I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.
I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".
You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.
I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.
While I'm cloud agnostic, this unique difference for Azure should not be overlooked compared to the other clouds.
But popular restaurants can be better, and they can be worse..
Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.
If you spin up your servers in EU locations they are under German ownership and EU regulation. Others, such as those in the US, are owned by a subsidiary and those are subject separately on the Cloud Act. Correct me if I'm wrong.
For my company it's about the "pulling the plug" usecase. We create a SaaS product for semi-critical infrastructure - we don't need 99% uptime but more than a few hours and it's problematic.
Sure, most cloud/VPS providers have sites in the US as well, but worst case only those places would be affected if the US decided to do a Special Military Operation on Greenland for example.
All without congressional approval. And apparently without the US population knowing about it.
Why risk using US tech?
It costs more, and the people running it likely may not be my friends
Wonder if any large geopolitical rifts happened eh. I soul would not host my application in Russia either for instance
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c...
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
Having a global monopoly on these kinds of things is part of what has let U.S. companies get away with being so anti-consumer for so long.
> If you have used Stripe before, Mollie is the closest thing to that experience in the EU.
But Mollie does not even properly support recurring payments, a pretty important feature for SaaS. It does not track subscription state and does not retry failed payments.
https://olly.world/what-it-actually-costs-to-run-pagecord-ma...
Which is fine, but I don’t imagine they’ll list a company that hasn’t paid for it.
> A subtle, high-visibility banner
Any recommendations?
Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.
There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.
You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.
They don't seem t care as well.The mindset is different.
