Developer migration demonstrates viability of European digital infrastructure stack

A developer has completed a two-month migration of their digital infrastructure to European-based providers, aiming to enhance digital sovereignty and data autonomy. The transition involved replacing US-centric software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools with European alternatives, including Matomo for analytics, Proton Mail for email, and Scaleway and OVH for cloud hosting. The migration was executed without incident, with the stack running reliably for two months post-completion, demonstrating the viability of a professional digital infrastructure based primarily on European providers.

The move was driven by concerns over data privacy, regulatory compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and reliance on US-based technology giants. The developer self-hosted Matomo on a new small server to achieve GDPR compliance and avoid Google’s advertising data model. Proton Mail was selected for its Swiss jurisdiction, which aligns with GDPR, and its end-to-end encryption. However, the developer noted limitations in Proton’s filtering capabilities and a cap of three custom domains, requiring consolidation of email workflows.

For cloud hosting, Scaleway was chosen for its clean interface and projected carbon dioxide emissions data, leading to most infrastructure being hosted in Paris. OVH was utilised for object storage, with the developer configuring lifecycle rules to reduce costs compared to Backblaze B2. The developer also switched AI integrations from OpenAI to Mistral, a Paris-headquartered provider with open-weight models. Anthropic’s Claude Code was retained for coding assistance despite being a US company, due to its strong reasoning quality and structural approach to safety.

Pragmatic considerations led to the retention of certain US services. Cloudflare was kept for public-facing content delivery, as the data flowing through it is already public by definition. GitLab was retained for source control due to its strong commitment to transparency and open source, with a self-hosted instance planned for the future. GitHub remains in use for public-facing NPM packages and open source issue tracking, where network effects provide practical upside that outweighs sovereignty concerns.

The developer plans to migrate from Stripe to Mollie, a Dutch payment processor, but has not yet done so due to integration complexity and cost differences. The migration highlights the growing maturity of European cloud infrastructure and SaaS providers, although some limitations in functionality and integration complexity remain. Local AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, were noted as increasingly viable for running on personal hardware, further supporting the trajectory toward digital autonomy.