Went through 307 SaaS tools that market themselves as European or EU based and checked what actually sits under the hood: hosting, CDN, DNS, email, analytics.
70% have at least one hard dependency on a US provider. Most common:
- Google in the stack of 118 of 307 (mostly Workspace mail, plus fonts and analytics)
- Cloudflare in front of 111
- AWS hosting 70
- Microsoft 35
None of this shows up on their marketing pages. You read “hosted in the EU” and the mail still routes through Google, the site still sits behind Cloudflare.
The cleaner side: 91 of the 307 had no US dependency at all. Most common EU providers there were Hetzner, Scaleway, Bunny and TransIP. So an EU only stack is genuinely doable in 2026, it is just rarer than the marketing suggests.
Happy to share the full list and methodology if anyone wants it.
fair hit, and yeah the irony of a transparency thing being cagey isn’t lost on me
honest reason: link posts from new accounts get auto-nuked on reddit and i wasn’t sure about the rules here, so i kept it out to avoid the filter, came across worse than intended
so openly: euroseal is mine, i’m building it, the audit is real and the method’s public so anyone can redo it, but yeah i’ve got a horse in this
appreciate you saying it straight instead of just downvoting
Hope your horse will take you far. It’s good to keep companies responsible for their choices. I feel in general certification is a good way to do that. Don’t think you picked up a light task there, but i wish you all the best.
And welcome to Lemmy :).