I know it's boring to comment and say that something sounds like it was written by an AI, but this sounds like it was written by an AI. I am often especially suspicious of these listicle recommendation sites because it's pretty cheap and easy to have dozens of sites doing some list which just so happens to mention a specific service that 'quietly' does a 'surprisingly good job' of some doodad. This kind of submarine advertising feels like it might be quite common. Although in this case it seems they're trying more for a 'sponsorship' thing - 'our website got X views in Y days, sponsor us, random company!'
I recently came across https://tropes.fyi/directory which has a pretty solid set of common patterns, and I like it a lot. The pattern that always really bothers me is the one named "short punchy fragments", for example from the site “He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.”
It kills me every time. I automatically lose any interest in the substance and often just throw away the whole conversation!
When will AI generated content have been prevalent enough for it to be consumed more than traditional content - and can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
I myself already feel like my style is being influenced by all conversations I've had with LLM, if not influenced by their responses, at last influenced by how I talk to it.
I sometimes wonder if much upcoming human creative work will be quite avant-garde, out there, ultra-stylised and/or difficult to comprehend (or even devoid of intent or message), as a reaction to AI's sort of 'common denominator' approach.
> can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
Already happened, most of the internet pre-AI was just human-generated SEO-optimized slop created by underpaid content writers in third world countries. All those listicles, informaticals, etc, are now currently being used to train AI, but before that, they were what "trained" humans.
You are missing https://unikraft.com/pricing. Amazing compute, 2 instances free. A German company. Offers EU hosting too. Just a happy paying user myself
Hm, interesting. But the pricing page is quite confusing to me: the $39 "pro plan" says "Up to 8 instances running". And above that, "Pricing that scales to zero". But if I'm always paying $39, what's the point of scaling to zero vs just keeping the 8 instances running? I guess the point is that you can scale down one workload and scale up another, but that seems a bit niche compared to the much more common use case of "scale up with increased user activity, and pay less when users are sleeping".
It's missing some sort of per-minute / per-GB RAM "pay as you go" pricing model. It seems like Fly.io, but missing the pay-as-you-go pricing & rapid scaling model that makes Fly worth using.
Yeah I really agree. There's no overage pricing on their website's main pricing page, which makes me think the jump from "Team" to "Pro" to negotiating an enterprise contract will really hurt. Going from $39/month to $199/moth because you needed slightly more is a really big jump in pricing. It's pretty much the opposite of what I would expect from a service that lets you scale to 0.
They focus on compute only. Otherwise roughly the same thing, but you get amazing performance with their own technology (from research, part of the Linux Foundation) to boot, sleep, and wake instances up in bare milliseconds.
You deploy using a Dockerfile, or Docker Compose.
Definitely suggest you give it a shot. The free plan is a no-brainer for the performance you get. We are on the team plan at https://www.sourcemeta.com
Yes, thank you! It’s so annoying how frequently that typo gets me, and my brain just skips over it. I’ve updated it above. And I also preferred SendInBlue!
After Sendgrid got acquired by Twilio and retired their free plan, i also went with Brevo and am quite happy with it. No deliverability issues on the major email operators (Google, MS365) at all, decent delivery speed.
Either way, one of the most critical parts is that many are still hosting on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft, therefore you are not 100% insulated from Cloud Act.
Take Tally (tally.so), the one I took the time to check.
In their footer they say: Made and hosted in the EU which technically it's not wrong, but since they are using Google Cloud and Cloudflare, they are not insulated from the effect of the CLOUD Act.
On Herzner add Dokploy (Honduras, I prefer this even if it's not European) or Coolify (Hungary) to get a Vercel-like PaaS experience for free. Any others that are good?
Passkeys cannot be cryptographically reset, but plenty of providers have account recovery flows in case you lose your passkey. Without a recovery mechanism you’d be technically locked out, that’s true.
Yeah you just allow setting a new passkey by sending an email link, just like password resets. Passkeys don't have to be remembered, can't be phished, and don't need 2FA.
That's highly misleading to outright misinformation.
> Passkeys don't have to be remembered
Because you need an app for the login flow. You also don't have to remember passwords if you use a password manager app.
> don't need 2FA
Not true, a second factor in the form of eg a biometric ID or PIN is mandatory.
Phishing resistance exists, but only truly so if you completely surrender control over your device and access to your credentials. Something that the same organizations who you'll depend on for Passkeys are actively pushing for through various initiatives.
No it is not. You’re free to save passkeys in your manager of choice and it still won’t let you use a passkey on the wrong website. Users are freed from having to copy&paste TOTPs. No app other than a browser needed.
Apple is more a service provider than a hardware vendor these days. You can't realistically own Apple hardware without periodically connecting to Apple.
Interesting, I looked into some of these types of services for my SaaS but used none of the listed providers except Mollie. I landed on IONOS for hosting, Scaleway for transactional mails, mailbox.org for receiving and sending manual mails and statichost.eu for hosting my docs.
I don't think that's an alternative to US hyperscalers. Scaleway is the closest thing there is. Replacing a single service with 10 others is not really an alternative in my opinion.
Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a good choice. I think the AWS service catalog makes you adopt more than you need or want anyway, it is a great way of locking people into one vendor.
I would argue that with AI, this becomes less of an issue. Connect N services, deploy to bare metal. Granted, AI is an additional cost now local or remote. But so is the MacBook people use to develop their software.
I read this, and the list is fine. But the title made me think VPS + self hosting of services like xmox for email/transactional email… you know since we’re bootstrapping and all.
What about DNS buying/hosting? Seems it's not mentioned (neither is emailing besides transactional/marketing). I'm currently on DNSimple but been trying to replace it with some closer to home (Europe) alternative that still offers the same level of possible automation as DNSimple does, anyone know of any that fits the bill?
It's not European, rather a New Zealand company but I find https://zonomi.com/ pretty good. There's a Lego resolver that works fine https://github.com/go-acme/lego - although my only complaint is the DNS propagation takes a while though I suspect that's a my config problem (dig will show the txt record long before Lego sees it)
Wow, I'd never heard of Zonomi, or RimuHosting (which appears to be the parent company). Data centers in NZ & Oz & UK & Germany, and the website gives me the vibe of those customer focused companies of the late 90s / early 2000s, probably because they started in 2002. Pricing is a little more than I'd like, but I'm just pleased to see alternatives like this in Oceania.
I've used their (same family of company) email hosting services lightly in the past and found that to work well also. For the DNS I'm paying like $1 a month which is probably more than it needs to be, but sufficiently low that I'm happy to support small/local business. I'm also reasonably confident I could get a response if anything ever goes wrong, untested as nothing has so far.
I've just been moving some domains of cloudflare. I moved some to hetzner dns (works fine). Then i got recomended deSEC which is it's own open source project. But for one domain i needed CNAME for apex (or ANAME/ALIAS record) so that i moved to bunny.net. I think Bunny is pretty good replacement for many features of cloudflare.
any good reason to serve the EU? I am observing through various SaaS and support tickets and EU seem no average way more finicky and stingy than North American customers not to mention the absurd level of EU regulations you have to follow just to serve the same product at a much higher cost.
It's like a bad mix of culture (bordering on arrogance and pathological in some bad cases) and over regulation.
I always advise clients to avoid the EU at launch and focus on UK if they really want to do a test run and encourage them to focus on East Asia instead.
You'd think Europe is this affluent and sophisticated customer demographic but again and again from data I see it couldn't be further from the truth.
I know it's boring to comment and say that something sounds like it was written by an AI, but this sounds like it was written by an AI. I am often especially suspicious of these listicle recommendation sites because it's pretty cheap and easy to have dozens of sites doing some list which just so happens to mention a specific service that 'quietly' does a 'surprisingly good job' of some doodad. This kind of submarine advertising feels like it might be quite common. Although in this case it seems they're trying more for a 'sponsorship' thing - 'our website got X views in Y days, sponsor us, random company!'
The use of the word genuinely is always a dead giveaway
I recently came across https://tropes.fyi/directory which has a pretty solid set of common patterns, and I like it a lot. The pattern that always really bothers me is the one named "short punchy fragments", for example from the site “He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.”
It kills me every time. I automatically lose any interest in the substance and often just throw away the whole conversation!
That's kind of sad to me, I've used that word a lot, it was my go-to and best technique for trying to convey sincerity in comment sections
You're absolutely wrong.
But someone can genuinely like using the word!
And “honestly” in the way it is used in this piece
It genuinely is.
When will AI generated content have been prevalent enough for it to be consumed more than traditional content - and can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
I myself already feel like my style is being influenced by all conversations I've had with LLM, if not influenced by their responses, at last influenced by how I talk to it.
I sometimes wonder if much upcoming human creative work will be quite avant-garde, out there, ultra-stylised and/or difficult to comprehend (or even devoid of intent or message), as a reaction to AI's sort of 'common denominator' approach.
> can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
Already happened, most of the internet pre-AI was just human-generated SEO-optimized slop created by underpaid content writers in third world countries. All those listicles, informaticals, etc, are now currently being used to train AI, but before that, they were what "trained" humans.
The rounded box with the accent border on the left gives it away
as long as the text is not slop (no hallucinations / factual) and useful to me, I do not care about the author of it
You are missing https://unikraft.com/pricing. Amazing compute, 2 instances free. A German company. Offers EU hosting too. Just a happy paying user myself
Hm, interesting. But the pricing page is quite confusing to me: the $39 "pro plan" says "Up to 8 instances running". And above that, "Pricing that scales to zero". But if I'm always paying $39, what's the point of scaling to zero vs just keeping the 8 instances running? I guess the point is that you can scale down one workload and scale up another, but that seems a bit niche compared to the much more common use case of "scale up with increased user activity, and pay less when users are sleeping".
It's missing some sort of per-minute / per-GB RAM "pay as you go" pricing model. It seems like Fly.io, but missing the pay-as-you-go pricing & rapid scaling model that makes Fly worth using.
Yeah I really agree. There's no overage pricing on their website's main pricing page, which makes me think the jump from "Team" to "Pro" to negotiating an enterprise contract will really hurt. Going from $39/month to $199/moth because you needed slightly more is a really big jump in pricing. It's pretty much the opposite of what I would expect from a service that lets you scale to 0.
You can only sign-up via Google or GitHub, so American companies. Definitely doesn't belong on the list.
What? Why do people do this? Let me sign in with my damn email address, like a normal person. Why do you have to assume I have a Google account?
Because it gets you a minimal amount of abuse prevention for free.
How do they compare to the likes of fly.io, Railway, Render, Northflank ?
They focus on compute only. Otherwise roughly the same thing, but you get amazing performance with their own technology (from research, part of the Linux Foundation) to boot, sleep, and wake instances up in bare milliseconds.
You deploy using a Dockerfile, or Docker Compose.
Definitely suggest you give it a shot. The free plan is a no-brainer for the performance you get. We are on the team plan at https://www.sourcemeta.com
As someone who tries to "buy local", I have been a happy customer of the following recommended services for many months or years:
- Hetzner (Cloud, Box, and Object Storage)
- Brevo (for transactional emails)
- Mollie
For monitoring I use and recommend UpDown.io, which doesn’t seem to be listed there.
I think you mean Brevo instead of Brave? Previously known by the (much better) name SendInBlue.
Yes, thank you! It’s so annoying how frequently that typo gets me, and my brain just skips over it. I’ve updated it above. And I also preferred SendInBlue!
iOS still thinks I really, really mean ‘bexause’ instead of ‘because’, so your typo barely registered.
My only gripe with SIB was terribly low deliverability to Outlook, even with full config.
> For monitoring I use and recommend UpDown.io, which doesn’t seem to be listed there.
It doesn't seem very well known, but I've been a happy user. Most of the others have become over-bloated with a shitty UI.
After Sendgrid got acquired by Twilio and retired their free plan, i also went with Brevo and am quite happy with it. No deliverability issues on the major email operators (Google, MS365) at all, decent delivery speed.
Fastmail is excellent, FWIW
Not European, but Zoho Zeptomail is cheap as hell and very good. I can definitely recommend it.
this website seems a clone of https://european-alternatives.eu/
Either way, one of the most critical parts is that many are still hosting on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft, therefore you are not 100% insulated from Cloud Act.
A lot of the alternatives there are tagged "EU hosted". Some are not.
Are the ones that are tagged "EU hosted" among the ones you mean host on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft?
Take Tally (tally.so), the one I took the time to check.
In their footer they say: Made and hosted in the EU which technically it's not wrong, but since they are using Google Cloud and Cloudflare, they are not insulated from the effect of the CLOUD Act.
On Herzner add Dokploy (Honduras, I prefer this even if it's not European) or Coolify (Hungary) to get a Vercel-like PaaS experience for free. Any others that are good?
We've been building canine.sh free and open source for an enterprise ready deployment platform.
Think about it like coolify is to a VPS as Canine is to Kubernetes.
Currently getting a 503 on the docs: https://docs.canine.sh/
> Why you should NOT use Canine
I found the section sorta funny, but I was actually trying to find reasons not to use it. Might want to add some real reasons in there :)
Look at lowendtalk/box
> passkeys, the modern way to handle login that gets rid of password resets entirely
Doesn't that just trade password resets for passkey resets? Or do they permanently lock out users who lose their passkey?
Passkeys cannot be cryptographically reset, but plenty of providers have account recovery flows in case you lose your passkey. Without a recovery mechanism you’d be technically locked out, that’s true.
Yeah you just allow setting a new passkey by sending an email link, just like password resets. Passkeys don't have to be remembered, can't be phished, and don't need 2FA.
That's highly misleading to outright misinformation.
> Passkeys don't have to be remembered
Because you need an app for the login flow. You also don't have to remember passwords if you use a password manager app.
> don't need 2FA
Not true, a second factor in the form of eg a biometric ID or PIN is mandatory.
Phishing resistance exists, but only truly so if you completely surrender control over your device and access to your credentials. Something that the same organizations who you'll depend on for Passkeys are actively pushing for through various initiatives.
No it is not. You’re free to save passkeys in your manager of choice and it still won’t let you use a passkey on the wrong website. Users are freed from having to copy&paste TOTPs. No app other than a browser needed.
The second one
Thanks for listing Hanko as EU-based authentication provider.
To be upfront about this, we’re still on AWS (Frankfurt), but "EU-owned" hosting/data regions will be available very soon.
For a bootstrapper's computeless log search solution using Duckdb and s3 compatible store, use Blobsearch (https://github.com/amr8t/blobsearch)
But what laptop do you access it from?
Apple is more a service provider than a hardware vendor these days. You can't realistically own Apple hardware without periodically connecting to Apple.
Interesting, I looked into some of these types of services for my SaaS but used none of the listed providers except Mollie. I landed on IONOS for hosting, Scaleway for transactional mails, mailbox.org for receiving and sending manual mails and statichost.eu for hosting my docs.
I don't think that's an alternative to US hyperscalers. Scaleway is the closest thing there is. Replacing a single service with 10 others is not really an alternative in my opinion.
Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a good choice. I think the AWS service catalog makes you adopt more than you need or want anyway, it is a great way of locking people into one vendor.
Putting your single egg into multiple baskets isn't all that much better. Now you have many points of failure rather than a single point of failure.
I would argue that with AI, this becomes less of an issue. Connect N services, deploy to bare metal. Granted, AI is an additional cost now local or remote. But so is the MacBook people use to develop their software.
Now you've got N potential points of failure.
I read this, and the list is fine. But the title made me think VPS + self hosting of services like xmox for email/transactional email… you know since we’re bootstrapping and all.
What about DNS buying/hosting? Seems it's not mentioned (neither is emailing besides transactional/marketing). I'm currently on DNSimple but been trying to replace it with some closer to home (Europe) alternative that still offers the same level of possible automation as DNSimple does, anyone know of any that fits the bill?
It's not European, rather a New Zealand company but I find https://zonomi.com/ pretty good. There's a Lego resolver that works fine https://github.com/go-acme/lego - although my only complaint is the DNS propagation takes a while though I suspect that's a my config problem (dig will show the txt record long before Lego sees it)
Wow, I'd never heard of Zonomi, or RimuHosting (which appears to be the parent company). Data centers in NZ & Oz & UK & Germany, and the website gives me the vibe of those customer focused companies of the late 90s / early 2000s, probably because they started in 2002. Pricing is a little more than I'd like, but I'm just pleased to see alternatives like this in Oceania.
Thanks for sharing! Bookmarked immediately.
I've used their (same family of company) email hosting services lightly in the past and found that to work well also. For the DNS I'm paying like $1 a month which is probably more than it needs to be, but sufficiently low that I'm happy to support small/local business. I'm also reasonably confident I could get a response if anything ever goes wrong, untested as nothing has so far.
I've just been moving some domains of cloudflare. I moved some to hetzner dns (works fine). Then i got recomended deSEC which is it's own open source project. But for one domain i needed CNAME for apex (or ANAME/ALIAS record) so that i moved to bunny.net. I think Bunny is pretty good replacement for many features of cloudflare.
OVH is one of the cheapest and works satisfactorily for me. I went back to OVH when Gandi stopped being a recommendable company.
OVH's API allows full control of an account, but I don't know how that compares to DNSimple.
When and why did Gandi stop being recommendable?
they got acquired in 2023, prices went up and the free mailboxes turned into a monthly fee
ClouDNS is probably the most popular one.
Bunny.net is based in Europe
cbk.ai - nearly 100% eu with a few small exceptions we will finish migrating by the end of Q3
Happy to see my friends from Hanko on the list, they are great and you should really try their privacy-first authentication.
Have a look to OVH VPS their offers are real cheap and if you're not scarred of openstack they have this too.
Creem is just a MoR layer on top of Stripe. Not really an EU alternative.
Is it? I couldn't find info about it.
Haven’t used herzner but heard good things
Interesting. Wonder if they have competitive pricing on GPU instances.
Fremdschämen
I thought I will find GetResponse there, but they are fucking greedy!
any good reason to serve the EU? I am observing through various SaaS and support tickets and EU seem no average way more finicky and stingy than North American customers not to mention the absurd level of EU regulations you have to follow just to serve the same product at a much higher cost.
It's like a bad mix of culture (bordering on arrogance and pathological in some bad cases) and over regulation.
I always advise clients to avoid the EU at launch and focus on UK if they really want to do a test run and encourage them to focus on East Asia instead.
You'd think Europe is this affluent and sophisticated customer demographic but again and again from data I see it couldn't be further from the truth.
Out of curiosity, what EU laws does your 'same product' break?
Maybe we have a more refined taste :)
Maybe your product is just not an acceptable fit to EU customers?
(as in "you are pushing shite no one wants but not accustomized to getting a well-deserved push-back")