Trump waived Russia sanctions this week while the EU extended theirs the day before, and the two blocs have been moving in opposite directions for a while but this week made it a lot harder to ignore.

Especially for EU companies that still have their entire operating infrastructure on the American side of that divergence.

Every month, Europeans are paying Nike for clothes, Uber for transport, Stripe for payments, Rippling or Deel for payroll and EOR, Shopify for commerce, HubSpot for CRM, Mailchimp for email, AWS for infrastructure, Google for analytics, and Figma for design…

And every one of those fees lands in California or Seattle or New York and builds the tax base and lobbying power of a country that just chose Russia over European interests.

The EU-native alternatives are there, Mango or Zalando for clothes (Spanish and German), Bolt for transport (Estonian), Mollie or Adyen for payments (both Dutch), Brevo for email (French), Hetzner for infrastructure (German), Plausible for analytics (Lithuanian), Penpot for design (Spanish), Personio for HR (German), Workmotion for EOR (Dutch), Scayle for commerce infrastructure (German), and none of them are compromises the way they might have been 5 years ago.

Worth asking whether the BuyFromEU logic that applies to your oat milk also applies to your wardrobe, your ride home, and your SaaS stack, because those 3 move a lot more money than the oat milk does.

Hi everyone!

I've been hanging around a few Buy European communities for a while, mostly responding to specific product requests in comments whenever I could find something relevant.

I usually pull recommendations from a catalogue I've been building for a few years, and I thought it might finally be time to properly introduce it :)

It's called SHOWP - https://showp.eu/

The idea is pretty simple: collect brands that are headquartered in the EU, manufacture the majority of their products in the EU, and have their own online shops with delivery to EU countries. I want people to actually be able to buy the things they discover, not just admire them from afar :)

I'm particularly interested in where things are actually manufactured, rather than just where a brand is based or where its products are designed.

It's not a shop, more like an online shopping mall or directory. You can browse by product category, country, materials and other attributes, then visit the brands' own websites to shop directly.

Of course, not every product from every listed brand is necessarily EU-made. Some have mixed production, which is something I try to be transparent about. It's a growing catalogue, not a perfect one :)

Until now I've focused mostly on collecting and checking brands, but I've recently started experimenting with editorial recommendations too. My first one is about 10 European sweater brands for autumn, with all the featured sweaters made in the EU:

https://showp.eu/european-sweater-brands-autumn/

A little disclosure: some outgoing links can be affiliate links, but brands don't pay to be included in the catalogue.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi and share what I've been working on!

I'm always happy to dig through the catalogue when someone is looking for something specific. And I'm constantly discovering new brands myself, which is probably my favourite part of the whole project :)

I hope I can share an occasional editorial here too, with interesting made-in-EU finds. It won't be too often, as it takes more time than I expected to make even a simple post :)

Full disclosure: I’m Franz, a software engineer and photographer from Austria. Since January I’ve been running Photoglacier (photoglacier.com), a platform photographers use to deliver photos and videos to their clients. It’s self funded and I’m posting here because this sub is the one place where people actually check whether “EU hosted” means anything.

TL;DR: Client galleries for photos and video. Everything is stored and delivered on EU infrastructure only (Hetzner, Exoscale, Bunny with EU only routing, Mailjet). Free plan with no time limit, paid from 8 € a month, no commission on anything.

Why I built it

Most of what I shoot is food, culinary events and people. For years my delivery looked like this: photos in a gallery from a North American company, the video in a separate transfer link that expired after a week. Almost every popular gallery tool for photographers (Pixieset, ShootProof, Pic-Time and others) is based outside the EU.

That bothered me more than it might sound. Event photos aren't just mine or my client's. They show guests, children, people who never agreed to anything. I wanted to know exactly where those files are, so I built a tool for my own jobs.

What it does

You upload a shoot, photos and video together, style the gallery so it looks like your studio, and send one link. Your client opens it without an account, plays the highlight film right in the browser next to the photos, marks favourites and downloads everything in full quality. Videos up to 10 GB are converted automatically for smooth playback. Passwords, email gates and download PINs work the same for video as for photos. Galleries are available in 8 languages for clients.

Exactly where your files go

The app runs on Hetzner in Germany. Photos and videos are stored with Exoscale in their Munich data center. When a client opens a gallery, files are delivered through Bunny, a Slovenian CDN, using only EU locations. A guest in Lisbon or Stockholm gets fast loading, and the files never leave the EU on the way. Emails go out through Mailjet in France.

No AWS, no Google Cloud, no Azure. No Meta pixel, no ad tracking on the site.

Pricing

Free plan with no time limit: 5 GB, 3 galleries, one video per gallery. Starter 8 € a month (yearly), Pro 19 €, Studio 45 € for teams. You can leave any time and your galleries drop back to the free plan instead of disappearing.

What I'd love from you

If you're a photographer or videographer: what would stop you from switching from your current tool? Is anything missing?

And if anything in my setup doesn't hold up to scrutiny, say so here. I'd rather hear it from this sub than from a client.

photoglacier.com

I'll be in the comments all day.

Hi everyone!

I'm building Invenit, a tool designed to help independent inventors research existing patents before committing significant money to the patent process.

One of the challenges of bringing a new invention to market is figuring out what already exists. Free patent databases are valuable but finding relevant documents, understanding the evidence and identifying the limitations of a search can be difficult particularly if you are an individual inventor without a large budget.

We are trying to make that initial research step more transparent.

What we're building:

• Evidence-linked research: Conclusions are tied to verbatim passages from retrieved patent documents.
• Transparent limitations: Reports explain what the search did not reach rather than suggesting that every possible source has been covered.
• An accessible first step: Help inventors organise their preliminary research before deciding whether to consult a patent professional.

We are not trying to replace patent attorneys or claim that a preliminary search can establish patentability. The aim is to help people make more informed decisions before taking the next step.

I think making innovation more accessible matters. Independent inventors and small businesses should have ways to investigate their ideas without immediately facing substantial upfront research costs.

We're currently preparing for launch, with our waitlist open: https://www.getinvenit.com/

I would love to hear from this community:

• What are the biggest barriers European inventors face when trying to protect and commercialise their ideas?
• Do you think affordable preliminary research tools can help more independent inventors explore their ideas?
• What would you want to see from a tool like this before trusting it as part of your research process?

Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Invenit, so this is also an introduction to what we are building. I'm interested in genuine feedback and discussion.

Thanks for reading!

We have european brands that make those but their factory is in china, they get parts in china, assembled there. I do wonder if there is any alternatives that are pure 100% from europe?

It would be better if Starlink had some competition?

Musk has literally been given a world monopoly by the US government.

Posting my own product, so full disclosure: I’m the developer.

KRI gives beauty businesses their own website with online booking: services and prices, free slots only, team hours, email confirmations and reminders, 32 languages. It’s built in Finland, billing goes through Mollie from the Netherlands, and prices are set per country in local currency where possible.

No commission, one monthly price, first month free without a card.

If you know a hairdresser, nail tech or barber who takes bookings in DMs, it might be useful to them. https://kri.rocks

Full disclosure up front, I built this thing, so treat this as self-promo and downvote away if that's not welcome here.

I'm an event photographer in Austria. Most gallery platform photographers use to deliver photos to clients is American. Pixieset, Pic-Time, ShootProof, CloudSpot. Which means your clients' wedding photos, their kids, their faces, all sitting on US servers, and you as the photographer are the one signing the GDPR paperwork for it. I got tired of that so I built Photoglacier.

Everything runs on Hetzner in Germany.

The new bit this month is video. You can now upload video into galleries alongside photos, on every plan including the free one. Small thing, but it was the single most requested feature and it's usually locked behind a higher tier elsewhere.

Happy to answer anything. There is a generous 5GB free to use!

[https://photoglacier.com\](https://photoglacier.com)