Building a European Product

The trend for sovereign European software solutions is obvious. As previously analyzed, 93% of German Cities use sovereign email solutions. Entire European countries such as Denmark discuss their exit from Microsoft.

Shifting perspective from the demand to the supply side, what does it take to offer a sovereign email service? Here is what I do with my company.

EU-based building blocks

Starting a business usually requires a registered legal entity. In The Netherlands, the most prominent form is a B.V., while in Germany, it is a GmbH. All my direct suppliers should run an EU-based legal entity as well.

Registering a domain can be done at probably hundreds of registrars. There are not too many EU-based registrars though. I registered my domain at gandi.net, a French business with a long history acting as a domain name registrar.

I host all servers at Hetzner. In my opinion, running a sovereign service should not only take place in a datacenter in Europe. The hosting provider’s legal entity has to be EU based.

When it comes to software, I differentiate between perpetual licenses that keep the core business running, and software that is not critical for business continuity. For example, my IDE’s provider is not EU-based. Even if they discontinue service for me, it won’t affect my core business even for a day. My core business does not directly rely on perpetual software licenses but solely on free Open Source solutions.

Payment processing is the last building block. Stripe has a huge popularity, but does not have a place in an EU sovereign business. Mollie is a Dutch payment processor that works EU-wide. Of course, Visa and Mastercard are US controlled, but with WeRo and other local options, the EU is on a good path to get independent.

Some of these sub-processors are not fully EU sovereign. The website european-alternatives.eu lists Mollie as dependent on Google Cloud Platform. I guess there is a limit when it comes to practicality in full sovereignty.

Why go sovereign?

I think there’s a business- as well as a moral perspective.

No matter what embargo the US imposes on the EU or its member states, I care for business continuity. Will my subprocessors be affected? It is hard to find out. Some of them are paid by credit card. Some run on US entities based data centers. At least it will be other people’s obligation to manage.

The moral component is to collaborate with companies that are bound to the same or similar legal and tax regulations as I am.

Running a small business, it feels unfair that mainly US based companies can get away from tax-paying obligations, while I’d neither be willing to run a tax-evasion scheme nor do I have the bureaucratic capacity. For traditional business trading (selling and buying services and goods - not stock!), it makes much more sense to work with companies that could potentially hire my services in return, than with companies that are likely to hire US based personell.

When I speak about non-EU companies it might sound like I directly refer to US-based companies. This is mainly to the fact the most important players in my field, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Stripe, Cloudflare and others are all US-based.

Sovereign email

If you started thinking about where you host your emails, and if it feels wrong to have them in the hands of US-based companies, I encourage you to start self-hosting, provided you know the technical basics.

I run a service that navigates all the hard parts of self-hosting emails, so you can focus on your local setup. I’d be happy if you try it out at p25.dev.