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.
Good job. This, of course, is a process. I don’t expect all companies to be 100% “pure”, in this short amount of time. But every step in this direction is a good thing, I still prefer a European tool that uses some American infrastructure, than an American big tech.
yeah that’s how i see it too, it’s not about being 100% pure. a eu tool with one us dependency is already miles ahead of full us big tech, and easier to finish the job later
the audit’s just there to make the hidden part visible, not to shame anyone