Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!
Added my company (https://mailpace.com) - I’m looking forward to a resurgence of innovation in European tech companies, the talent and education here is amazing, we just need to improve our investment and start treating tech with as much respect as we give to law, finance and other “prestigious” career paths here
I know that it's not in the cards (yet), but I hope the UK and the EU can be a single market again (even if the UK does not rejoin the EU). Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible! We love the UK and you are part of the European family :hugs:.
Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.
It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.
Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community. Progress was gradual, sure, but it was real. Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.
Now, though, it’s all about "national sovereignty" and "independence" as if going it alone could ever match the strength of interdependence.
The trust we built feels shattered and TBH it’s hard to imagine it being rebuilt anytime soon, if ever.
If you are advocating for European products, I would expect you to use Plausible or similar products instead of Google Analytics. This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
> This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
That isn't actually true (or at least is only allowed in the "it's a small enough violation of the law that the enforcers have bigger fish to fry" sense).
Cookie banners are required to gather informed consent, which is relevant for two EU legislations: the ePD, which requires it to access or store _any_ data from terminal equipment, and the GDPR which requires it for personally identifiable data. Most people only consider the latter, but the former is a much bigger hurdle to pass.
Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment. That was made very explicitly clear in a 2023 guideline from the EDPB[1].
The one saving grace for Plausible is that the ePD is a Directive, so the actual implementation into law differs by Member country. The claim might be true for some EU countries, but certainly isn't for all.
I've written a longer analysis of this in the context of Plausible for anyone interested[2] (although it might be worth skipping the first section, to get to the meat of the issue).
folks mess "cookie banner" with "consent banner". many people do conflate them, but in some jurisdictions (e.g., the EU under GDPR), a "cookie banner" typically includes a consent mechanism.
if you're tracking users for analytics using cookies, fingerprinting, or any other method that identifies them (even probabilistically), you generally need explicit consent under GDPR and similar privacy laws. The key point is that it's not just about cookies; any persistent tracking requires consent.
Great to see a directory like this starting to include physical products. I'd be interested in having some extra datapoints to help with decision making:
- How much of the product/company's supply chain is in EU (to get an idea of just how European the product is, is it made here or abroad)
- Some way to show if the company is paying "fair" tax in EU (or are profits shifted abroad)
These are difficult datapoints to get, but I wonder if there can be some sort of "community notes" where this data can be crowd sourced and updated on the directory.
Today I learned that DeepL was German. It's hands down the best Japanese to English translator (according to my Japanese coworkers) and I was surprised how many used it in office. (never used it myself as a trilingual)
While i'm from EU and I support the movement, after I looked over some numbers it is hard to ditch something like Amazon. 1st thing for me are the prices and monthly I can save at least 100 Euros just from shopping on deals. Second Amazon employs 150k people across EU and this is not a low number (how about them?).
Yes we need alternatives but the rich EU guys also have to invest some. Sometimes I feel that average Joe needs to support the "movement" while rich just mid their own business.
Same goes also with local producers: "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!"
Sorry, I'm not in a position to just spend more just because...
Amazon is probably the easiest for me to ditch. It's not really that much cheaper, and when you include shipping it's certainly not cheaper. Shipping times are horrible, search is broken, half of everything is a scam and again, it's not that much cheaper, if at at all.
I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.
> "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!"
But it isn't the same thing. Locally grown food tends to taste much better and have higher nutritional value.
Plus, something I didn't expect when I started buying most of my food from my local farmer's market-- these farmers are like friends. Every meal I sit down to eat, I have a direct connection to it's source. Of course I go to "grocery stores" for staples, and it always feels so weird, empty, fake.
I have stopped using Amazon all together >1 year ago. Prime Video is as shitty as it gets and most stuff ordered on Amazon is Chinese shovelware in the same rankings as Temu. I give exactly zero shit about same day delivery in 99,99% of the cases.
Amazon shines in customer support though.
Search & categorization is entirely broken, the webshop experience is absolutely abysmal. Just order from better online stores. In Germany, I found these (surprisingly ok):
Then, buying specialized stuff on the actual website is often a decent experience. Just price hunt on sites like Idealo (attention though, Axel Springer!) and proceed to the specific stores from there.
I explicitly avoided mentioning Otto as alternative to Amazon although it is technically the closest. While their shop is ok, prices and customer experience are horrifyingly bad (especially returns and delivery). For an unbiased view:
In Switzerland amazon never bothered to enter the market, so local competition filled the gap, and it created much better service while doing it.
I speak specifically about galaxus/digitec which often have more and more available stock than actual amazon in EU, any category has 1000s of items, much better organized and findable. Plus it has many great features not seen or usable elsewhere - directly showing evolution of price across the time, reviews which are absolutely not gamed due to tiny market, so I can rely on them very well (while on amazon its tricky at best). You can easily buy used versions of same item at fraction of the price, its showed at top of each product page.
Their guarantee handling is stellar. And for stuff in stock its next day delivery.
Your arguments ignore externalities. You aren't saving 100 EUR. You pay for it in many other ways. There's no such thing as free lunch, as the saying goes. They're just hijacking your short-term thinking.
Similar here. It doesnt have to be all or nothing. Im in the u.s. and have a cool local co-op. So i buy most commodities at the cheapest grocery store and then some fancy stuff at the co-op to help them stay afloat and support local farmers. It's probably enough if everyone spends to their ability and maybe pushes themselves a little too.
In the summer we also have farners markets and thise are about the same price as the cheapest stores so i switch to them for fruits and veggies.
Using price comparison services here in Sweden I almost never see a better deal on Amazon, at best they have the exact same price as the cheapest deal, seems to be their MO here to check the pricing data from competitors and set their prices exactly the same as the cheapest on offer at the time.
Personally I find myself reevaluating the choices I made for my personal data at the beginning of the cloud era.
Back then, one of the arguments I convinced myself with was that the cloud behemoths had so much to lose on integrity breach that it would just not happen.
It didn’t even occur to me at the time that my data being held hostage in some geopolitical gameplay should be part of the risk assessment.
I'm seriously considering self-hosting as an alternative, in combination with regional cloud services.
Maybe we have an Internet renaissance on our hands, taking it back to its decentralized nature?
Such a shame to see Gitlab go for gold in America rather than staying with its European basis. While Codeberg is absolutely fine in itself, I think Gitlab is a much better offering for many companies.
Breakups are painful. A great battle is afoot on the "data
sovereignty" ground, for sure.
It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent
need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American
companies.
At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people
accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply
enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled
creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic
about relocating away from US BigTech.
It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US
BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned
with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.
Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are
running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that
seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.
Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly
having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end
encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.
For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC
where they are not strictly NTK.
> It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism.
It's amazing to see people say things like this as if the US was any different before. Trump just put an honest face on fascism and imperialism. Before, they were exercised in a 'polite', polished manner. Even by Obama who stomped down the Occupy Wall Street.
I already pointed it out in another thread about this exact website: Go and search for "keyboard", what's the first search result? Logitech, a company that makes their products almost exclusively in china. There's nothing european about this.
"Yeah but it's a european company so!" yeah i don't care. It's not an european product. It's a chinese product. I don't care if the CEO lives in europe or it has a German flag on the cover or whatever - if the product is made in china, it's not an european product.
Also this is like the 5th time i see this here, which makes me wonder if this is some sort of organic-looking promotional campaign.
The problem with buying European is that shipping between countries is nightmarishly expensive.
If Brussels wants to try something useful - instead of bottle caps create a proper shipping network that can ship from Malaga to Vilinus in 2 days for 0.5 euro per KG. It is not that we don't have national postal companies. It is absurd to buy something for 15 euro in italy and pay 30 euro shipping to romania.
International freight shipping is incredibly cheap per kilogram (1 TEU/20ft shipping container costs about 6000 euros to ship, with a max eeight of about 28900kg, so about 20 cents per kg), at least by sea and rivers. Many of the costs come from the moment products arrive on land. Land-locked countries and countries with major population centers far away from docks and freight terminals pay the price.
Shipping individual packages within a short amount of time costs money. The solution is to do what companies like Amazon and AliExpress do: stock up products in many different companies in bulk so that packages can be dispatched locally for much cheaper.
Many of the shipping routes between countries go by plane rather than by boat, filling up unused weight in passenger planes or being shipped in bulk by passenger planes. Planes are a lot more expensive, especially by weight, but you'll get your products within days rather than weeks.
If you're a business importing goods in bulk, you'll have to deal with weeks or even months of delays between ordering and delivery, but international cargo delivery per product is essentially free unless you ship things like cars.
Things will become cheaper as warehouses are spread wider and transport legs get optimized more. Currently, there aren't many companies shipping from Italy to Romania, so there aren't many boats or trains making the journey, and shipping is expensive. When demand grows, more availability will follow, and prices will drop eventually.
I understand that for you cheaper shipping options are important, but other people might find other things important. The EU has the capability to address multiple issues at a moment, so it should not be "instead of doing <my favorite thing to make fun of>". btw, shipping to Romania is expensive because infrastructure is still quite bad and the reliability of the national post is quite low.
PS: Bottle caps that stay attached to the bottles is great!
A similar product is Boycat - https://boycat.io. AFAIK they are adding a campaign focused on the US since the US started adding tarifs everywhere. Would love to see them adding something for the EU side of things.
In Canada, there's a big push for buying Canadian given the Trump trade war, and especially avoiding products from the US. A kitchen store I went into over the weekend had little red maple leaf stamps on the price tags of Canadian products and the provincial liquor store in Ontario has pulled US products from shelves (though that's more of a marketing stunt by the populist Premier). Many Canadian-owned businesses have added logos at the top of their webpages (I noticed Canada Computers and Memory Express over the last few days, as I was browsing for graphics cards).
The European alternative was sold to--sorry, merged into--Mastercard and rebranded to Maestro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europay_International. It was the E in EMV. So friendly were European and American relations in the past that it was allowed to happen.
I don't think there's such a thing yet for payment terminals. Local alternatives all seem to have died off because banks in other countries didn't support them.
I hope the new attempt you linked will make a difference. This time, international support seems to be at the basis of the system. Widespread integration of a unified form of iDeal/Bancontact/Payconiq could easily replace the need for American style credit card forms across Europe.
Technology-wise this is a solved problem. Uses open-source software too. All the EU needs to do is say 'self-custody is fine, please use a EUR-based stable coin for payments EU-wide'. The market will do the rest (the stable-coin, payment terminals, integrations with cash registers, DeFi forex for places where EUR is not used, etc.).
I think this is useful more than just actual Europeans.
I'm an American, and my wife and I have been looking at "Made in…" labels on our products for decades. Not as a geopolitical protest; just as routine intellectual curiosity.
Over the last five years or so, we've noticed a significant shift in the locations listed on the things we buy. A lot of what we buy used to read "Made in China" (and before that shift, "Made in Mexico") but these days more and more of it is from Europe.
Sometimes it's the vague "Made in the EU," which I assume means Turkey or Romania or some other less-fashionable quarter. But increasingly, it's France and Switzerland, and the U.K.
(My personal, completely unscientific guess is that the next shift in manufacturing will be to Africa. Lots of cheap labor close to raw materials and access to both hemispheres by sea.)
Unfortunately, data on Cypriot companies is quite limited.
There are far more products built on the island than what is officially listed.
Speaking as a founder of a CY-based company, SpatialChat
[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|1 year ago|reply
Added my company (https://mailpace.com) - I’m looking forward to a resurgence of innovation in European tech companies, the talent and education here is amazing, we just need to improve our investment and start treating tech with as much respect as we give to law, finance and other “prestigious” career paths here
[+] [-] microtonal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Separo|1 year ago|reply
Always.
hug
[+] [-] noneeeed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|1 year ago|reply
We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] matt-p|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveMcMartin|1 year ago|reply
Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community. Progress was gradual, sure, but it was real. Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.
Now, though, it’s all about "national sovereignty" and "independence" as if going it alone could ever match the strength of interdependence.
The trust we built feels shattered and TBH it’s hard to imagine it being rebuilt anytime soon, if ever.
[+] [-] mertbio|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hans_castorp|1 year ago|reply
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...
[+] [-] birjolaxew|1 year ago|reply
That isn't actually true (or at least is only allowed in the "it's a small enough violation of the law that the enforcers have bigger fish to fry" sense).
Cookie banners are required to gather informed consent, which is relevant for two EU legislations: the ePD, which requires it to access or store _any_ data from terminal equipment, and the GDPR which requires it for personally identifiable data. Most people only consider the latter, but the former is a much bigger hurdle to pass.
Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment. That was made very explicitly clear in a 2023 guideline from the EDPB[1].
The one saving grace for Plausible is that the ePD is a Directive, so the actual implementation into law differs by Member country. The claim might be true for some EU countries, but certainly isn't for all.
I've written a longer analysis of this in the context of Plausible for anyone interested[2] (although it might be worth skipping the first section, to get to the meat of the issue).
[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid... [2] https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compl...
[+] [-] risyachka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zkid18|1 year ago|reply
if you're tracking users for analytics using cookies, fingerprinting, or any other method that identifies them (even probabilistically), you generally need explicit consent under GDPR and similar privacy laws. The key point is that it's not just about cookies; any persistent tracking requires consent.
[+] [-] robin_reala|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vanrohan|1 year ago|reply
- How much of the product/company's supply chain is in EU (to get an idea of just how European the product is, is it made here or abroad)
- Some way to show if the company is paying "fair" tax in EU (or are profits shifted abroad)
These are difficult datapoints to get, but I wonder if there can be some sort of "community notes" where this data can be crowd sourced and updated on the directory.
[+] [-] NalNezumi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] batrat|1 year ago|reply
While i'm from EU and I support the movement, after I looked over some numbers it is hard to ditch something like Amazon. 1st thing for me are the prices and monthly I can save at least 100 Euros just from shopping on deals. Second Amazon employs 150k people across EU and this is not a low number (how about them?).
Yes we need alternatives but the rich EU guys also have to invest some. Sometimes I feel that average Joe needs to support the "movement" while rich just mid their own business.
Same goes also with local producers: "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!" Sorry, I'm not in a position to just spend more just because...
[+] [-] mrweasel|1 year ago|reply
I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.
[+] [-] fads_go|1 year ago|reply
But it isn't the same thing. Locally grown food tends to taste much better and have higher nutritional value.
Plus, something I didn't expect when I started buying most of my food from my local farmer's market-- these farmers are like friends. Every meal I sit down to eat, I have a direct connection to it's source. Of course I go to "grocery stores" for staples, and it always feels so weird, empty, fake.
[+] [-] neuronic|1 year ago|reply
Amazon shines in customer support though.
Search & categorization is entirely broken, the webshop experience is absolutely abysmal. Just order from better online stores. In Germany, I found these (surprisingly ok):
- Kaufland --> https://www.kaufland.de
- Galaxus Deutschland --> https://www.galaxus.de
- Lidl --> https://www.lidl.de (Schwarz IT is building a European Cloud btw!)
- ShopApotheke --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/
- Home24 --> https://www.home24.de/
Then, buying specialized stuff on the actual website is often a decent experience. Just price hunt on sites like Idealo (attention though, Axel Springer!) and proceed to the specific stores from there.
https://www.idealo.de/ --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/
I explicitly avoided mentioning Otto as alternative to Amazon although it is technically the closest. While their shop is ok, prices and customer experience are horrifyingly bad (especially returns and delivery). For an unbiased view:
https://www.otto.de/
[+] [-] jajko|1 year ago|reply
I speak specifically about galaxus/digitec which often have more and more available stock than actual amazon in EU, any category has 1000s of items, much better organized and findable. Plus it has many great features not seen or usable elsewhere - directly showing evolution of price across the time, reviews which are absolutely not gamed due to tiny market, so I can rely on them very well (while on amazon its tricky at best). You can easily buy used versions of same item at fraction of the price, its showed at top of each product page.
Their guarantee handling is stellar. And for stuff in stock its next day delivery.
[+] [-] guerrilla|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chillingeffect|1 year ago|reply
In the summer we also have farners markets and thise are about the same price as the cheapest stores so i switch to them for fruits and veggies.
[+] [-] piva00|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordahl|1 year ago|reply
Back then, one of the arguments I convinced myself with was that the cloud behemoths had so much to lose on integrity breach that it would just not happen.
It didn’t even occur to me at the time that my data being held hostage in some geopolitical gameplay should be part of the risk assessment.
I'm seriously considering self-hosting as an alternative, in combination with regional cloud services.
Maybe we have an Internet renaissance on our hands, taking it back to its decentralized nature?
[+] [-] mentalgear|1 year ago|reply
(btw: codeberg is the European alternative to Github)
[+] [-] jeroenhd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] h1fra|1 year ago|reply
Also it seems to be missing some techs company: pigment, aircall, contentsquare (but not sure if it's a mistake)
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|1 year ago|reply
It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American companies.
At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic about relocating away from US BigTech.
It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.
Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.
Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.
For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC where they are not strictly NTK.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/cloud-native-talk/
[+] [-] dumbledoren|1 year ago|reply
It's amazing to see people say things like this as if the US was any different before. Trump just put an honest face on fascism and imperialism. Before, they were exercised in a 'polite', polished manner. Even by Obama who stomped down the Occupy Wall Street.
[+] [-] olivier-tille|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mogall|1 year ago|reply
I already pointed it out in another thread about this exact website: Go and search for "keyboard", what's the first search result? Logitech, a company that makes their products almost exclusively in china. There's nothing european about this.
"Yeah but it's a european company so!" yeah i don't care. It's not an european product. It's a chinese product. I don't care if the CEO lives in europe or it has a German flag on the cover or whatever - if the product is made in china, it's not an european product.
Also this is like the 5th time i see this here, which makes me wonder if this is some sort of organic-looking promotional campaign.
[+] [-] ReptileMan|1 year ago|reply
If Brussels wants to try something useful - instead of bottle caps create a proper shipping network that can ship from Malaga to Vilinus in 2 days for 0.5 euro per KG. It is not that we don't have national postal companies. It is absurd to buy something for 15 euro in italy and pay 30 euro shipping to romania.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|1 year ago|reply
Shipping individual packages within a short amount of time costs money. The solution is to do what companies like Amazon and AliExpress do: stock up products in many different companies in bulk so that packages can be dispatched locally for much cheaper.
Many of the shipping routes between countries go by plane rather than by boat, filling up unused weight in passenger planes or being shipped in bulk by passenger planes. Planes are a lot more expensive, especially by weight, but you'll get your products within days rather than weeks.
If you're a business importing goods in bulk, you'll have to deal with weeks or even months of delays between ordering and delivery, but international cargo delivery per product is essentially free unless you ship things like cars.
Things will become cheaper as warehouses are spread wider and transport legs get optimized more. Currently, there aren't many companies shipping from Italy to Romania, so there aren't many boats or trains making the journey, and shipping is expensive. When demand grows, more availability will follow, and prices will drop eventually.
[+] [-] tdrz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|1 year ago|reply
Not a shill, just a happy customer.
[+] [-] tdrz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Separo|1 year ago|reply
{hug emoji}
[+] [-] pbiggar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xTJ|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tdrz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackFly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|1 year ago|reply
I hope the new attempt you linked will make a difference. This time, international support seems to be at the basis of the system. Widespread integration of a unified form of iDeal/Bancontact/Payconiq could easily replace the need for American style credit card forms across Europe.
[+] [-] jgilias|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jycr753|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|1 year ago|reply
I'm an American, and my wife and I have been looking at "Made in…" labels on our products for decades. Not as a geopolitical protest; just as routine intellectual curiosity.
Over the last five years or so, we've noticed a significant shift in the locations listed on the things we buy. A lot of what we buy used to read "Made in China" (and before that shift, "Made in Mexico") but these days more and more of it is from Europe.
Sometimes it's the vague "Made in the EU," which I assume means Turkey or Romania or some other less-fashionable quarter. But increasingly, it's France and Switzerland, and the U.K.
(My personal, completely unscientific guess is that the next shift in manufacturing will be to Africa. Lots of cheap labor close to raw materials and access to both hemispheres by sea.)
[+] [-] tacker2000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zkid18|1 year ago|reply