A Dutch entrepreneur felt uncomfortable with his data being owned by large, powerful tech companies overseas. That’s why he moved his entire digital stack to Europe in two months.
At a time when two-thirds of Europeans support replacing American technologies with local alternatives, this is already a reality for Dutch entrepreneur Wimer Hazenberg.
In two months, Hazenberg moved all his digital stack – with few exceptions – to Europe, a process he documented here. From compute and object storage to email services and password managers, his projects now operate on European infrastructure.
Hazenberg tells Cybernews that the migration was motivated by a long-held discomfort with sending all his data to big, powerful corporations. Because most of them are American, the current political climate in the US also played a role.
“I was looking around for European solutions because the European political climate feels closer to home and more stable. But it poses a problem because we don’t have hyperscalers like Amazon or Google,” he says.
The lack of local hyperscalers contributes to Europe’s heavy reliance on American tech. For instance, three American providers – Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – account for about 70% of the European cloud market.
Moreover, 74% of publicly listed companies in Europe use American email services, Proton analysis suggests.
Such dependence raises concerns about sensitive European data flowing outside the continent, as well as about European institutions and businesses being vulnerable to a “kill switch” scenario.
The research part is the most time-consuming
Hazenberg says researching for alternatives took longer than the actual migration because “you have to dive a little bit deeper than the promo page of each of those services.”
He explains that big US services are effortless and easy to set up, a smoothness that alternative solutions sometimes lack. Nevertheless, despite a couple of dead ends, Hazenberg found some European services to be a pleasant surprise.
“I thought European infrastructure servers were not mature yet, but Scaleway really is,” he says.
As Hazenberg was getting fed up with Twilio SendGrid, for its repeated price increases and the need to buy separate subscriptions for separate domains, he replaced it with the Dutch-based Lettermint, a service for transactional emails, which he describes as “a breeze.”
Migration from Gmail to Proton, on the other hand, came with some friction, as the Swiss-based service has a less advanced email filtering system.
Despite an overall positive experience with European alternatives, Hazenberg made a few exceptions to American tech in his migration. He, for example, still uses Cloudflare.
As Hazenberg explains in his blog post, Cloudflare sits in front of his public-facing website. Therefore, data flowing through it is already public by definition.
“The sovereignty calculus is different when the thing you’re protecting is already public,” he writes.
In addition, Claude Code remains Hazenberg’s day-to-day AI assistant for coding, as Mistral Vibe cannot yet compete with Anthropic’s tool.
I feel more at ease when those kinds of emails and those kinds of data are protected by EU law, because I live in the EU and its values are also closely aligned to my own values.
Wimer Hazenberg
Will ditching US tech hurt your wallet?
Hazenberg says price wasn’t the decisive factor in choosing alternatives, although it was still important that migration to European tech wouldn’t inflate the costs multiple times.
“That didn’t happen. I pay about the same as I did before. Some services are a little bit cheaper, and some are a little bit more expensive. All in all, it’s around the same,” he tells Cybernews.
For Hazenberg, one of the biggest victories is that his data is now on European services and protected by European law. Especially when it comes to email services, as correspondence often contains sensitive data, such as information from health companies.
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“I feel more at ease when those kinds of emails and those kinds of data are protected by EU law, because I live in the EU and its values are also closely aligned to my own values,” he explains.
Similar sentiments are felt across Europe, where capitals are increasingly talking about their digital independence from the US, especially under the Donald Trump administration.
Governments in France, Germany, and Austria, among others, have already migrated parts of their digital stacks to Europe or are planning to do so. Open-source alternatives often come to the rescue by helping ensure independence and lower costs.
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