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As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs? I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself. I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff. Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe? I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar? I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
- Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
  It's not that they cannot be found. But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    You're not choosing between "Hans with a server in his closest in Germany" and Stripe here, you're choosing between two almost equally established companies that just happen to have different geographic locations and different names. Companies like Adyen are even older than Stripe by some years, and there are tons of examples like this.
  - anonzzzies 2mo ago
    That's why I meet with them. I have the mobile number of the ceo of Mollie and can call him in the weekend; compared to the US, we are DEFINITELY not big. But haven't had issues since using them since 2006.
- LucaSiviero 2mo ago
  I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe... Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    Right, because you're looking for a Stripe alternative, none of them will be. Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
    - cuu508 2mo ago
      Do you know of any EU payment processor that supports recurring payments like a SaaS would need (subscriptions, subscription state tracking, automatic retries of failed payments)? I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
      - econ 2mo ago
        Fake news? > Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times. https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments
        nottorp 2mo ago
        I keep being told Stripe supports 3D Secure (or whatever the marketing name for it is this week) too :) They may but it's not out there in the wild.
anonzzzies 2mo ago
Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Stripe, AWS and many of the "defaults" people use are extremely expensive, but since it's mostly VC-funded startups who foots the bills, no one seem to care. But once you're doing bootstrapped/long-lived stuff, you need to start caring, and once you see the terms and prices of other things, you start to realize how ridiculously over-priced AWS, Stripe, et al actually are.
karambahh 2mo ago
Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies. Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
- amiga386 2mo ago
  The UK Government just replaced Stripe with Ayden for most payments, so good suggestion. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-making-change-simple-on-gov-uk-pay/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
  - ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
    There was a thread about it, and Ayden will not talk to you if you sell less than $5mm/yr using online payments.
    - dnpls 2mo ago
      This could be Adyen's opportunity for a growth spike if they seize it
    - karambahh 2mo ago
      I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"
      - econ 2mo ago
        I've never been so confused implementing something. I sat there thinking, this is it? There is nothing else to do? How can this be it? It does have all the features and API craziness other processors offer but you don't have to use any of it.
hsuduebc2 2mo ago
Out of curiosity. There aren't any payment card processors other than Stripe? I thought I saw bunch of them.
- anonzzzies 2mo ago
  There are a LOT of processors/acquirers, just most don't want to work with small companies and somehow developers are so really not developers that stripe won because 'better api' even though you get overcharged for everything.
- LucaSiviero 2mo ago
  Stripe doesn't just process payments. Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has. I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.
wolvoleo 2mo ago
Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option. I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
  It's not about complete replacement. People don't buy a Golf because they googled "Toyota European version" and decided the limitations are acceptable, or because it has all the same buttons as a Hyundai. They do it because Volkswagen and a number of other European manufacturers make genuinely good, competitive cars.
throwawayffffas 2mo ago
OVH is much more developed on the managed side, they even have managed k8s as a service. And you know their infra generally works, you know when it's not on fire. And when it is, well you are not going to be the only one down.
mrtksn 2mo ago
There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market? After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today. Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > USA is/was easier to start business and get funding I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't. Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
  - mrtksn 2mo ago
    Seden is a success story, just as Estonia but instead doing that and god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US and be clear on the situation across all the EU since US is a 3rd party with much clear rights and obligations towards EU. AFAIK that's why the EU wants to have a 28th regime.
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      So is the US easier than the EU or not? Now you're saying Sweden is a "success story", does that mean it's easier than the US then? > god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU. This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?
gempir 2mo ago
Adyen is a big payment processor from the Netherlands which many EU retailers already use. Even with some worldwide customers.
- gib444 2mo ago
  UK government too
adulion 2mo ago
For cyber security examples there are real movement in europe - ciphercue is trying to create a directory of alternatives which is gaining traction - https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed
m00dy 2mo ago
There are plenty of alternatives to Stripe. Just search for card processors. If you’re a high-risk merchant, or your product falls into a high-risk category, Stripe will probably reject you. That’s why there’s a big market for other processors to step in.
epolanski 2mo ago
I'm italian too. For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good. You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far. > Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe? Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users. If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box. Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases. US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings. Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.
itsamario 2mo ago
Most of the 13 root dns servers are American. They're distributed geographically but still owned by American entities
- Bender 2mo ago
  Adding for somewhat completeness sake those are 13 anycast IP addresses with upwards of 2000 servers responding to them. The US has about 500 to 700 of those servers. The EU about 600 servers and the rest of the world 600 to 900 but I do not have exact numbers. One of the root DNS server admins would have to chime in for more accurate numbers. I am fairly certain that the EU servers belong to companies in the EU not that it entirely relates to the overall management hierarchy but I don't know their management structure. Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so. Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1]. [1] - https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
  - itsamario 2mo ago
    The anycast is for the /24 those IP addresses share (first.three.octects.0/24) But if you look those /24 are Arin. Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS. They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
    - Bender 2mo ago
      That part makes sense to me. If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed. Been there, done that. The root servers were created in the US. To have RIPE IP addresses I would imagine would require ARIN to set up some partnership but there again that gets into management and politics in their organization that I am unaware of. Every time I start to read any of their minutes they lose me after the first paragraph. If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.
throw-the-towel 2mo ago
Neon was actually developed in Europe -- but by Russians, not Europeans. (Source: I interviewed with them around the acquisition.)
inigyou 2mo ago
What services do you need from Hetzner? It sounds like there's an available business niche here. Serverless?

embedding-shape 2mo ago

> is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar? I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.

Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
It's not that they cannot be found. But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  You're not choosing between "Hans with a server in his closest in Germany" and Stripe here, you're choosing between two almost equally established companies that just happen to have different geographic locations and different names. Companies like Adyen are even older than Stripe by some years, and there are tons of examples like this.
- anonzzzies 2mo ago
  That's why I meet with them. I have the mobile number of the ceo of Mollie and can call him in the weekend; compared to the US, we are DEFINITELY not big. But haven't had issues since using them since 2006.
LucaSiviero 2mo ago
I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe... Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Right, because you're looking for a Stripe alternative, none of them will be. Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".
  - cuu508 2mo ago
    Do you know of any EU payment processor that supports recurring payments like a SaaS would need (subscriptions, subscription state tracking, automatic retries of failed payments)? I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.
    - econ 2mo ago
      Fake news? > Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times. https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments
      - nottorp 2mo ago
        I keep being told Stripe supports 3D Secure (or whatever the marketing name for it is this week) too :) They may but it's not out there in the wild.

anonzzzies 2mo ago

Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
Stripe, AWS and many of the "defaults" people use are extremely expensive, but since it's mostly VC-funded startups who foots the bills, no one seem to care. But once you're doing bootstrapped/long-lived stuff, you need to start caring, and once you see the terms and prices of other things, you start to realize how ridiculously over-priced AWS, Stripe, et al actually are.

karambahh 2mo ago

Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies. Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)

amiga386 2mo ago
The UK Government just replaced Stripe with Ayden for most payments, so good suggestion. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-making-change-simple-on-gov-uk-pay/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...
- ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
  There was a thread about it, and Ayden will not talk to you if you sell less than $5mm/yr using online payments.
  - dnpls 2mo ago
    This could be Adyen's opportunity for a growth spike if they seize it
  - karambahh 2mo ago
    I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"
    - econ 2mo ago
      I've never been so confused implementing something. I sat there thinking, this is it? There is nothing else to do? How can this be it? It does have all the features and API craziness other processors offer but you don't have to use any of it.

hsuduebc2 2mo ago

Out of curiosity. There aren't any payment card processors other than Stripe? I thought I saw bunch of them.

anonzzzies 2mo ago
There are a LOT of processors/acquirers, just most don't want to work with small companies and somehow developers are so really not developers that stripe won because 'better api' even though you get overcharged for everything.
LucaSiviero 2mo ago
Stripe doesn't just process payments. Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has. I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.

wolvoleo 2mo ago

Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option. I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.

SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
It's not about complete replacement. People don't buy a Golf because they googled "Toyota European version" and decided the limitations are acceptable, or because it has all the same buttons as a Hyundai. They do it because Volkswagen and a number of other European manufacturers make genuinely good, competitive cars.

throwawayffffas 2mo ago

OVH is much more developed on the managed side, they even have managed k8s as a service. And you know their infra generally works, you know when it's not on fire. And when it is, well you are not going to be the only one down.

mrtksn 2mo ago

There isn't going to be "EU tech" as long as US can access the EU market as freely because for the mainstream anything it doesn't make sense to have a duplication effort for the EU. USA is/was easier to start business and get funding, you can access Europe just as well from there so why bother with the European based stuff if you are targeting a broad market? After Trump now there is a reason to actually go for European base and EU is trying hard to clean up the field with things like EU-inc, digital Euro, common markets etc but its not happening fast enough to make a difference today. Maybe if all goes well and Trump can finish his term or even invades Greenland then EU can have its "tech", but for now its happening slowly because its primarily driven by the hypothetical risks that are convincingly real but but costly to act on.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> USA is/was easier to start business and get funding I think this would highly depend on the country. With a solid business plan, I could easily get funding via banks and literally start a company with the press of a button in web portal, in Sweden. Similarly, Estonia seems to have made it ridiculously easy as well. In Spain it's slightly harder, I have to fill out some forms, but with stable income, very easy to get a bank loan even for business ideas that probably shouldn't. Sure, you won't attract multi-trillion VCs that route, but is that exclusively what you're talking about? How much easier can it be to start the company than the press of the button, since you seem sure it's much easier in the US than all the countries in the EU?
- mrtksn 2mo ago
  Seden is a success story, just as Estonia but instead doing that and god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US and be clear on the situation across all the EU since US is a 3rd party with much clear rights and obligations towards EU. AFAIK that's why the EU wants to have a 28th regime.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    So is the US easier than the EU or not? Now you're saying Sweden is a "success story", does that mean it's easier than the US then? > god knows what complications it creates across EU borders you can just create a company for pretty cheap in US What? That doesn't make any sense. If I'm a Swedish resident, and I want to sell to Danes, then in no way is it easier for me to start a US company (?!) then sell to Denmark from outside the EU, than just starting a Swedish company and selling directly to Danes inside of the EU. This is starting to sound like someone who never done intra-EU B2B or B2C at all. Where are you getting this from?

gempir 2mo ago

Adyen is a big payment processor from the Netherlands which many EU retailers already use. Even with some worldwide customers.

gib444 2mo ago
UK government too

adulion 2mo ago

For cyber security examples there are real movement in europe - ciphercue is trying to create a directory of alternatives which is gaining traction - https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed

m00dy 2mo ago

There are plenty of alternatives to Stripe. Just search for card processors. If you’re a high-risk merchant, or your product falls into a high-risk category, Stripe will probably reject you. That’s why there’s a big market for other processors to step in.

epolanski 2mo ago

I'm italian too. For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good. You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far. > Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe? Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users. If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box. Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases. US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings. Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.

itsamario 2mo ago

Most of the 13 root dns servers are American. They're distributed geographically but still owned by American entities

Bender 2mo ago
Adding for somewhat completeness sake those are 13 anycast IP addresses with upwards of 2000 servers responding to them. The US has about 500 to 700 of those servers. The EU about 600 servers and the rest of the world 600 to 900 but I do not have exact numbers. One of the root DNS server admins would have to chime in for more accurate numbers. I am fairly certain that the EU servers belong to companies in the EU not that it entirely relates to the overall management hierarchy but I don't know their management structure. Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so. Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1]. [1] - https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
- itsamario 2mo ago
  The anycast is for the /24 those IP addresses share (first.three.octects.0/24) But if you look those /24 are Arin. Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS. They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor
  - Bender 2mo ago
    That part makes sense to me. If one has ever tried to announce an ARIN IP in the EU or a RIPE IP in the US they will send warnings that the allocations will be pulled back if that is not fixed. Been there, done that. The root servers were created in the US. To have RIPE IP addresses I would imagine would require ARIN to set up some partnership but there again that gets into management and politics in their organization that I am unaware of. Every time I start to read any of their minutes they lose me after the first paragraph. If the concern is that the US would somehow break the root servers and disrupt many trillions of dollars of trade I guess that is technically possible but probably unlikely given the amount of trade, tariffs, tax revenue that would impact would end anyone's political career and things would be reverted quickly in my opinion.

throw-the-towel 2mo ago

Neon was actually developed in Europe -- but by Russians, not Europeans. (Source: I interviewed with them around the acquisition.)

inigyou 2mo ago

What services do you need from Hetzner? It sounds like there's an available business niche here. Serverless?