One Developer's Migration From US SaaS to a European-First Digital Stack

A developer documents swapping out US-based cloud and SaaS tools for European equivalents, motivated less by cost than by digital sovereignty concerns: data residency, jurisdictional risk, and misaligned vendor incentives. The replacements include self-hosted Matomo for analytics, Proton Mail and Proton Pass (Swiss) for email and passwords, Scaleway for compute and S3-compatible object storage, OVH for cold backups, Lettermint for transactional email, self-hosted Bugsink for error tracking, and Mistral for LLM inference.

The trade-offs are honest rather than evangelical. Proton’s filters can’t match Gmail body searches and custom domains are capped at three. Bugsink lacks Sentry’s performance monitoring and replays. OVH’s lifecycle configuration is buried in the control panel and requires terminal work. Self-hosting Matomo shifts maintenance burden onto the operator. Migrating large S3 buckets to Scaleway via rclone took over a week of continuous syncing.

The author keeps Cloudflare as a deliberate exception, reasoning that a CDN fronting public content has a different sovereignty profile than tools handling private data. The piece is useful as a concrete inventory of mature European alternatives for anyone weighing the same move, and a reminder that the practical friction is real but mostly one-time.