A Directory for European Technology
A directory of European alternatives to US tech. 350+ products from across the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland and EU candidates. One person, Rotterdam.
🇳🇱 Built in Rotterdam · hosted on European infrastructure
Why This Exists
Europe builds a lot of good software. The problem is finding it. Google defaults the whole continent to US tools, the indie European products don't rank, and if you don't already know the names you're not going to stumble onto them.
I started BuiltInEu from Rotterdam because I was tired of that. I wanted to know what the European alternative to Gmail was, or to Dropbox, or to Google Analytics, and every answer I could find was either a random Reddit thread from 2019 or a directory that hadn't been updated in years. So I built the thing I wanted to exist. It's still mostly me. If you're reading this in 2026, we're at 350+ products across 44 categories.
Jurisdiction matters too, and it's worth being direct about why. If your provider is headquartered in Europe, your data sits under GDPR and (for Switzerland and Norway) equivalent national law. A US-headquartered company, even one with European servers, can be reached by the US CLOUD Act. That's not a political argument, it's how the law actually works. For some people that's the whole reason to look at European alternatives. For others it's a bonus on top of wanting a tool that isn't trying to sell them to an ad network.
What “European” Means Here
When I say “European” I mean Europe, not just the 27 EU member states. The directory currently includes companies headquartered in any of these:
- →The EU. All 27 member states under GDPR and DMA.
- →The EEA non-members. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. They apply GDPR via the EEA agreement.
- →Switzerland. Outside the EU, but the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) is recognized by the European Commission as offering equivalent protection.
- →The UK. Post-Brexit but still on UK GDPR, which mirrors the EU one. Adequacy decision in place.
- →EU candidate countries. Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans. There's real work coming out of these places, and the legal direction is converging with the EU.
The reason I cast it this wide is jurisdiction. A Swiss provider under FADP, a Norwegian provider under EEA-aligned GDPR and a German provider under direct GDPR all sit outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act for the same practical purposes. That's the part that actually changes anything for users.
What it doesn't include: companies headquartered outside Europe with European subsidiaries or “EU regions” inside their cloud. A US company with a Frankfurt data center is still a US company. If the parent is in San Francisco, Beijing or anywhere else outside Europe, the product doesn't qualify here regardless of what the marketing copy says.
What Gets Listed
For a product to make it into the directory, it has to clear a few specific bars. I check each one before adding anything.
- →The parent company is headquartered in Europe. EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland or an EU candidate country. A US company with European servers doesn't count. Neither does an EU subsidiary of a US parent.
- →The product is a real alternative to its non-European counterpart. Not feature-for-feature parity, but enough that someone could actually switch to it without the migration being painful.
- →The data handling matches what the marketing claims. If the privacy policy doesn't back up the homepage copy, I either don't list it or write about why.
- →The company is operationally alive. No abandoned projects, no two-person teams that went dark mid-2023, no products in permanent “beta” since 2019.
If you submit something that doesn't clear all four, I'll usually still write back to explain why.
Where It Runs
The site itself runs on European infrastructure. It seemed off to recommend European tools while shipping the directory from AWS, so in May 2026 I moved everything off Vercel onto European providers.
- →Hetzner 🇩🇪. Server in Falkenstein, Germany.
- →OVHcloud 🇫🇷. Domain registrar and authoritative DNS, based in Roubaix.
- →Coolify đź‡đź‡ş. Open-source PaaS that replaced Vercel as the deployment layer. Built by a Hungarian team, runs on my own server.
- →Brevo 🇫🇷. Transactional email and the newsletter. French, formerly Sendinblue.
- →Simple Analytics 🇳🇱. Privacy-first, cookieless, no personal data collected. Same town as me, which is a fun coincidence.
The site is cookieless by default. No Google Analytics, no consent banner, no third-party trackers, no ad pixels. If you visit anonymously, you stay anonymous.
How We're Funded
BuiltInEu is bootstrapped and self-funded. No VC, no investors, no parent company. Some of the products in the directory have affiliate links, and if you sign up through one of those I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's what pays for the hosting, the research time, and the coffee.
Affiliate links don't buy a better ranking. A product is either a good European alternative or it isn't. Anything with an affiliate link gets a Partner badge so you always know what you're looking at.
A Few Honest Biases
Privacy. I only list products that actually treat your data as yours. That cuts a few otherwise-decent European tools that resell user data on the side. If a product says it's private but the privacy policy doesn't match, I either skip it or write about why.
Transparency. If a link pays me, it says so. If something I get paid to recommend has a real flaw, I write about it anyway. When I get things wrong (and that does happen), I'd rather post a correction than quietly edit the page.
Independents. Big European brands have marketing teams and SEO budgets. The smaller indie products are harder to find, often more interesting, and usually run by people you can email directly. I lean toward those because they're what Google won't surface for you.
An open invitation. If you've found a European product that should be here and isn't, or one that's here and shouldn't be, the submission form and contact page both go straight to me. This directory gets better when people tell me what I missed.
