Building a SaaS in 2026 Using Only EU Infrastructure

I've posted this a couple times before when EU tech + Hetzner comes up (and probably will again):

I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.

I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".

It's worth considering why you are choosing a European stack.

Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.

Good list but the biggest missing piece for most new SaaS products right now is AI/LLM APIs. If you're building anything with AI features you're calling OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar - all US. Mistral exists but the ecosystem around it is much thinner. That's probably the hardest US dependency to drop in 2026 that I can think of.

Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.

Competition is good.

Having a global monopoly on these kinds of things is part of what has let U.S. companies get away with being so anti-consumer for so long.

Might also want to add Codeberg and Tangled for EU-hosted code forges.

No love for Gcore Labs? They're seemingly completely unknown but their free DNS product is rock solid. They also have a FaaS platform I've never gotten around to trying. Some of their products have a high premium but the range available under one roof is very broad

Mollie itself is hosted on GCP: https://cloud.google.com/customers/mollie

Might want to add ClouDNS for DNS management (based in EU).

Why not add Adyen for payments?

The EU providers are simply not on par with AWS, CloudFlare, GCP, etc.

Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.

There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.

You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.