand in most of the US and the cashier will be all flashy smile asking how is your day, and you ignore it and ask your request, and that's the game. A french person would mostly hate that, feel the question as annoying.
You go to a similar french store and the cashier and yourself will say the bonjour / merci / ... yada yada game and if someone doesn't do his part he's considered rude; I found a lot of foreigner surprised by that, the fact that you're not answering "merci" or asking "s'il vous plait" because it's nice, but because not doing it puts you in unpleasant person territory.
Ok business meeting, even in tech. American are always super optimist and happy, and seeing a solution and the end goal, French are over realist bordering on pessimist.
It's not that black and white of course there is a lot of inter mingling and differences, but overall which one you feel "better" is very personnal and based around what you're used to.
OVH? I hate the dashboard, but the support seems fine to me.
Have you tried Hetzner
No, I was looking for a French one. I'll persist with this for a while and then switch if things don't get better. Thanks
Scaleway is slick. It's like a European Digital Ocean.
Agree, I’ve been impressed with Scaleway so far during some early experiments. Including a quick support response to a query I had.
Last time I wanted to try it it was nowhere near DO: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1835649083345649780
You've posted that twice in this thread. I don't think it's as damning as you think it is.
I agree, seems he's on a mission instead.