I want to build European software for Europeans. On European infrastructure. Independent. And right now, that means fighting through every layer myself—because the environment to do this does not exist yet.
I am building two products in Germany, both for the European market. And finding the right infrastructure is like furnishing a house where IKEA does not exist—every piece comes from a different shop, in a different city, with a different return policy.
In the US, you spin up a startup and the ecosystem hands you everything: Vercel for hosting, Auth0 for login, Stripe for payments, SendGrid for email, Sentry for errors. Onboarding: “Connect your GitHub repo.” Done. “Copy this snippet.” Done. “Paste our prompt into your favourite coding tool.” Done. It simply works. Free tiers that let you throw ten ideas at the wall without spending a cent.
In Europe? You start Googling.
The Real Gap
It is not that the components do not exist. Hetzner is cheaper than AWS. Mollie covers more EU payment methods than Stripe. Ory is more flexible than Auth0. The pieces are there.
The gap is the environment. No funding culture that lets you burn through ten ideas at zero cost until one sticks. No ecosystem that wires everything together with one click. Software that works but feels soulless—built to spec, not built to love. And when you find something that sounds European, like my domain host “Host Europe”, it turns out they were acquired by GoDaddy years ago. The “European” provider was US-owned with none of the convenience.
What Europe needs is good software. Good funding. And an environment where you can move fast—rotate ideas, try ten things, kill nine, ship the one that works.
This Is Part 0
I am documenting the entire journey. Auth, hosting, payments—each layer its own story. What works, what does not, what I would do differently. A field journal called Rohbau—because that is what the European software stack is right now: a shell with solid walls, waiting for someone to do the interior.
Next: how I chose between a €70/month European auth provider and a free American one—and why the answer was not obvious.
The components exist. The environment does not. Every founder who documents the path makes it shorter for the next one.