In 2025, the new US administration initiated a spectacular shift in its relationship with Europe. It now treats the European Union not just as a competitor but increasingly as an adversary in many areas. The US president threatens the EU with new tariffs and derogatory rhetoric almost every week.
Conflicts like this create uncertainty, which is causing many European businesses to reevaluate their dependence on American technology providers. They are now considering whether they could substitute these providers with European alternatives. This shift does not stem from anti-American sentiment but rather from a pragmatic desire to reduce risk.
The reality is that many American tech companies have succeeded because they offer highly effective services compared to their competitors, including those based in Europe. Their success has been particularly pronounced in the "cloud era," with European businesses often defaulting to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Exchange due to their ubiquity, reliability, and comprehensive documentation. There are thousands of documentation pages, blogs, and forum discussions about AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, but there are limited resources on European alternatives.
Europe has also struggled to develop viable alternatives to American service providers, partly due to an entrepreneurship environment that is not particularly conducive to agile innovation or friendly toward startups.
However, the landscape is evolving, with a growing realization that many businesses do not need to be cloud-based. In fact, leaving the cloud can result in substantial savings, as the creator of Ruby on Rails famously described, saving his company 7 million USD over 5 years. Open-source tools that simplify the deployment and management of business applications have gained considerable maturity, allowing small teams to build bigger stuff more efficiently than ever before, both in and out of the cloud. Given these developments, European businesses now have many of the tools they need to reduce their reliance on American tech providers if necessary. It just takes a little extra effort.
We know this shift is possible because we develop and host the Lectronz marketplace in Europe:
- For application hosting and DNS, Lectronz uses OVH, a French cloud provider and hosting service.
- For email, Lectronz relies on a self-hosted SMTP service with data stored in the EU.
- For our CDN, Lectronz utilizes bunny.net, a competitive Slovenian company.
- For uptime monitoring, Lectronz leverages BetterStack's free tier, a company founded in the Czech Republic.
These choices were made long before the current geopolitical tensions. Our rationale was straightforward: storing most of our customer data within the European Union enhances privacy and data protection.
We remain pragmatic in our decisions. For example, we use Stripe, an international payment processor, because it provides the best tools and documentation available.
In the end, perhaps this is not a crisis but an opportunity for the EU to consider a more European and independent tech landscape.
But there's also something else at play here. I sincerely hope that divisive talks and global politics do not overshadow the spirit of our community. Let's not forget that twenty years ago, a small Italian company created the Arduino UNO and launched an industry of tinkerers and makers happy to share ideas and designs, regardless of gender, race, or country of origin. This spirit of collaboration and openness must endure.