Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort

Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure sounds like a nice sovereignty flex right up until you actually try it and realize the real price gets paid in time, tinkering, and slowly unlearning a decade of GitHub muscle memory.

That's the takeaway from a blog post published on Friday in which one founder lays out what happened when they decided to ditch the US hyperscalers and piece together a "Made in EU" stack instead.

The experiment eventually turned into hank.parts, a cross-border car parts marketplace where buyers post what they need and sellers from around Europe pitch offers.

The motivation won't surprise anyone who's followed the sovereignty debate: keep data in Europe, avoid putting everything in the hands of a few US cloud giants, and see if a homegrown stack can actually hold up. Turns out it can – just with a few more hurdles along the ...