590 points on Hacker News: someone built their startup entirely on European infrastructure. Hetzner, Scaleway, Bunny.net, Nebius for GPU. No AWS. No American hyperscalers.
The pitch: data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, not dependent on US cloud providers. The price: actually lower than AWS.
But here’s what the headline doesn’t tell you.
The Real Cost
It’s not the money.
The real cost is community. Every service they chose has a smaller community, thinner docs, fewer Stack Overflow answers. When something breaks at 2 AM, there’s no endless Reddit thread to Google. There’s no Claude answer waiting.
Self-hosting Gitea instead of GitHub means:
- No Actions, no Issues, no code review UI
- CI/CD pipelines need to be rebuilt from scratch
- Integrations you took for granted don’t exist
They wrote: “Leaving GitHub feels like leaving a city you’ve lived in for a decade.”
The Things You Can’t Avoid
- Google Ads? American.
- Apple Developer Program? American.
- Claude? American.
- “Sign in with Google”? Hits US servers.
The EU infrastructure is real. But the defaults of the tech industry pull you west across the Atlantic. Swimming against that current takes effort.
The Take
“Data sovereignty” sounds clean. But sovereignty means isolation. It means smaller communities, fewer answers, more maintenance.
The question isn’t whether you can build on European infrastructure. You can. People do.
The question is whether you want to pay the hidden price: doing everything yourself, with less help, because the crowd is elsewhere.
The dream is real. But it’s lonelier than you think.