But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example
I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.
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.
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.
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 can see it now, if you have a European Hacker news, you'll have a bunch of people complaining about how Europe isn't the world and admonish posters to not be so eurocentric on the site --that other people besides Europeans would read it... but anyway, good luck on the endeavour.
I already have this feeling on french-speaking forums where everything is very France-centric despite there are french speaking people from other countries reading it.
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?
EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless. The EU should avoid key US dependencies, but that means things like we shouldn't design a system that needs Microsoft's stupid "Co-pilot 365" or whatever they are now calling Word and Excel, rather than it's important never to visit a web site hosted in the US.
"The new government policy shouldn't require iPhones" is a long way from "Nobody can read The Onion", and even in its hardcore "Sign up for YCombinator" mode Hacker News really isn't anywhere close to the former.
Although because idiots I am no longer in the EU I'm in Europe too.
Just seems needless. Like "We should have Hacker News for musicians" or "We should have Hacker News for City Dwellers". I think there's more value from the broader audience than from specialising what is already a fairly niche site. This isn't Facebook or Youtube, it's both less technically sophisticated (no offence to Dan & co keeping it working) but also much smaller in scope.
I'm sure musicians and city dwellers could have some stories they're more interested in versus less interested in, but this gets into the newsgroup hierarchy problem where too much specialisation means there's nothing left to talk about. We presumably agree that a Hacker News for people named Brian who work at Meta is a bad idea?
I used to think like you, but in the last few years I have become tired of American-dominated spaces that ignore other world views and push their narratives endlessly, so I am very much in favour of European-focused forums and social media.
I am sorry but no. This is a common myth, but go way back to the original treaty of Rome and you’ll see much more than free movement for goods. It was just a convenient first step.
Reading the preamble of the treaty is enough because it explains the mindset behind the European project. The Schuman declaration is also short and very clear on the subject. Even though it’s not a treaty or regulation, it’s a clear demonstration that the people at the time saw much further than just the economy. The core message is political integration to prevent Europe from tearing itself apart every 50 years.
I don't think I see free movement of people in Schuman? It's very clear about wanting to move steel and coal but it mentions workers only to suggest that this ECSC should "improve living conditions" for workers. I could squint at this and consider that a steelworker in Duisburg might "improve their living conditions" by retiring to a nice slow-paced village in Southern Italy but just as easily it could mean the ECSC is about workers staying where they are but being able to afford nicer stuff.
However once I'd fought the EU's terrible web search I did sit and read a bunch of the actual Treaty of Rome, and yes that actually does very clearly specify Freedom of Movement for Workers and is broad enough in how it treats this freedom that it's not a surprise courts subsequently concluded that basically every EU citizen should be able to live anywhere in the EU.
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 have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
Euro-Stack.eu is a scam that promotes European software using:
A wordpress.com based website hosted in California by the US company Auttomatic
Fronted by Cloudflare, a US monopoly (this is probably part of wordpress.com paid subscription)
Edits its letter to EU Commission asking to support European IT industry in Microsoft Word.
Converts it to PDF with Adobe software
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).
Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.
I wouldn't hard recommend based on lack of solid experience of using them over time, but Gandi showed a lot of promise for me.
Context: I used to run a domain-related service that used registrar api's and gandi's seemed the most well thought out by a considerable way. The drawback was they're quite expensive for registrations/renewals unless you're doing it at volume.
I had reservations about them being a French company wrt support but their API was so good I never needed to contact them on anything.
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.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?
Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.
I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.
In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free.
It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.
The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me!
And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
It seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well.
If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
You’re twisting words at this point. Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly and neither of them are afraid to use their power to cut off money flows towards entities they disapprove of. It’s an intrinsic risk and a big issue for sovereignty. The situation is very different for pharmaceuticals, a lot of which are American. The short story is, the American healthcare system is broken and very expensive for the results it provides. The solution is to reform your health system. Moaning won’t solve anything because even if you replaced all those evil European companies with American alternatives, it won’t bring prices down because the system still encourages price gouging.
You’d have a point if you had examples of European pharma companies cutting off supply to American entities for political reasons. You don’t, so you don’t have a point.
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
They correctly point out that useless parasites like the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that I also mentioned to you, are a quite big part of your drug price problem. Yet you seem to refuse to acknowledge it
The system is packed with opaque middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, many of which are making big rents
Certainly the US healthcare system needs reform. But I believe a big reason why we have paid such high drug prices for so long is because congresspeople in the US believed that it was good for us to subsidize drug innovation for the entire world. That era is over. Like I said, you Europeans had a good thing going, but you just couldn't let well enough alone.
If you really believe that Congressmen in the US thought they were subsidizing foreign nations while their own citizens suffer out of their goodness of their hearts, and not because some Lobbyists donated huge sums to their campaigns and "convinced" them in some meetings, Boy I do have a Bridge to sell you.
American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation
Especially the Republican ones, which have blocked and still trying to block all efforts to bring drug prices down by negotiation.
They are known for being very caring people. Especially for the poor and disadvantaged
The lobbyists probably said something like "it is good for drug companies to make profits so they can innovate new drugs for global benefit".
Same way the defense companies probably said something like "it is good to deter Russia so that Europe can remain free and democratic".
Hilarious, isn't it?
Anyways shouldn't you get back to work so you can afford all the new weapons you're going to have to buy?
"American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation." Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it. Now we're done.
* Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it
We got nothing but hate and laughter for it*
You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll.
I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran (pre-Mullahs) and other countries that were gifted with democracy were also other selfless endeavours by the Americans.
"You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll."
Europeans always imply that NATO is some sort of vast American conspiracy. But they are hardly ever able to give compelling examples of American benefit. The US benefit from NATO always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I suppose if we were more educated on European geography trivia, like you guys, that might help us understand why the US needs NATO so badly.
"Vietnam"
Yes, that was seen as analogous to another very recent war in Korea. If it wasn't for us, the state known as "North Korea" would cover the entire peninsula.
"Iraq"
One of the worst dictators in history, that Saddam Hussein. Europeans laughed at us for our opposition to him. It's why we now have little interest in opposing Putin, who is a herbivore by comparison.
"Afghanistan"
Depending on who you ask, we are either imperialists for displacing the Taliban, or complicit for allowing them to displace us right back. Typical double-bind.
"Iran"
You mean the country which is at this very moment crying out for American intervention, asking the Americans to protect protesters? It's fascinating to me how certain Europeans can simultaneously beg the US for protection, and also assume that the US must be up to no good in other countries where the US gets begged for protection.
Hopefully you can see why I support Massie's bill to withdraw the US from NATO at this point. I'm tired of it all. I want a Swiss foreign policy for the US. Do you also support Massie's bill? Maybe that's something we can agree on.
It seems that you have great difficulties with reading comprehension. I was mentioning Iran (Pre-Mullahs) where the UK and US overthrew a democratically elected president because of Oil. Leading to the current theocratic and oppressive government.
Also your reasons to invade Iraq were made up Lies about Weapons of Mass destruction, and the US propped up the Taliban against the Soviets in the first place.
Both were quite liberal states compared to today, after they were blessed with US intervention
Classic double bind. If we support the Taliban, we are evil for "propping it up". If we oppose it, we are evil for "destabilizing it". The implication is that everything would magically be fine and dandy if it weren't for the US. Of course, your critique does not engage much with the actual reasoning or decision-making process of the US in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter). But caricaturing the US as an evil empire was the point, after all.
I think your narratives are oversimplified or inaccurate, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
The important point is: Since US intervention is so bad, according to you, can you understand why I want to withdraw from NATO? Can we at least agree on that? Don't you want to save your continent from the evil US intervention such as all the billions we've sent as support to Ukraine?
Why do you think we propped them up against the Soviets? Oh yeah, it was an effort to bring down the Soviet Union so Germany could be reunified, hermanzegerman. Arguably, a rather successful effort. And a huge mistake in retrospect. Germany should've stayed divided. Berlin Wall should've stayed in place. Not our problem. We unified Germany and got 9/11 as thanks.
See why I want out of NATO? The Swiss stay perfectly neutral, they never had a 9/11, everyone loves them. No one blames them for the situation in Ukraine (they contribute little) or anything else. That's what the US was like pre-WW1 with regard to Europe. I want to go back.
> Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it.
Have you thanked the French for getting involved in US wars?
And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Why would I personally thank Euros for "destabilizing the Middle East" when they demonize the US for "destabilizing the Middle East"? That doesn't make any sense. You know the Libya operation was Europe-initiated right? You gonna personally thank the US for going along with it? Lead the way amigo.
>And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Yes, in the sense that me and my ancestors have been paying taxes to support a military which was supposed to be able to win against the USSR. That money should have stayed in the United States for peaceful purposes. Euros should've defended themselves. If the USSR took over the entire continent that's not our problem. We have to focus on our own problems instead of playing world police.
You can't both demonize the US for its every foreign policy move, and also demand the US protect you. That makes zero sense. You can't both trash the US for its every supposed problem, and also demand that the US pay more attention to Europe's problems. That also makes zero sense. There's nothing coherent in the European ideology beyond just "America Bad". Fine, we'll take our toys and go home. I sure hope it makes you happy.
No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made fun of our long work hours, while demanding Ukraine contributions based on our high GDP (which is high in part because we work long hours). They talk so much about America's soft power in Europe, without realizing that Europe's soft power in America is practically all gone at this point.
See this illustrates my point. The "soft power" talking point I sometimes see from Europeans is a complete lie. The idea is that giving Europe relatively favorable terms will cause Europe to regard the US well is a fabrication. In reality, giving Europe favorable terms just causes Europeans to view Americans as suckers.
You are deluded. Nobody "gave Europe a sweet deal". Those are the rules of the land. Companies are free to reject them, in which case they just cannot do business here. We did not force them to come. The fact that they are still obviously making tons of money in the EU should tell you how you are being taken advantage of.
Right. It’s not really protection money. It’s just a duopoly under the control of a rogue foreign power that control any entity’s access to customer’s payments. So even if it’s not protection money, the risk of blackmail is high. It is a strategic weakness.
Protection Money is as much nonsense as "Europeans are ripping off Americans in Trade". Because they always conveniently leave out services, which would make the Balance between the US/EU even
As the other guy said you're completely deluded. Nobody "gave" us cheaper credit card fees from MasterCard or Visa. They were the result of a regulatory process.
MasterCard or Visa also aren't operating as a charity in Europe.
Before the capping of fees was introduced, their acceptance was shit at most businesses, and most bank consumers also didn't have one, as opposed to cards of the national scheme which had lower fees both for customers and merchants
So initially MasterCard/Visa profits in Europe are "protection money".
Then it comes out that MasterCard/Visa fees in Europe are actually far lower than in the US.
Now the Europeans are laughing at the Americans for being suckers.
This interaction basically sums up the entire EU/US relationship and the absurdity of Europe's rhetoric around it. Copy/paste this template, change a few words, and it applies pretty much everywhere.
We don't laugh at Americans for being suckers, we feel sorry for them that they have to live with all this nonsense, and their current horrible administration.
And we also look with horror because most of the bullshit in the US is coming to Europe with a 20 year delay
OK so can we at least agree that the US needs to withdraw from NATO in order to focus on our own domestic issues, and so Russia will no longer interfere in our elections?
I need to worry about secret police in my state murdering randomly people. I have no time to think of Europe. Hence it is best to withdraw from NATO. Agreed?
> Sweden: 47% had a favorable opinion of the US.; Germany: 49%; France: 46%; The Netherlands: 48%
And this was after the US committed over $120 billion in aid (all weapons and cash) to Ukraine, and, for some reason, allowed Sweden to join NATO--the same Sweden that pledged neutrality when Finland was invaded by the Soviets, who stole the Karelian Isthmus and other bits of its territory, and similarly did nothing when Norway and Denmark were invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany.
Yes, there is no point in trying to make Europeans happy. They are impossible to please. You can see our favorability in Europe was barely net positive then.
By May of last year (before the Greenland drama--I'm against that of course), more Europeans liked China better than the US. Maybe we should start shipping materials for weapons to Russia, like China does, to see if that improves our popularity with Europe.
"Soft power" is an absurd talking point. Doing nice things for Europe has brought us nothing but anger and contempt. Just scroll through this thread, there's plenty of proof. They are a very entitled and condescending people.
In 2021 he tried an autogolpe and by the time this survey was done in 2024, he was not in prison for treason but instead again running for president as nominee of one of only two major parties. What sort of opinion should one have of such a country?
> allowed Sweden to join NATO
What sort of absurd argument is this? Now that Sweden changed their mind and want to enter treaty obligations to help defend e.g. the Baltics, we should refuse them?
Also, I can't begin to comprehend how Sweden would militarily defend Finland, who entered WW2 as an ally of Nazi Germany after being invaded by USSR, and simultaneously fight against Nazi Germany.
You are paying more for everything because your country is extremely anti social, people alone have no leverage to negotiate prices with visa, pharmaceutics and so on.
Trump is only pushing that « free for all » policy even more, I wouldn’t expect to see things improve for you.
Instead of fixing your country and making the rich accountable, you’re being manipulated to look elsewhere.
Anyway, I believe that the eu cutting ties with the USA is the best thing that could happen to us and I’m glad you’re satisfied. We should have spent much more on military and put an end to the USA military supremacy across the world a long time ago.
Yes, I am very happy to see Europe develop its own military-industrial complex. That way, whenever something bad happens in the world, you will be "complicit" if you sit by, and "imperialist" if you take action. It's a lot of fun!
Besides the military-industrial complex, I am very happy to see Europe develop its own digital systems. That way we won't be totally dependent on Google, Microsoft, AWS, OpenAI, Apple, Visa, Mastercard etc.
Come on, it’s already been that way for more than a century. Old imperial powers cannot do a thing or its opposite without endless recriminations. We’re used to it.
For the past few decades I've only seen the US constantly criticized as either "complicit" or "imperialist". We tried to take responsibility for everything and it got us nothing but hate. Hopefully it will be Europe's turn soon.
If you're trying to imply that I have a childlike understanding... in that case, I appreciate you reinforcing the points I've made in this thread, namely (a) Europeans are condescending jerks, and (b) Europeans will airily claim "Americans are ignorant" but rarely have much interesting evidence to back up their claims.
These two comments you made above and the fact that you care so much about what a not very well-defined mass of people thinks about you and blames you of that you mistake it for soft power are the perfect illustration of my point.
So, more condescension with no supporting evidence? Gotcha.
Like the US benefit from NATO, "soft power" always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I've spent tens or even hundreds of hours arguing online with Europeans. They've never given a compelling explanation of how US "soft power" is supposed to work in a democratic country when the majority of the population dislikes the US. They just stick their nose in the air and say "too bad you're an ignorant American, if you were European like us, you would understand". Europeans think Americans are suckers, in other words.
It's very ironic to me that Europeans say that Americans are purely self-interested, but when it comes to actually convincing to us, they are barely ever able to muster any sort of compelling appeal to our self-interest. (They don't just want us to defend them; they also want us to make the argument that it is in our national interest to defend them! It's rather astonishing.) At the end of the day, "Americans only care about their self-interest" is just another "America Bad" rhetorical point, as is proven by the actions of Europeans.
If you want us to be benevolent to you, give us credit for being a benevolent actor in your region. If you truly believe we are self-interested, appeal effectively to our self-interest, and respect our decision if we conclude that your appeal is unpersuasive or the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But don't constantly talk about how we are evil and self-interested, and then de facto expect us to help you on the basis of altruism. That's what you've been doing for years now. At this point we are burnt out. "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
It goes to show how pointless it is to chase 'soft power' by appealing to global public opinion. Even in democratic countries, most leaders have sub-50% approval. So even if the US was run by a politician chosen by a global electorate, we would most likely still be hated.
And of course good intentions are no guarantee of good results, e.g. I believe Bush had good intentions with Iraq, he was just incompetent.
China is very smart to simply not get involved in much of anything. As soon as you do something, it gives people the opportunity to blame you, if even a single person thinks the result is even a little bit less than perfect.
There are regulations. Both Visa and Mastercard were happy with those and made quite a lot of money from their business in the EU. They absorbed and merged with local alternatives and competitors. It’s a bit rich to complain after the game has been going on for a while that the rules are as they are: they’ve always been that way and if they were not happy, they could just have ignored the European markets. Now, if your point is that you’re being shafted, then congratulations: realising is the first step towards solving. Now, vote for a government that will actually regulate the sector in the people’s favour, not the big corps. We cannot help you for that.
I'm not complaining about Visa or Mastercard fees in the US.
I am pointing out the absurdity of the original European claim that such fees are "protection money" to the US, when the EU is getting a sweetheart deal relative to the US. It's typical disingenuous European rhetoric.
I know it's difficult for you to comprehend, but Governments are supposed to act in the interest of the general population of their country, not for companies and the 1%.
And that includes making sure that markets are working and regulating (near) monopolies
And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is
Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.
More importantly, perhaps, are some exercises where a A SRE team creates likely problem (US/China/…) does bad things with DNS/BGP/…, submarine cables, starlink, GPS/GALILEO, Kessler effect etc, and SRE team B tries to keep the national infrastructure together. This may be happening already, but I have my doubts
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?
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.
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?
> 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?
> People can define Europe as nation and then you can have a nationalistic Europe.
Right, it they do not. You’d have to stretch the definition of nation beyond its breaking point for Europe to be a nation. It would include Russia and Ukraine, Finland and Greece, none of these nations have much in common.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free?
We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.
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.
What makes you say that? It was explicitly created as an EU alternative to HN by a person from the Netherlands. They posted about it on HN a few days ago.
I haven't found anything public about where its hosted
I was probably not clear in my original comment. My point, in context of this thread, was that it is hosted in US-based company. So things like Cloud Act still apply.
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.
> Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
Do you have a single clue about Europe? That's not true at all.
Besides that, besides my native language and English, I had German and French in school (which are required topics in our country). So I can speak the native language of all nearby countries.
I would hesitate to even call that English: "Many of the features suggested to be characteristic of Euro-English could be identified as learners' mistakes."
Hardly anyone uses Irish in daily life or for official purposes, notwithstanding its official status. 99% of the Irish you hear outside a classroom is performative.
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 was edited to "average educated European", whatever that means.
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!
However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
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, Arabic, English. In The Netherlands basically anyone speaks Dutch and English plus a third language, usually Frisian, Limburgish, German, French, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic.
Two American tourists were backpacking in Europe when a car pulled up next to them. The driver rolled down his window and asked in german:” Where is the nearest diner?”
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
I do find it funny that Brits colloquially describe "Europe" as being foreign, as in, "in Britain" vs "in Europe", or "in Europe" vs "on the continent. Of course, I guess the "the continent" is a loaded term, too.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to me, I get it, and it's easier to refer to Europe as "the other" rather than having to use a longer phrase to describe traveling from the British isles to the mainland of continental Europe.
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.
Basic fluency in English is widespread enough that I've had to be way out in the boonies in pretty much any country I've visited for me not to find somebody who can speak English. It makes me feel like a bit of a fool not being able to speak anything but English myself. I've got a learning disability that affects my ability to learn languages, so as much as I've tried, I'm not able to get much further than being able to get fed and find the bathroom in any other language.
I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
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.
> You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).
Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
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.
To the extent that my employer blocks Oracle dot com at the outbound firewall to stop anyone accidentally incurring license costs. You don't want to deal with Oracle license enforcement.
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.
Back then the licence did not apply to embedded systems, and Google did a Microsoft move as well, Android Java is their J++.
Sun did not sue, because they were out money already, and Oracle used the argument they were using Apache clone implementation of Java, with copyrighted headers.
To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android.
Even after having won, they refuse to implement full compatibility.
> To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android
Because of the licence or because it won't work? Sounds like the latter, but I have never seen a Java library that unexpectedly did not run on Android.
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.
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
They do not dominate the development Like MS for Windows. Independent people from all over the world review their contribution. This is a small problem related to other things.
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.
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
Yeah i understand why one would do that, i wrote that not to make the question itself, but to indicate that whoever thinks to look for EU alternatives should ask that question to themselves. This way they can figure out how to choose their next steps, like judging if a FLOSS project makes sense to use or avoid - e.g. if it is tied in a US company.
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?
Ok, but in that case the only FLOSS projects from US that can be considered "dangerous" would be those which are both tied to specific US companies and do not have much of a EU presence to be forked in case of such weaponization (with ease of forking being taken into account as well).
And TBH IMO such projects should be avoided in the first place regardless of what US is doing because they tend to use FLOSS as a marketing method than for practical development. Choosing projects which have multiple shareholders, so to speak, is much healthier in the long term.
- 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.
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).
I've been looking at mail providers too, and it's starting to look there are no real alternatives. Not just in Europe, but worldwide. I've been a happy user of Fastmail for quite some time now, and it's sad the the current geopolitical situation pressures me into migrating away.
The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.
In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.
Doesn’t seem to support on-the-fly aliases for sending, requiring instead to set it up in advance. I use a custom mail per website/contact workflow, and with FM any reply uses whatever alias I used to receive the mail, with the option to change it to whatever I want without extra steps.
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?
The EUPL is a fine license, especially if your goal is wide compatibility with other copyleft licenses. However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft, which could be surprising if you just read the main text.
Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.
Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.
Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.
That depends on your interpretation of what a “derivative work” constitutes, which the EUPL delegates to copyright law. For the GPL, it includes other programs linked to the work (which is how it affects other projects using the work as a library). If this definition held true for the EUPL as well, it would behave the same way. (By the way, I don't really like describing copyleft as “viral”, because that implies the GPL (and similar licenses) are like infectious diseases.)
However, the compatibility clause allows relicensing to other licenses that are explicitly weaker in their copyleft, which is what I meant with the quoted sentence.
Another comment just made me aware though that apparently, copyleft extending to other programs linking with the work is just not a thing in the EU? I'll have to read more into the details of that.
What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
I think you’re missing the point of my question. I’m not saying that story isn’t distressing and a good reason to use alternatives, but I’m asking about whether you can convince individuals and individual businesses that these alternatives are more cost effective or capable than the software they’re replacing.
To me, a very non-subjective reason is that the money I'm paying for these services will go to people and companies that share the same values and the taxes on the said money will be used for our common defense instead of being used to attack us.
If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is.
There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.
Please don’t assume I’m not up to date on the news. But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. I’m genuinely asking about incentives for the individual or individual business. That’s a more difficult question to answer than asking why shouldn’t Europe as a whole pursue this.
I answered above, but answering here as well in case it's buried.
> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.
Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.
European companies operate under stricter privacy laws. GDPR is applicable world wide but has serious teeth and enforcement within Europe. Small US companies with no presence in Europe can effectively ignore it. However if an American were to choose a European service this benefit is effectively passed on to them. They can view what data any company has on them or ask them to delete it.
I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.
And a second non-subjective and very important reason is that at any moment the US government might decide that the data we entrusted their corporations with is no longer ours and we need to part with it. It will be used for AI training. Also, this is because we didn't say thank you or something like that...
That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.
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.
True. But the systems are more and more breaking down. Its unsustainable. At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands.
to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases.
Not talking about the trains. Germany DB runs on time in only 50% of the cases.
So thats a big problem
My partner has had three extensive cancer treatments in the Netherlands. She has had dietary and psychological specialists help her during and after each one.
All of this was just on normal health insurance and with normal clinics and hospitals.
Never did she have to wait more than perhaps 3 weeks tops for an appointment.
The medical system here is world class.
However Germany and it's infrastructure can not be compared to the Netherlands. I refuse to take trains through that country anymore.
I was talking about Germany's infrastructure. Last year I had 3x separate trips turn into chaos due to how broken their system is. Broken trains, broken track infrastructure etc. Think multiple hours on each trip rather than just 10 minutes delay.
The trains that are 10 min late in Germany mostly not exist in many other countries. Sure Switzerland is the best, but Germany is pretty high up. It’s just less good than it used to be. Oh and you can ride almost everywhere for 60 EUR / month.
For healthcare if you get an IT salary you can either move to private insurance, or buy additional insurance, or just pay a consultation yourself for a fee that US people won’t believe.
Last 7 times i took the ICE, i had 5 delays. 3 times the restaurant wasnt available. 2 times they didnt stop at my destination and I had to rent a car.
so yeah. I try to travel now either by car or plane. But even by car is terrible, especially in the south. More construction sites every year and none are finishing.
.
Health care is totally broken if you dont have private insurance. My step dad, who has, gets an appointment 1 day after he calls. my grand ma, who worked all her life and is now on public needs to wait 5 months IN PAIN.
the system is breaking down in front of our very eyes.
i am not living in Germany. i moved to fthe NL, but the situation is very similiar.
That's very alarmist, sensational and dramatic. The systems are going though some tough times, but they are not breaking down, that's what children would say to make their life more like a Hollywood movie.
My father had to go though multiple appointments and analysis to get his prostate and hernia checked. Never waited more than a week and paid 0 in total. Before, he'd probably only have to wait a couple days for appointments, but the stress the healthcare system is currently undergoing is abnormal due to the more aggressive cases of flue this season. All things considering, things are not "breaking down" (I'm even getting some second hand embarrassment reading those words).
> At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands. to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases.
Same in France, it can take a while to get an appointment to see some specialists nowadays. There's a clear decline there.
But if you have something bad, they'll treat you in time. Actually, a relative of mine has been diagnosed with cancer a not long ago. She got several surgeries and all the treatments with no wait, and at not cost.
There's no reason why it shouldn't be sustainable.
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.
Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.
Biggest problem has been talent going to US.
This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.
The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.
It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).
I don't think that's motivated by money. The US companies simply solved more interesting problems. Working for a start up in the Bay area trying to invent a new industry, or scale systems to global is generally more interesting than working on a CRM system for mid-size lumberyards in Sweden. The CRM system pays well enough to have a comfortable lifestyle and provide for your family, but it's a little boring if you're 25 with a shiny new CS degree.
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.
Because many European engineers move to the US does not mean at all that most European engineers move to the US. There are many engineers in Europe.
I hear that argument a lot, and honestly it sounds uninformed and downright disrespectful. Some kind of "I am a US developer, we US developers are the best, and the few good European engineers come here. The remaining ones in Europe are dumb".
Not to mention that I have talked to quite a few European engineers who could earn a lot more by moving to the US, but just really don't want to live in the US. Maybe there is a reason for that?
I think you underestimate how dramatically the perception of the US in Europe changed for the worse. It was already in nose dive during recent months, but the recent days (Greenland crisis) will put a nail in the coffin. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I expect that influx to dry up very soon.
> What is the European alternative to the US military if Russia attacks Europe?
European military. Why do some people act as if European countries had no armies?
And even if we had no armies and Russia attacked and totally destroyed us, how is it related to the topic discussed here, which is whether the influx of European engineers to the US will continue or not?
> This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
Perhaps. I don't think it is, but let's say you are right. How is that relevant? People do not want to go to a country they perceive negatively. Whether that perception is an objective fact or hysteria is, in this context, immaterial.
Well there is no "European military" per se and there will be no "Russia invades Europe" scenario, because "Europe" is a continent and not a sovereign nation.
What would happen is that Russia invades Poland, or Russia invades Romania or Bulgaria or something. Those are Eastern European countries. (I mean they all used to be Soviet bloc anyway.) Or Russia would invade Germany like the good ol' days. So whatever nation they invaded would sic their own armed forces on them, and their allies' too. NATO could jump into the fray.
Americans (and perhaps Russians too) often misunderstand how terribly small European nations are, really. They're mostly smaller than individual United States. So, less population, less time to transport stuff, fewer natural resources available in a sovereign context, etc. But lots of national borders.
So Russia won't invade "Europe" but they could go into one or more nations on the list.
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.
Over what period of time do you predict economic downfall for European tech because of salaries?
Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.
You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.
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).
I really don't see money as an incentive. Political and economic stability of the whole country is much more important. Of course you need enough to afford food and roof, but after that, I'm not chasing it.
I'm a freelance, and I take fun jobs, not jobs that pay well.
Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high, and you get the insane salaries, and your healthcare is oftentimes mostly if not completely covered by your employer (I pay literally $0 out of pocket for high quality healthcare here in San Francisco).
> Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high
Quality of life is also a cultural thing. I know it's hard to understand for US people (I truly believe it is the case for cultural reasons), but many people really don't want the lifestyle of the US for all sorts of reasons. For some people, quality of life means easy access to healthy food, or to nature, seeing trees instead of giant concrete parking lots or 6-lanes highways, etc.
A analogy for major health events that demand a lot of money, to which I replied you don't have $major_health_event every year. Interesting that you didn't pick that up.
I'd say if you get a job in the same company, Zurich is competitive. The problem is that if you lose your job at Google in Seattle there are several hundreds of FAANG positions and probably thousands of other 200k$+ SWE jobs you can reapply to. In Zurich you will maybe see a dozen of openings in the small subsidiaries of Apple, Microsoft & Co., and maybe some individual job offers from small AI companies, and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent.
> and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent
Which should not be an issue, if as I read a lot in this page, "all good European engineers move to the US". It means that you only have to compete against the "bad ones" that stayed back, right? /s
Numbeo shows averages, and the basket of goods that it considers is not what a well-off person would buy. I Zurich I could live perfectly well without having a car, just with public transportation, and French and Italian cheeses and wine are a cheaper than in Seattle.
As a well off person your most significant purchase is going to be a house, and in Seattle they are 3x cheaper.
I just left Seattle Greater Area and my 350sqm admittedly old house + a small ADU with an outdoor pool went for $2M (at the moment it was a downturn, so maybe $2.5M tops now). What can you get for that money in Greater Zurich Area? A 100sqm flat?
In the Zurich Greater Area, you can get this for example: https://www.immoscout24.ch/buy/4002631314. Keep in mind that in most of Europe, real estate ads show the living space, i.e. surface net of walls, corridors, closets, cupboards, etc... whereas in US/Canada it's the gross surface. Those 350sqm are prolly 280 "livable". So if you're willing to live outside the Zurich city core, prices are comparable to Seattle but construction quality is way higher.
Also, most mortgages in Switzerland are very peculiar: you pay 20% down, but then you don't ever pay off the principal, only interest on the remaining 80% which is owned in perpetuity by the bank. The interest rates are kept very low and the currency quite stable, because most of the citizens rely on it. So your monthly interest could be 400-500 CHF, and you invest the rest however you prefer.
The rail network in and around Zurich is reliable and punctual, so you can live anywhere along that 30km long lake and still have your commute be 30-40m, without needing to search for a parking spot and whatnot.
I experienced this myself when I was briefly commutung from Pfäffikon(SZ).
Commute to where? 15 minutes walking from Microsoft main campus and 10 minutes driving from a new Facebook campus. 10 minutes driving to a good daycare.
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.
Personally it's not all about money. I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe for better quality of life.
Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.
When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.
I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.
The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.
Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:
- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.
- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society
- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.
- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.
- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.
You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.
Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:
- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people.
- China
- Iran
- New Zealand
- Australia
- Canada
...
Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.
Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.
Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.
Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.
You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.
It's just crazy. I went to the Estonian embassy in Berlin, was offered coffee, and 20 minutes later I had my digital card allowing me to create a limited company.
What is your experience running that company? It looks great on paper, but if you don’t mind sharing, what is the practical side of things? Have you encountered any stumbling blocks?
Greater chance of survival, greater chance of being a winner in any consolidation in the industry, generally revenue translates to higher share price which means ability to acquire useful and interesting companies, likely lower cost of capital for borrowing for build-outs. Attracts greater talent with better packages. Now as teeny tiny (personal) customer of these guys... I'm not really going to care about most of this stuff. But in my $70B company market cap day-job... I do.
Hmm, how starnge that AWS then seems to be the most expensive option around. I've saved loads of money by using Hetzner instead. I can also easily move to other providers should I want thanks to open standards and open source.
Trump's attitude motivated me to finally get away from Gmail. I tried several of the providers mentioned on this website and stuck with tuta.com. After almost a year, I'm very happy, would recommend.
Interesting to know before going in:
- They encrypt the emails when storing them, so the only way to access emails is to use their own apps. I was hesitant at first but their web app, desktop app and android app are great
Speaking of missing categories — there's no "Compliance Tools" or "GRC" category yet. I'm building humadroid.io (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliance platform, based in Poland) and as far as I can tell, there aren't many European alternatives in this space. Most of the established players (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) are US-based. Would be great to see this category added.
Interesting, do you also provide the actual audit for ISO 27001 as part of your service? That’s why I went with Oneleet, but a EU-based solution would be attractive.
No, we don't do audits — and that's intentional. I think there's a conflict of interest when the same company advises you on compliance and then certifies you. Incentives get weird.
The good news: there are plenty of EU-based ISO 27001 audit firms. We can recommend one or two if you need a pointer — we just don't have a formal catalogue or marketplace for that yet (though it's on my list).
So you'd use Humadroid for the preparation - policies, controls, evidence, risks, continuity plans, ISMS workbook - and then bring in an independent auditor for certification.
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'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".
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.
The German NSA seemed unable to access the server as they only intercepted the traffic. They got a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt by intercepting traffic. If the app had used public key pinning, and the server had full disk encryption, this wouldn't have been enough for a compromise.
We should be divesting from unethical businesses, not from american ones.
Nationalism can be so seductive but if you engage in it you're being pulled down to "their" level.
Instead, consider your true "country" is the set of good people, no matter where they live. Keep spending your money on ethical american businesses, and european ones, and russian and chinese ones, if you can find them. Stop spending your money on unethical businesses, even if they're local.
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.
It depends where you live. There's no one company that's implented in all European countries. All countries have a shop similar to Amazon (often with fewer sponsored products and less drop shipping garbage). There are also a few specialized shops (for books, sports, electronics...). Since 2020 I only buy Amazon if they're significantly cheaper than other sellers. That's about 10% of my purchases.
> 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.
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 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.
"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.
so much reasonable scepticism here is being downvoted, i don’t get why
to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?
Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".
It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
> being posted by Americans
> Americans with vested interests
proofs, please?
> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech
it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government
> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"
again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
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.
I'm sorry, my cognitive bias says 'Look! See! That proves my point at how great the US is/was.'
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
But it's not just one politician or just one election. The current guy was elected twice. His position on tariffs, NATO, and Greenland are not new. The movement supporting him is unlikely to disappear any time soon. From the outside, it doesn't look like one wrong step, but just part of the new normal.
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. It's easy to understand the change in behaviour if you understand this.
Back to the European Alternatives stuff, I've been looking at the services I use and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
It was a single election in 2016, and a few governors and senators and… oh it’s actually a pattern, a system that people feign to ignore when convenient for them.
> 1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
I get your pain but are you expecting other countries just to take hit?
Should EU lift sanctions with Russia as well? You know "1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population".
US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries.
Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.
The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.
OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.
Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.
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.
That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.
Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.
> 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
A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.
> 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."
This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.
> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
I almost choked at this.
The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.
The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.
> 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.
That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.
That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
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.
> the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it
That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US.
> the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details
I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services.
Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
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.
There was absolutely nothing about your comment that indicated this intent. Open questions can be asked for discussion, not closed yes/no factual questions with a singular, well-known answer.
I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
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”.
That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
Why not? I said "get your own domain", not "self-host your server". You are the one saying that it doesn't work so well to self-host your server, I never asked about it.
In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet.
Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.
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.
In this thread I've seen
- https://altstack.jp for Japan
- https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives for Canada
- and ofc https://european-alternatives.eu/ for the EU
But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example
https://alternativeto.net/software/github/
I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.
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.
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.
Hard agree
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 :)
There is one, it starts about 11pm my time at https://news.ycombinator.com :)
Good morning :)
=)
I read about https://techposts.eu/ the other day, seems like a decent alternative, but needs some more traction.
No documentation about who runs it, no privacy policy, no words of licensing or anything else. Seems like a good prototype for a start nonetheless.
I can see it now, if you have a European Hacker news, you'll have a bunch of people complaining about how Europe isn't the world and admonish posters to not be so eurocentric on the site --that other people besides Europeans would read it... but anyway, good luck on the endeavour.
I already have this feeling on french-speaking forums where everything is very France-centric despite there are french speaking people from other countries reading it.
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?
EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless. The EU should avoid key US dependencies, but that means things like we shouldn't design a system that needs Microsoft's stupid "Co-pilot 365" or whatever they are now calling Word and Excel, rather than it's important never to visit a web site hosted in the US.
"The new government policy shouldn't require iPhones" is a long way from "Nobody can read The Onion", and even in its hardcore "Sign up for YCombinator" mode Hacker News really isn't anywhere close to the former.
Although because idiots I am no longer in the EU I'm in Europe too.
> EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless
Ok, but what are your actual arguments against it? Again your comment contains things about the EU and US which I don't know why you keep bringing up.
Do you have any arguments against a European Hacker News that isn't related to the EU and US geopolitics or government policies?
Just seems needless. Like "We should have Hacker News for musicians" or "We should have Hacker News for City Dwellers". I think there's more value from the broader audience than from specialising what is already a fairly niche site. This isn't Facebook or Youtube, it's both less technically sophisticated (no offence to Dan & co keeping it working) but also much smaller in scope.
I'm sure musicians and city dwellers could have some stories they're more interested in versus less interested in, but this gets into the newsgroup hierarchy problem where too much specialisation means there's nothing left to talk about. We presumably agree that a Hacker News for people named Brian who work at Meta is a bad idea?
I used to think like you, but in the last few years I have become tired of American-dominated spaces that ignore other world views and push their narratives endlessly, so I am very much in favour of European-focused forums and social media.
> This started out as an ideal about Goods.
I am sorry but no. This is a common myth, but go way back to the original treaty of Rome and you’ll see much more than free movement for goods. It was just a convenient first step.
I didn't know that's a myth, do you have anything I can look at to learn more, besides "try reading the entire Treaty of Rome" ?
Reading the preamble of the treaty is enough because it explains the mindset behind the European project. The Schuman declaration is also short and very clear on the subject. Even though it’s not a treaty or regulation, it’s a clear demonstration that the people at the time saw much further than just the economy. The core message is political integration to prevent Europe from tearing itself apart every 50 years.
I don't think I see free movement of people in Schuman? It's very clear about wanting to move steel and coal but it mentions workers only to suggest that this ECSC should "improve living conditions" for workers. I could squint at this and consider that a steelworker in Duisburg might "improve their living conditions" by retiring to a nice slow-paced village in Southern Italy but just as easily it could mean the ECSC is about workers staying where they are but being able to afford nicer stuff.
However once I'd fought the EU's terrible web search I did sit and read a bunch of the actual Treaty of Rome, and yes that actually does very clearly specify Freedom of Movement for Workers and is broad enough in how it treats this freedom that it's not a surprise courts subsequently concluded that basically every EU citizen should be able to live anywhere in the EU.
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 have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
I checked the first 3 companies I saw with the label 'EU hosted'. bunq.com and lifebit.ai are hosted on AWS, and tomtom.com is hosted on Azure.
https://info.addr.tools/bunq.com https://info.addr.tools/lifebit.ai https://info.addr.tools/tomtom.com
Do you have a plan or idea of how to get the minimum critical mass of genuine users once the platform is built out?
Wow, 1launch looks great! Will definitely launch there very soon.
Just submitted EasyInvoicePDF to launch on 1launch :)
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've been able to submit new entries to
https://eucloud.tech/
https://buy-european.net/
I've also found other problematic ones:
https://euro-stack.com/ (I couldn't understand how to submit a new entry)
https://www.goeuropean.org/ (all submissions fail with an AirTable error [sic] that the workspace is at the record limit)
Euro-Stack.eu is a scam that promotes European software using:
Interesting. Thanks for the info
Someone should make european-alternatives-alternatives.eu.
xD
Same here. I created and submitted a European open-source Snapchat alternative, but it's been in “Waiting for Review” status for quite some time now.
Webpage: https://twonly.eu/en
Github: https://github.com/twonlyapp/twonly-app
twonly looks very cool, just starred the repo on github :)
Thank you, I appreciate every star :)
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.
You probably need to include EN16931, XRechnung, Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, … and how they all called, the new standard for electronic invoices.
Free generator for e-invoices here: https://www.e-rechnung-online-erstellen.de/kostenlos/e-rechn...
This is planned =)
Starting working asap on this because in Poland (where I live) it will be required from April 2026.
Issue to follow: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/121
Same, can’t get https://mailpace.com listed, no idea why
Unless you do Peppol... it's not intresting at all.
Stay tuned
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/issues/121
A hint: try cooperating with letspeppol, it is built by engineers for engineers.
Thanks for the suggestion. Will take a look
> template=stripe
Maybe this was enough to not include it?
What is the problem with “/?template=stripe”…?
=)
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.
Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.
Unfortunately Hetzner volumes have pretty low iops for databases
We have a small database with low access rates. We'll be fine, at least for a while.
What EU based registrars would you recommend?
https://www.inwx.de/en
Hetzner might be a good choice to keep things together, as we're already using some services from them.
I like Hetzner, but I'd avoid having everything under the same provider.
Sometimes hosting companies suspend accounts. If that happens, it's useful to have your domains and backups with different providers.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/domain-name-regist...
It's all in there.
I wouldn't hard recommend based on lack of solid experience of using them over time, but Gandi showed a lot of promise for me.
Context: I used to run a domain-related service that used registrar api's and gandi's seemed the most well thought out by a considerable way. The drawback was they're quite expensive for registrations/renewals unless you're doing it at volume.
I had reservations about them being a French company wrt support but their API was so good I never needed to contact them on anything.
Definitely worth a look.
For me personally, one that's well supported by DNS-01 providers for let's encrypt.
Unfortunately there's not that many and often the process is broken.
What does that have to do with registrar?
You are talking about DNS zone hosting which can be separate. And I always prefer to keep it that way.
It can be separate yes but I generally keep it the same for simplicity
I haven't looked into this yet, so I cannot recommend. I'll work my way through the list here: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/domain-name-regist...
I’ve been using Gandi for quite a few years now without any trouble.
SchlundTech
netim.com
Me too.
Just moved all my hosting and dbs from a US company to Hertzner after 15 years of good service. Moving domains now.
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.
Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.
And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.
No it's not.
Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco.
There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.
I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?
Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.
I see one engineering job ad https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack... if we can call EU Digital Wallet speculation "engineering".
But you just answered your own question.
Wero is a money extraction business that secured European Commission support. There is no engineering nor payment system to it.
what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.
Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.
I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.
In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free. It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.
Sounds more like you have some axe to grind
https://epicompany.eu/members
Others joined quite recently, indeed.
Wikipedia gives an overview by year.
As for the axe, I have no personal interest.
The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff
I recently heard of Wero and it seemed promising. What makes Blik so much better in your opinion?
+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.
Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.
Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me! And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.
I wish GNU Taler would become more concrete.
https://www.taler.net
It seems like Taler has been coming along great and the biggest things it’s missing are more interest and adoption. There has been some first ‘real-world’ use recently, but it’s still far from becoming widespread, which would be a dream come true.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
The digital Euro has not been implemented yet. Some analysts are skeptical but this is the EUs answer for Visa/Mastercard.
For small transactions right? I haven't looked much into it but I thought the main purpose was to save people all the transaction fees.
That's not the main purpose. The main purpose is tech independence.
The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks)
Wero is coming and it should work across Europe
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
France has the CB network for example which I believe still dominates most credit card transactions although it's declining as more and more cards are not co-branded anymore.
It merged with Mastercard almost two decades back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_%28credit_card%29
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
When European customers pay American firms, it's "protection money".
When American customers pay European firms, it's just capitalism, sorry bro.
You’re twisting words at this point. Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly and neither of them are afraid to use their power to cut off money flows towards entities they disapprove of. It’s an intrinsic risk and a big issue for sovereignty. The situation is very different for pharmaceuticals, a lot of which are American. The short story is, the American healthcare system is broken and very expensive for the results it provides. The solution is to reform your health system. Moaning won’t solve anything because even if you replaced all those evil European companies with American alternatives, it won’t bring prices down because the system still encourages price gouging.
You’d have a point if you had examples of European pharma companies cutting off supply to American entities for political reasons. You don’t, so you don’t have a point.
I was responding to this comment about how Visa/Mastercard fees are supposedly "protection money": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736657
If US firm profits in Europe are "protection money" then EU firm profits in the US should also be added to the ledger.
For pharma there are, most of the time, alternatives. There is no alternative to Visa/Mastercard in Europe. It's an American duopoly.
No, Europe had Europay, which their regulators allowed to be subsumed into Mastercard.
Hell, the EMV standard — used in all cards worldwide — means "Europay, Mastercard, Visa".
Look after your toys better.
> Look after your toys better.
Lesson learned, at least for me. I am in the process of moving everything digital to Europe.
That comparison makes no sense at all. What protection money are you taking about?
It's a claim from the comment I originally replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736657
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
That actually changed recently, but The Economist (UK newspaper) whines that Americans will no longer be footing the bill for drug development:
https://archive.is/bWwP4
We're done with Europeans treating us as suckers. Doing nice things for Europe leads to nothing but contempt from Europeans.
They correctly point out that useless parasites like the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that I also mentioned to you, are a quite big part of your drug price problem. Yet you seem to refuse to acknowledge it
The system is packed with opaque middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, many of which are making big rents
Certainly the US healthcare system needs reform. But I believe a big reason why we have paid such high drug prices for so long is because congresspeople in the US believed that it was good for us to subsidize drug innovation for the entire world. That era is over. Like I said, you Europeans had a good thing going, but you just couldn't let well enough alone.
If you really believe that Congressmen in the US thought they were subsidizing foreign nations while their own citizens suffer out of their goodness of their hearts, and not because some Lobbyists donated huge sums to their campaigns and "convinced" them in some meetings, Boy I do have a Bridge to sell you.
American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation
Especially the Republican ones, which have blocked and still trying to block all efforts to bring drug prices down by negotiation.
They are known for being very caring people. Especially for the poor and disadvantaged
The lobbyists probably said something like "it is good for drug companies to make profits so they can innovate new drugs for global benefit".
Same way the defense companies probably said something like "it is good to deter Russia so that Europe can remain free and democratic".
Hilarious, isn't it?
Anyways shouldn't you get back to work so you can afford all the new weapons you're going to have to buy?
"American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation." Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it. Now we're done.
* Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it*
You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll.
I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran (pre-Mullahs) and other countries that were gifted with democracy were also other selfless endeavours by the Americans.
"You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll."
Europeans always imply that NATO is some sort of vast American conspiracy. But they are hardly ever able to give compelling examples of American benefit. The US benefit from NATO always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I suppose if we were more educated on European geography trivia, like you guys, that might help us understand why the US needs NATO so badly.
"Vietnam"
Yes, that was seen as analogous to another very recent war in Korea. If it wasn't for us, the state known as "North Korea" would cover the entire peninsula.
"Iraq"
One of the worst dictators in history, that Saddam Hussein. Europeans laughed at us for our opposition to him. It's why we now have little interest in opposing Putin, who is a herbivore by comparison.
"Afghanistan"
Depending on who you ask, we are either imperialists for displacing the Taliban, or complicit for allowing them to displace us right back. Typical double-bind.
"Iran"
You mean the country which is at this very moment crying out for American intervention, asking the Americans to protect protesters? It's fascinating to me how certain Europeans can simultaneously beg the US for protection, and also assume that the US must be up to no good in other countries where the US gets begged for protection.
Hopefully you can see why I support Massie's bill to withdraw the US from NATO at this point. I'm tired of it all. I want a Swiss foreign policy for the US. Do you also support Massie's bill? Maybe that's something we can agree on.
It seems that you have great difficulties with reading comprehension. I was mentioning Iran (Pre-Mullahs) where the UK and US overthrew a democratically elected president because of Oil. Leading to the current theocratic and oppressive government.
Also your reasons to invade Iraq were made up Lies about Weapons of Mass destruction, and the US propped up the Taliban against the Soviets in the first place.
Both were quite liberal states compared to today, after they were blessed with US intervention
Classic double bind. If we support the Taliban, we are evil for "propping it up". If we oppose it, we are evil for "destabilizing it". The implication is that everything would magically be fine and dandy if it weren't for the US. Of course, your critique does not engage much with the actual reasoning or decision-making process of the US in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter). But caricaturing the US as an evil empire was the point, after all.
I think your narratives are oversimplified or inaccurate, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
The important point is: Since US intervention is so bad, according to you, can you understand why I want to withdraw from NATO? Can we at least agree on that? Don't you want to save your continent from the evil US intervention such as all the billions we've sent as support to Ukraine?
If you wouldn't have propped them up in the first place against the Soviets you wouldn't need to fight them afterwards...
Why do you think we propped them up against the Soviets? Oh yeah, it was an effort to bring down the Soviet Union so Germany could be reunified, hermanzegerman. Arguably, a rather successful effort. And a huge mistake in retrospect. Germany should've stayed divided. Berlin Wall should've stayed in place. Not our problem. We unified Germany and got 9/11 as thanks.
See why I want out of NATO? The Swiss stay perfectly neutral, they never had a 9/11, everyone loves them. No one blames them for the situation in Ukraine (they contribute little) or anything else. That's what the US was like pre-WW1 with regard to Europe. I want to go back.
> Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it.
Have you thanked the French for getting involved in US wars?
And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Why would I personally thank Euros for "destabilizing the Middle East" when they demonize the US for "destabilizing the Middle East"? That doesn't make any sense. You know the Libya operation was Europe-initiated right? You gonna personally thank the US for going along with it? Lead the way amigo.
>And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Yes, in the sense that me and my ancestors have been paying taxes to support a military which was supposed to be able to win against the USSR. That money should have stayed in the United States for peaceful purposes. Euros should've defended themselves. If the USSR took over the entire continent that's not our problem. We have to focus on our own problems instead of playing world police.
You can't both demonize the US for its every foreign policy move, and also demand the US protect you. That makes zero sense. You can't both trash the US for its every supposed problem, and also demand that the US pay more attention to Europe's problems. That also makes zero sense. There's nothing coherent in the European ideology beyond just "America Bad". Fine, we'll take our toys and go home. I sure hope it makes you happy.
No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710
How is that relevant? The US can reform its healthcare system whenever it decides to do so.
For the EU, Visa and Mastercard dependence form a duopoly controlled by a hostile foreign power. An alternative is essential.
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
This website appears to indicate that Visa/Mastercard fees are about 6x as high in the US vs EU:
https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-co...
The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made fun of our long work hours, while demanding Ukraine contributions based on our high GDP (which is high in part because we work long hours). They talk so much about America's soft power in Europe, without realizing that Europe's soft power in America is practically all gone at this point.
Okay, so you're mad that your country is too stupid to regulate it's own business?
The regulation also forced all merchants to accept Visa/MC without being able to surcharge a fee for it.
Both Companies are quite happy with that deal as it boasted the adoption for their cards across Europe
See this illustrates my point. The "soft power" talking point I sometimes see from Europeans is a complete lie. The idea is that giving Europe relatively favorable terms will cause Europe to regard the US well is a fabrication. In reality, giving Europe favorable terms just causes Europeans to view Americans as suckers.
You are deluded. Nobody "gave Europe a sweet deal". Those are the rules of the land. Companies are free to reject them, in which case they just cannot do business here. We did not force them to come. The fact that they are still obviously making tons of money in the EU should tell you how you are being taken advantage of.
So you acknowledge that this point about "protection money" (the point I was originally responding to) is nonsense then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736657
Right. It’s not really protection money. It’s just a duopoly under the control of a rogue foreign power that control any entity’s access to customer’s payments. So even if it’s not protection money, the risk of blackmail is high. It is a strategic weakness.
Protection Money is as much nonsense as "Europeans are ripping off Americans in Trade". Because they always conveniently leave out services, which would make the Balance between the US/EU even
As the other guy said you're completely deluded. Nobody "gave" us cheaper credit card fees from MasterCard or Visa. They were the result of a regulatory process.
MasterCard or Visa also aren't operating as a charity in Europe.
Before the capping of fees was introduced, their acceptance was shit at most businesses, and most bank consumers also didn't have one, as opposed to cards of the national scheme which had lower fees both for customers and merchants
So initially MasterCard/Visa profits in Europe are "protection money".
Then it comes out that MasterCard/Visa fees in Europe are actually far lower than in the US.
Now the Europeans are laughing at the Americans for being suckers.
This interaction basically sums up the entire EU/US relationship and the absurdity of Europe's rhetoric around it. Copy/paste this template, change a few words, and it applies pretty much everywhere.
We don't laugh at Americans for being suckers, we feel sorry for them that they have to live with all this nonsense, and their current horrible administration.
And we also look with horror because most of the bullshit in the US is coming to Europe with a 20 year delay
I'll feel very sorry for you and your country's horrible administration when the Russians are invading your country.
I would worry more about the secret police in your state murdering randomly people if I were you
OK so can we at least agree that the US needs to withdraw from NATO in order to focus on our own domestic issues, and so Russia will no longer interfere in our elections?
I need to worry about secret police in my state murdering randomly people. I have no time to think of Europe. Hence it is best to withdraw from NATO. Agreed?
[flagged]
Interesting how Europeans react when Americans talk about Europe the exact same way Europe has talked about America for decades. Isn't it interesting?
Not really
> soft power
Go look at what these people thought of us before Trump: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
> Sweden: 47% had a favorable opinion of the US.; Germany: 49%; France: 46%; The Netherlands: 48%
And this was after the US committed over $120 billion in aid (all weapons and cash) to Ukraine, and, for some reason, allowed Sweden to join NATO--the same Sweden that pledged neutrality when Finland was invaded by the Soviets, who stole the Karelian Isthmus and other bits of its territory, and similarly did nothing when Norway and Denmark were invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany.
Yes, there is no point in trying to make Europeans happy. They are impossible to please. You can see our favorability in Europe was barely net positive then.
By May of last year (before the Greenland drama--I'm against that of course), more Europeans liked China better than the US. Maybe we should start shipping materials for weapons to Russia, like China does, to see if that improves our popularity with Europe.
"Soft power" is an absurd talking point. Doing nice things for Europe has brought us nothing but anger and contempt. Just scroll through this thread, there's plenty of proof. They are a very entitled and condescending people.
> what these people thought of us before Trump
Last I checked, Trump was elected in 2016.
In 2021 he tried an autogolpe and by the time this survey was done in 2024, he was not in prison for treason but instead again running for president as nominee of one of only two major parties. What sort of opinion should one have of such a country?
> allowed Sweden to join NATO
What sort of absurd argument is this? Now that Sweden changed their mind and want to enter treaty obligations to help defend e.g. the Baltics, we should refuse them?
Also, I can't begin to comprehend how Sweden would militarily defend Finland, who entered WW2 as an ally of Nazi Germany after being invaded by USSR, and simultaneously fight against Nazi Germany.
You are paying more for everything because your country is extremely anti social, people alone have no leverage to negotiate prices with visa, pharmaceutics and so on.
Trump is only pushing that « free for all » policy even more, I wouldn’t expect to see things improve for you.
Instead of fixing your country and making the rich accountable, you’re being manipulated to look elsewhere.
Anyway, I believe that the eu cutting ties with the USA is the best thing that could happen to us and I’m glad you’re satisfied. We should have spent much more on military and put an end to the USA military supremacy across the world a long time ago.
Yes, I am very happy to see Europe develop its own military-industrial complex. That way, whenever something bad happens in the world, you will be "complicit" if you sit by, and "imperialist" if you take action. It's a lot of fun!
Besides the military-industrial complex, I am very happy to see Europe develop its own digital systems. That way we won't be totally dependent on Google, Microsoft, AWS, OpenAI, Apple, Visa, Mastercard etc.
Come on, it’s already been that way for more than a century. Old imperial powers cannot do a thing or its opposite without endless recriminations. We’re used to it.
For the past few decades I've only seen the US constantly criticized as either "complicit" or "imperialist". We tried to take responsibility for everything and it got us nothing but hate. Hopefully it will be Europe's turn soon.
That's a very childlike understanding of the world around you, I'm afraid.
If you're trying to imply that I have a childlike understanding... in that case, I appreciate you reinforcing the points I've made in this thread, namely (a) Europeans are condescending jerks, and (b) Europeans will airily claim "Americans are ignorant" but rarely have much interesting evidence to back up their claims.
Our relationship with Europe is not very important for American prosperity. The GDP growth trend is the same before and after NATO was founded: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...
These two comments you made above and the fact that you care so much about what a not very well-defined mass of people thinks about you and blames you of that you mistake it for soft power are the perfect illustration of my point.
So, more condescension with no supporting evidence? Gotcha.
Like the US benefit from NATO, "soft power" always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I've spent tens or even hundreds of hours arguing online with Europeans. They've never given a compelling explanation of how US "soft power" is supposed to work in a democratic country when the majority of the population dislikes the US. They just stick their nose in the air and say "too bad you're an ignorant American, if you were European like us, you would understand". Europeans think Americans are suckers, in other words.
It's very ironic to me that Europeans say that Americans are purely self-interested, but when it comes to actually convincing to us, they are barely ever able to muster any sort of compelling appeal to our self-interest. (They don't just want us to defend them; they also want us to make the argument that it is in our national interest to defend them! It's rather astonishing.) At the end of the day, "Americans only care about their self-interest" is just another "America Bad" rhetorical point, as is proven by the actions of Europeans.
If you want us to be benevolent to you, give us credit for being a benevolent actor in your region. If you truly believe we are self-interested, appeal effectively to our self-interest, and respect our decision if we conclude that your appeal is unpersuasive or the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But don't constantly talk about how we are evil and self-interested, and then de facto expect us to help you on the basis of altruism. That's what you've been doing for years now. At this point we are burnt out. "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
It goes to show how pointless it is to chase 'soft power' by appealing to global public opinion. Even in democratic countries, most leaders have sub-50% approval. So even if the US was run by a politician chosen by a global electorate, we would most likely still be hated.
And of course good intentions are no guarantee of good results, e.g. I believe Bush had good intentions with Iraq, he was just incompetent.
China is very smart to simply not get involved in much of anything. As soon as you do something, it gives people the opportunity to blame you, if even a single person thinks the result is even a little bit less than perfect.
Switzerland is the smartest.
> The EU had such a good deal with the US.
There are regulations. Both Visa and Mastercard were happy with those and made quite a lot of money from their business in the EU. They absorbed and merged with local alternatives and competitors. It’s a bit rich to complain after the game has been going on for a while that the rules are as they are: they’ve always been that way and if they were not happy, they could just have ignored the European markets. Now, if your point is that you’re being shafted, then congratulations: realising is the first step towards solving. Now, vote for a government that will actually regulate the sector in the people’s favour, not the big corps. We cannot help you for that.
I'm not complaining about Visa or Mastercard fees in the US.
I am pointing out the absurdity of the original European claim that such fees are "protection money" to the US, when the EU is getting a sweetheart deal relative to the US. It's typical disingenuous European rhetoric.
Europe is not getting a "sweetheart deal".
I know it's difficult for you to comprehend, but Governments are supposed to act in the interest of the general population of their country, not for companies and the 1%.
And that includes making sure that markets are working and regulating (near) monopolies
Who claimed which money is protection money of US?
And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is
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"
Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.
More importantly, perhaps, are some exercises where a A SRE team creates likely problem (US/China/…) does bad things with DNS/BGP/…, submarine cables, starlink, GPS/GALILEO, Kessler effect etc, and SRE team B tries to keep the national infrastructure together. This may be happening already, but I have my doubts
This is great. Since the greenland crisis I'm busy replacing all my us software and other products (e.g. no Heinz, no Apple...)
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?
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.
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.
> 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
Probably never... European nations rather seem to enjoy forming Unions, Agreements and Organizations.
What is nation is not a objective question. People can define Europe as nation and then you can have an nationalistic Europe.
> People can define Europe as nation and then you can have a nationalistic Europe.
Right, it they do not. You’d have to stretch the definition of nation beyond its breaking point for Europe to be a nation. It would include Russia and Ukraine, Finland and Greece, none of these nations have much in common.
That’s just as meaningful in the context as saying that humanity is a nation for some definition of the term.
Europe is many things, but probably a poor base to push any nationalistic aspiration.
Nobody inside Europe would define Europe as a Nation
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.
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.
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.
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.
The European alternatives are not restricted to Europe.
Qwant seems to be.
> 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!
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.
> Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free?
We should not; we must. But at the same time we need to recognise that we are powerless to affect the American government, which can go rogue at any moment. So from a pure risk analysis, we also need to have local alternatives. I regret this state of affairs, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the US threatening its nominal allies.
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'm really not sad about having alternative and choices, especially it also leads to reduce corporate overlordship.
We’ve been seeing a surprising amount of leads come through this site, clearly the demand for a EU alternative is high.
Hearing from our customers they are abandoning US products. Really surprising how many times I hear it tbh.
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
Somewhat similar for Canada:
https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives
They should add EU membership as alternative to CUSMA. I really like the idea!
Whoa, was unaware of this! Thanks!
Is there a European alternative for this website?
journalduhacker.net (in french)
Perhaps Lemmy may count based on distributed ActivityPub protocol with some servers in Europe.
techposts.eu i reckon
Seems to be US-hosted.
What makes you say that? It was explicitly created as an EU alternative to HN by a person from the Netherlands. They posted about it on HN a few days ago.
I haven't found anything public about where its hosted
https://hosting-checker.net/websites/techposts.eu
or:
whois "$(ping -c 1 techposts.eu | awk -F'[()]' '/PING/{print $2}')"
Fly.io probably serves in on the edge, and so it always appears to be near the request origin.
I was probably not clear in my original comment. My point, in context of this thread, was that it is hosted in US-based company. So things like Cloud Act still apply.
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.
Someone should make news.eucombinator.eu…
I also mean Hacker News
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
And the US still uses Arabic numerals in spite of banning visas for basically every Arab country in the world.
> Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
Do you have a single clue about Europe? That's not true at all.
First, we co-opted English. It’s now ours as well. Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
Besides that, besides my native language and English, I had German and French in school (which are required topics in our country). So I can speak the native language of all nearby countries.
Auf Wiedersehen!
I would hesitate to even call that English: "Many of the features suggested to be characteristic of Euro-English could be identified as learners' mistakes."
In short, it's just like Chinglish.
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 ...
Hardly anyone uses Irish in daily life or for official purposes, notwithstanding its official status. 99% of the Irish you hear outside a classroom is performative.
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 was edited to "average educated European", whatever that means.
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!
However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
> I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English
Have you tried any Scandinavian country for instance?
no, but we're talking about Europe on general. and the initial claim is surely false in countries like Spain, France, Poland and Belgium
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, Arabic, English. In The Netherlands basically anyone speaks Dutch and English plus a third language, usually Frisian, Limburgish, German, French, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic.
Two American tourists were backpacking in Europe when a car pulled up next to them. The driver rolled down his window and asked in german:” Where is the nearest diner?”
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
The UK did not leave Europe. Just the EU. But also English fluency is widespread, so it’s not a bad starting point.
I do find it funny that Brits colloquially describe "Europe" as being foreign, as in, "in Britain" vs "in Europe", or "in Europe" vs "on the continent. Of course, I guess the "the continent" is a loaded term, too.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to me, I get it, and it's easier to refer to Europe as "the other" rather than having to use a longer phrase to describe traveling from the British isles to the mainland of continental Europe.
But still, it amuses me.
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.
> 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.
Basic fluency in English is widespread enough that I've had to be way out in the boonies in pretty much any country I've visited for me not to find somebody who can speak English. It makes me feel like a bit of a fool not being able to speak anything but English myself. I've got a learning disability that affects my ability to learn languages, so as much as I've tried, I'm not able to get much further than being able to get fed and find the bathroom in any other language.
I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
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.
Ireland and Malta.
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
> You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).
Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
It's because we don't do dubbing but subtitling. Every foreign TV show or movie becomes a mini language class.
The bigger countries do dubbing and it is really noticeable.
Also in Holland we'd pride ourselves on speaking foreign languages much more than being proud of our own.
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.
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.
Java has FOSS implementations. Oracle is very much NOT free: https://oraclejavalicensing.com/who-needs-an-oracle-java-lic...
To the extent that my employer blocks Oracle dot com at the outbound firewall to stop anyone accidentally incurring license costs. You don't want to deal with Oracle license enforcement.
Yet another one spreading Java FUD.
Oracle cannot be blamed people are unable to understand the difference between OpenJDK and Oracle Java installers.
OpenJDK also happens to be developed mainly by Oracle employees, circa 80% of contributions.
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.
> Java is FOSS by the way
What was the problem between Android and Java then? Wasn't there some dispute between Google and Oracle on that? Genuinely interested.
Back then the licence did not apply to embedded systems, and Google did a Microsoft move as well, Android Java is their J++.
Sun did not sue, because they were out money already, and Oracle used the argument they were using Apache clone implementation of Java, with copyrighted headers.
To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android.
Even after having won, they refuse to implement full compatibility.
> To this day you cannot pick a random Java library and have it run on Android
Because of the licence or because it won't work? Sounds like the latter, but I have never seen a Java library that unexpectedly did not run on Android.
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
Yeah, it would be a matter who would pick up the forks so to speak.
A lot of European people spend their energy on those FOSS languages. Why would they go away?
There's C++ if you want something that has an international standard.
Yes that would be one of them.
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.
They accept suggestions - https://european-alternatives.eu/register
Thanks
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
Where are located the key companies that contribute to Linux ecosystem?
They do not dominate the development Like MS for Windows. Independent people from all over the world review their contribution. This is a small problem related to other things.
Also, Qubes OS exists.
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.
> why you are looking for an EU alternative
I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.
So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.
But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
Yeah i understand why one would do that, i wrote that not to make the question itself, but to indicate that whoever thinks to look for EU alternatives should ask that question to themselves. This way they can figure out how to choose their next steps, like judging if a FLOSS project makes sense to use or avoid - e.g. if it is tied in a US company.
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?
Yes, as it stands we should remove our independence on US, given current geopolitics, when technology can be weaponised.
Ok, but in that case the only FLOSS projects from US that can be considered "dangerous" would be those which are both tied to specific US companies and do not have much of a EU presence to be forked in case of such weaponization (with ease of forking being taken into account as well).
And TBH IMO such projects should be avoided in the first place regardless of what US is doing because they tend to use FLOSS as a marketing method than for practical development. Choosing projects which have multiple shareholders, so to speak, is much healthier in the long term.
European cloud sovereignty starts with European hardware. Without European bare-metal, the rest is just branding.
For consumers, these computers look interesting: https://starlabs.systems/
I recently discovered these: https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/
- 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.
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).
I've been looking at mail providers too, and it's starting to look there are no real alternatives. Not just in Europe, but worldwide. I've been a happy user of Fastmail for quite some time now, and it's sad the the current geopolitical situation pressures me into migrating away.
The alternative that's looking best to me so far is Kolab Now. I don't see a lot of user reviews of it on Reddit though, or anywhere else, so it seems to not be very popular at first sight. That's perhaps not a good sign.
In any case I'm planning on trying it out for a while, with a domain I don't use it all that often, before deciding to migrate to it.
Doesn’t seem to support on-the-fly aliases for sending, requiring instead to set it up in advance. I use a custom mail per website/contact workflow, and with FM any reply uses whatever alias I used to receive the mail, with the option to change it to whatever I want without extra steps.
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?
No plans according to some recent reddit threads, but you can probably email their support for a more up-to-date info.
US servers, though.
Ah wasn't aware of that, thanks.
Gandi.net offers mail with custom domain and unlimited aliases. You need to have your domain registered with them though.
I wouldn't consider them an option since they got bought and had extreme price rises.
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
The EUPL is a fine license, especially if your goal is wide compatibility with other copyleft licenses. However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft, which could be surprising if you just read the main text.
Also, the GPL is not as short and has more explicit wording for how it behaves in common situations (like the P2P copying stuff, for example), and it allows certain additional restrictions and exceptions (like what the LGPL is). It's just more well thought-out in my opinion.
Edit: Reading it again, I also just remembered that the EUPL's warranty disclaimer is a lot weaker than usual licenses, and weirdly also asserts the program is a “work in progress”.
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.
Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.
[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/li...
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft
Can you elaborate on that?
My understanding is that EUPL is a bit like MPLv2 or LGPL in the spirit. Like it protects the project itself, but doesn't go viral like the GPL.
That depends on your interpretation of what a “derivative work” constitutes, which the EUPL delegates to copyright law. For the GPL, it includes other programs linked to the work (which is how it affects other projects using the work as a library). If this definition held true for the EUPL as well, it would behave the same way. (By the way, I don't really like describing copyleft as “viral”, because that implies the GPL (and similar licenses) are like infectious diseases.)
However, the compatibility clause allows relicensing to other licenses that are explicitly weaker in their copyleft, which is what I meant with the quoted sentence.
Another comment just made me aware though that apparently, copyleft extending to other programs linking with the work is just not a thing in the EU? I'll have to read more into the details of that.
What are some non-subjective reasons to use Euro alternatives? It reminds me of startup founders having to choose between the big expensive service or their buddy’s startup that intends to serve the same use case.
Here's one case from August 2025:
----
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
I think you’re missing the point of my question. I’m not saying that story isn’t distressing and a good reason to use alternatives, but I’m asking about whether you can convince individuals and individual businesses that these alternatives are more cost effective or capable than the software they’re replacing.
To me, a very non-subjective reason is that the money I'm paying for these services will go to people and companies that share the same values and the taxes on the said money will be used for our common defense instead of being used to attack us.
If you're European and reading the news at any point in the last year+, you understand how critical a weakness being dependent on US companies for your IT infra is.
There are some things that are difficult to avoid, like CPUs and GPUs, but software is much more doable.
Please don’t assume I’m not up to date on the news. But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software. I’m genuinely asking about incentives for the individual or individual business. That’s a more difficult question to answer than asking why shouldn’t Europe as a whole pursue this.
I answered above, but answering here as well in case it's buried.
> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.
Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.
See this case of a French judge from 2025:
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
European companies operate under stricter privacy laws. GDPR is applicable world wide but has serious teeth and enforcement within Europe. Small US companies with no presence in Europe can effectively ignore it. However if an American were to choose a European service this benefit is effectively passed on to them. They can view what data any company has on them or ask them to delete it.
I can appreciate some don't care about their data especially in this world of people pouring their lives in to social media but some people do care.
America could feasibly use cloud and other service provision as an economic weapon. Your company could die as a result.
And a second non-subjective and very important reason is that at any moment the US government might decide that the data we entrusted their corporations with is no longer ours and we need to part with it. It will be used for AI training. Also, this is because we didn't say thank you or something like that...
> their buddy’s startup
That’s really not a good comparison. Many of the listed services and companies have been well established for a long time, in some cases for decades, and aren’t small businesses.
Legal one? Cloud Act is not compatible with GDPR.
I’m building something similar for Japan: https://altstack.jp. Still work in progress!
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.
Do you want to live in a school, on the streets, in a train, in a hospital, in a park or in a grocery store?
As long as housing is extremely expensive in Europe, nothing else matters except for higher salaries.
Housing is not extremely expensive in europe. Only close to the big cities it is.
The person you're responding to is claiming that Americans have to pay $10,000 for a 2 bedroom apartment, thus that is why the salaries are so high.
That isn't true unless you're looking to rent a luxury apartment in a big city.
I never said that.
It is extremely expensive almost everywhere when you compare to local salaries.
True. But the systems are more and more breaking down. Its unsustainable. At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands. to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases. Not talking about the trains. Germany DB runs on time in only 50% of the cases. So thats a big problem
My partner has had three extensive cancer treatments in the Netherlands. She has had dietary and psychological specialists help her during and after each one.
All of this was just on normal health insurance and with normal clinics and hospitals.
Never did she have to wait more than perhaps 3 weeks tops for an appointment.
The medical system here is world class.
However Germany and it's infrastructure can not be compared to the Netherlands. I refuse to take trains through that country anymore.
> However Germany and it's infrastructure can not be compared to the Netherlands. I refuse to take trains through that country anymore.
In which country are the trains bad? Netherlands or Germany? Do you care elaborating why? is that punctuality? strikes? decaying infrastructure?
Yeah I see now how that was unclear.
I was talking about Germany's infrastructure. Last year I had 3x separate trips turn into chaos due to how broken their system is. Broken trains, broken track infrastructure etc. Think multiple hours on each trip rather than just 10 minutes delay.
The Ditch system is very reliable in contrast.
Ehm, my parents some serious health issues the last two years and they usually had their appointments in days or at most a small number of weeks. (NL)
The trains that are 10 min late in Germany mostly not exist in many other countries. Sure Switzerland is the best, but Germany is pretty high up. It’s just less good than it used to be. Oh and you can ride almost everywhere for 60 EUR / month.
For healthcare if you get an IT salary you can either move to private insurance, or buy additional insurance, or just pay a consultation yourself for a fee that US people won’t believe.
Last 7 times i took the ICE, i had 5 delays. 3 times the restaurant wasnt available. 2 times they didnt stop at my destination and I had to rent a car. so yeah. I try to travel now either by car or plane. But even by car is terrible, especially in the south. More construction sites every year and none are finishing. . Health care is totally broken if you dont have private insurance. My step dad, who has, gets an appointment 1 day after he calls. my grand ma, who worked all her life and is now on public needs to wait 5 months IN PAIN.
the system is breaking down in front of our very eyes.
i am not living in Germany. i moved to fthe NL, but the situation is very similiar.
That's very alarmist, sensational and dramatic. The systems are going though some tough times, but they are not breaking down, that's what children would say to make their life more like a Hollywood movie.
My father had to go though multiple appointments and analysis to get his prostate and hernia checked. Never waited more than a week and paid 0 in total. Before, he'd probably only have to wait a couple days for appointments, but the stress the healthcare system is currently undergoing is abnormal due to the more aggressive cases of flue this season. All things considering, things are not "breaking down" (I'm even getting some second hand embarrassment reading those words).
> At least what I can tell from Germany and the Netherlands. to see a healthcare specialist, you wait 3-6months in some cases.
Same in France, it can take a while to get an appointment to see some specialists nowadays. There's a clear decline there.
But if you have something bad, they'll treat you in time. Actually, a relative of mine has been diagnosed with cancer a not long ago. She got several surgeries and all the treatments with no wait, and at not cost.
There's no reason why it shouldn't be sustainable.
> Not talking about the trains
How does that compare to the public transport situation in the US?
"trains exist"
Like Spain's commuter trains?
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.
Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.
Biggest problem has been talent going to US.
This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.
The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.
It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).
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.
I don't think that's motivated by money. The US companies simply solved more interesting problems. Working for a start up in the Bay area trying to invent a new industry, or scale systems to global is generally more interesting than working on a CRM system for mid-size lumberyards in Sweden. The CRM system pays well enough to have a comfortable lifestyle and provide for your family, but it's a little boring if you're 25 with a shiny new CS degree.
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.
Because many European engineers move to the US does not mean at all that most European engineers move to the US. There are many engineers in Europe.
I hear that argument a lot, and honestly it sounds uninformed and downright disrespectful. Some kind of "I am a US developer, we US developers are the best, and the few good European engineers come here. The remaining ones in Europe are dumb".
Not to mention that I have talked to quite a few European engineers who could earn a lot more by moving to the US, but just really don't want to live in the US. Maybe there is a reason for that?
I think you underestimate how dramatically the perception of the US in Europe changed for the worse. It was already in nose dive during recent months, but the recent days (Greenland crisis) will put a nail in the coffin. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I expect that influx to dry up very soon.
What is the European alternative to the US military if Russia attacks Europe?
This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
> What is the European alternative to the US military if Russia attacks Europe?
European military. Why do some people act as if European countries had no armies?
And even if we had no armies and Russia attacked and totally destroyed us, how is it related to the topic discussed here, which is whether the influx of European engineers to the US will continue or not?
> This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
Perhaps. I don't think it is, but let's say you are right. How is that relevant? People do not want to go to a country they perceive negatively. Whether that perception is an objective fact or hysteria is, in this context, immaterial.
Well there is no "European military" per se and there will be no "Russia invades Europe" scenario, because "Europe" is a continent and not a sovereign nation.
What would happen is that Russia invades Poland, or Russia invades Romania or Bulgaria or something. Those are Eastern European countries. (I mean they all used to be Soviet bloc anyway.) Or Russia would invade Germany like the good ol' days. So whatever nation they invaded would sic their own armed forces on them, and their allies' too. NATO could jump into the fray.
Americans (and perhaps Russians too) often misunderstand how terribly small European nations are, really. They're mostly smaller than individual United States. So, less population, less time to transport stuff, fewer natural resources available in a sovereign context, etc. But lots of national borders.
So Russia won't invade "Europe" but they could go into one or more nations on the list.
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.
Over what period of time do you predict economic downfall for European tech because of salaries?
Please explain your working. These last 40 years or more there has been a cliff of money, but Europeans continue to live and work in europe.
You have to have an incredibly narrow definition of "only good people work for more money and only poor/ineffective people work for less" to say people who don't chase the millions in a US company are somehow failures.
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).
I really don't see money as an incentive. Political and economic stability of the whole country is much more important. Of course you need enough to afford food and roof, but after that, I'm not chasing it.
I'm a freelance, and I take fun jobs, not jobs that pay well.
> 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.
But maybe culture and quality of life should not be ignored :-).
Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high, and you get the insane salaries, and your healthcare is oftentimes mostly if not completely covered by your employer (I pay literally $0 out of pocket for high quality healthcare here in San Francisco).
> Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high
Quality of life is also a cultural thing. I know it's hard to understand for US people (I truly believe it is the case for cultural reasons), but many people really don't want the lifestyle of the US for all sorts of reasons. For some people, quality of life means easy access to healthy food, or to nature, seeing trees instead of giant concrete parking lots or 6-lanes highways, etc.
I think the OP used "breaking a leg" as an analogy. Interesting that you didn't pick that up.
A analogy for major health events that demand a lot of money, to which I replied you don't have $major_health_event every year. Interesting that you didn't pick that up.
This talking point went out the window After America threatened to invade Greenland.
After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.
I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.
Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.
[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.
Not sure about Ireland, but Switzerland used to be true, but now it is also far behind since 5+ years.
See, Google Zurich vs Seattle
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Hm, after carefully reviewing the entries seem more or less the same, Zurich slightly lower.
Considering the low taxes and lower cost of living in Zurich (yes, lower than Seattle), and the much higher quality of life, Zurich is a no-brainer.
I'd say if you get a job in the same company, Zurich is competitive. The problem is that if you lose your job at Google in Seattle there are several hundreds of FAANG positions and probably thousands of other 200k$+ SWE jobs you can reapply to. In Zurich you will maybe see a dozen of openings in the small subsidiaries of Apple, Microsoft & Co., and maybe some individual job offers from small AI companies, and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent.
Ex-Googlers in Zurich have no trouble finding other jobs. For people with the right CV, there are a lot more openings than that.
> and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent
Which should not be an issue, if as I read a lot in this page, "all good European engineers move to the US". It means that you only have to compete against the "bad ones" that stayed back, right? /s
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... says Zurich is 33% more expensive and I remember it that way.
Numbeo shows averages, and the basket of goods that it considers is not what a well-off person would buy. I Zurich I could live perfectly well without having a car, just with public transportation, and French and Italian cheeses and wine are a cheaper than in Seattle.
As a well off person your most significant purchase is going to be a house, and in Seattle they are 3x cheaper.
I just left Seattle Greater Area and my 350sqm admittedly old house + a small ADU with an outdoor pool went for $2M (at the moment it was a downturn, so maybe $2.5M tops now). What can you get for that money in Greater Zurich Area? A 100sqm flat?
In the Zurich Greater Area, you can get this for example: https://www.immoscout24.ch/buy/4002631314. Keep in mind that in most of Europe, real estate ads show the living space, i.e. surface net of walls, corridors, closets, cupboards, etc... whereas in US/Canada it's the gross surface. Those 350sqm are prolly 280 "livable". So if you're willing to live outside the Zurich city core, prices are comparable to Seattle but construction quality is way higher.
Also, most mortgages in Switzerland are very peculiar: you pay 20% down, but then you don't ever pay off the principal, only interest on the remaining 80% which is owned in perpetuity by the bank. The interest rates are kept very low and the currency quite stable, because most of the citizens rely on it. So your monthly interest could be 400-500 CHF, and you invest the rest however you prefer.
How long was the commute from your place?
The rail network in and around Zurich is reliable and punctual, so you can live anywhere along that 30km long lake and still have your commute be 30-40m, without needing to search for a parking spot and whatnot.
I experienced this myself when I was briefly commutung from Pfäffikon(SZ).
Commute to where? 15 minutes walking from Microsoft main campus and 10 minutes driving from a new Facebook campus. 10 minutes driving to a good daycare.
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?
Why not?
I had offers from companies across the pond, and likely could make about 2x-3x what I make here.
What for? I live a comfortable life here.
The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.
Personally it's not all about money. I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe for better quality of life.
Having enough is what I care about and things are a lot cheaper here too. Not to mention free healthcare, social security. I don't need a car and a public transport pass is 25€ a month. That alone saves me so much money. The time till the next metro train counts down in seconds here.
When I had a car in the past it would cost me hundreds per month and it was such a headache.
I'd never move to the US even if I could make 3x as much. In fact I got an offer from a FAANG once (with the whole H1B managed by some agency I think) but I declined. I only applied because they advertised it as a local job but then when the offer came it was in California. Nope.
It very much is sustainable. See China, Russia, Korea and Japan, all varying degrees of being much less dependent on US tech than the EU is.
The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.
Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there:
- I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people.
- I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society
- An apartment with noisy air conditioning, dirty carpets and questionable building codes would cost more in rent than a villa at the Côte d’Azur.
- The air quality during fire season was a nightmare. During my time there I developed asthma.
- Everybody hated the arrogant ignorant tech people that invaded their communities, forced them out of their houses to then have to commute into the city or valley to serve tech bros. Yes, as a European I am not that well trained to constantly ignore that my privilege are causing the community around me to suffer. That I do not "earn" this gigantic salary, I am just grabbing the resources pretending the "normal" people don't deserve to have any of that.
You are getting paid so much because you in exchange are living in a sh*thole country without education, healthcare, public transport, clean air, or anything else that I as a "wealthy" developer person would expect to receive in exchange for my work.
Take your US salary, and invest it into a travel into some of the more up-to-date regions of the world. Those with clean air, education, healthcare. Places I have visited that are better than the Valley in this regard include:
- Pretty much all of Europe. Maybe with the exception of Greece and Spain, when they are now burning thanks to the "drill drill drill" people. - China - Iran - New Zealand - Australia - Canada ...
Yes, the amount of zeros on your US salary might look soooooooooooooooo impressive. But they are zeros. They don't buy you a livable live in a modern civilization.
Right now you are just bribed with money not to see the civil war getting ignited in minnesota.
Oh oh oh, now I remember! I have even been to two countries with civil wars a while ago, who had clean air, education and healthcare. And I think even directly after the civil war, all of Kosovo had a lower percentage of homeless people than the US has today.
Yes, another one of my drastic postings. But you will survive. Be brave: With someone who clearly is being paid a lot for being clever, I can assume that you think this through again, to calculate what the better deal is. You know the average amount of student debt people who want to become programmers have? Zero.
You are not getting more VALUE out of working in the US in high-tech compared to other places. There are places on this world, where being a good programmer buys you a wonderful life with nobody around you being poor, or without healthcare, or homeless. Try Estonia. They have a lovely tech community, a fully digital government. You can become a digital citizen, open your own company in minutes. And you will have a far better life.
Can you talk more about the Estonian tech scene? I am a Canadian-Estonian and I have been considering moving to Europe in the next year or so.
This here has been the key ingredient for the startup culture Estonia now has:
https://www.e-resident.gov.ee
It's just crazy. I went to the Estonian embassy in Berlin, was offered coffee, and 20 minutes later I had my digital card allowing me to create a limited company.
What is your experience running that company? It looks great on paper, but if you don’t mind sharing, what is the practical side of things? Have you encountered any stumbling blocks?
Let me know when someone spots a "Rival Castle" to GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle. These are Hamlets.
Hertzner?
I'm a happy customer of Hetzner, but AWS revenues are 440x theirs. Not much of a castle.
Why do you want to be a customer of a company with extreme revenue? That only means you'll pay too much money.
Greater chance of survival, greater chance of being a winner in any consolidation in the industry, generally revenue translates to higher share price which means ability to acquire useful and interesting companies, likely lower cost of capital for borrowing for build-outs. Attracts greater talent with better packages. Now as teeny tiny (personal) customer of these guys... I'm not really going to care about most of this stuff. But in my $70B company market cap day-job... I do.
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I am a customer of Walmart and Costco, both with extreme revenue and both saving me loads of money
Are you also a customer of Whole Foods?
sometimes
Customers can benefit from scale too
Hmm, how starnge that AWS then seems to be the most expensive option around. I've saved loads of money by using Hetzner instead. I can also easily move to other providers should I want thanks to open standards and open source.
They can't benefit from high prices
What about "GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle" revenues?
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
Trump's attitude motivated me to finally get away from Gmail. I tried several of the providers mentioned on this website and stuck with tuta.com. After almost a year, I'm very happy, would recommend.
Interesting to know before going in: - They encrypt the emails when storing them, so the only way to access emails is to use their own apps. I was hesitant at first but their web app, desktop app and android app are great
Speaking of missing categories — there's no "Compliance Tools" or "GRC" category yet. I'm building humadroid.io (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliance platform, based in Poland) and as far as I can tell, there aren't many European alternatives in this space. Most of the established players (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) are US-based. Would be great to see this category added.
Interesting, do you also provide the actual audit for ISO 27001 as part of your service? That’s why I went with Oneleet, but a EU-based solution would be attractive.
No, we don't do audits — and that's intentional. I think there's a conflict of interest when the same company advises you on compliance and then certifies you. Incentives get weird.
The good news: there are plenty of EU-based ISO 27001 audit firms. We can recommend one or two if you need a pointer — we just don't have a formal catalogue or marketplace for that yet (though it's on my list).
So you'd use Humadroid for the preparation - policies, controls, evidence, risks, continuity plans, ISMS workbook - and then bring in an independent auditor for certification.
They also do not carry out the audit themselves (for the same reason) but the do all the legwork for you. Huge benefit imo.
Makes sense. We're working toward making the auditor connection easier on our end too. Not there yet, but it's on the roadmap.
great, i’ll keep an eye on you guys
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
> 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
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.
Sigh Time to setup my own dedicated servers.
The German NSA seemed unable to access the server as they only intercepted the traffic. They got a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt by intercepting traffic. If the app had used public key pinning, and the server had full disk encryption, this wouldn't have been enough for a compromise.
I don't like it.
We should be divesting from unethical businesses, not from american ones.
Nationalism can be so seductive but if you engage in it you're being pulled down to "their" level.
Instead, consider your true "country" is the set of good people, no matter where they live. Keep spending your money on ethical american businesses, and european ones, and russian and chinese ones, if you can find them. Stop spending your money on unethical businesses, even if they're local.
Wow, nice! Great resource, thanks a lot!
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.
It depends where you live. There's no one company that's implented in all European countries. All countries have a shop similar to Amazon (often with fewer sponsored products and less drop shipping garbage). There are also a few specialized shops (for books, sports, electronics...). Since 2020 I only buy Amazon if they're significantly cheaper than other sellers. That's about 10% of my purchases.
In DE probably Otto.de is the closest you get (?).
In NL I remember Bol was quite good.
Yeah bol and coolblue are good in Holland
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.
There's galaxus.com
Galaxus.eu, even.
Lol. What the heck are you using Amazon for? Stop buying shit man. Go outside.
OpenDesk isn't mentioned. That seems like one of the most complete alternatives to goole workspace
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!
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.
Funny, the first 3 are web analytics, cloud computing and CDN. So surveillance.
I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah yes. The "mission" of pointing out how bad companies are in the most trivial details.
Agree, I’ve been impressed with Scaleway so far during some early experiments. Including a quick support response to a query I had.
OVH? I hate the dashboard, but the support seems fine to me.
Is this getting popular because of Trump's shenanigans?
so much reasonable scepticism here is being downvoted, i don’t get why
to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?
Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".
It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
> being posted by Americans > Americans with vested interests
proofs, please?
> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech
it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government
> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"
again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
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Be the change you want to see in this world.
Do you have a license to ask these questions?
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Have you considered discussing TFA instead of tropes so worn and boring even you yourself can't be bothered to write them out?
Are the worn, boring tropes false? Are they worth writing out again?
Internet tropes are explicitly outside the guidelines, because they're not really compatible with curious conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
I'm sorry, my cognitive bias says 'Look! See! That proves my point at how great the US is/was.'
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
But it's not just one politician or just one election. The current guy was elected twice. His position on tariffs, NATO, and Greenland are not new. The movement supporting him is unlikely to disappear any time soon. From the outside, it doesn't look like one wrong step, but just part of the new normal.
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. It's easy to understand the change in behaviour if you understand this.
Back to the European Alternatives stuff, I've been looking at the services I use and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
Altruism is not transactional.
If you think the US' "altruism" should buy us goodwill, then you're not for altruism, you're for good PR.
It was a single election in 2016, and a few governors and senators and… oh it’s actually a pattern, a system that people feign to ignore when convenient for them.
> 1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
I get your pain but are you expecting other countries just to take hit?
Should EU lift sanctions with Russia as well? You know "1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population".
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.
Depends on what level you are looking at. Did you know the US is comprised of 50 states with their own laws and security forces?
Pedantic. My state didn't vote for the US president, yet you are looking to buy from a different state now.
US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries.
Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.
The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.
OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.
Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.
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.
> When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
I hope you understand now that not even half of Democrats support these things, let alone most of the population, of any country in the world
> Ugh, back to nationalism.
That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.
Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.
>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?
>But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It's been ten years of Trumpism. This wasn't a flip of a dime. The opinion flipped after we were threatened with annexation. These aren't jokes.
> 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
A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.
> 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."
This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.
> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
I almost choked at this.
The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.
The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.
I actually prefer it this way.
> 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.
That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.
That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
(link to malauxyeux's comment where I found this summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738790)
we should have also claude-alternatives like projects that are entirely built by vibe-coders.
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.
> the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it
That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US.
> the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details
I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services.
Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
That's obviously the idea, but unfortunately everybody just wants convenience instead of decentralization. Hence Mastodon's amazing adoption rate...
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.
Of course there is. Google Mush Ryanair, for one.
And just 2 seconds of thinking is enough to answer that question. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML yet if money alone was enough?
I asked to discuss, not because I didn’t know the answer. Please attempt to be more polite in the future.
There was absolutely nothing about your comment that indicated this intent. Open questions can be asked for discussion, not closed yes/no factual questions with a singular, well-known answer.
It’s not a matter of mechanism. It’s a matter of mindset. Until today the mindset wasn’t there. Maybe this will change.
I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
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
> Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
Though that's one of the easy ones. Get your own domain and you're free to use whatever you want forever.
That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
I have used Fastmail for years, and now Migadu for years as well. Never lost a single email?
That's not comparable at all.
Why not? I said "get your own domain", not "self-host your server". You are the one saying that it doesn't work so well to self-host your server, I never asked about it.
In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet.
Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.
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.