My software stack to build products
My European software radar: the complete list of software (hosting, payment, monitoring) that I use or recommend to launch a product in Europe.
I would like to list here the software that I use or recommend to create products. I have an approach that deliberately aims to support the European market, so I prioritize, in order:
- European software
- Non-US open source software (self hosting)
- US open source software
- Non-US software
- US and Chinese software.
(Despite this, you will see that I have 14 28% US software)
Here I only talk about the basic building blocks for creating a company, support software, observability, emailing, payment, etc…
Hosting
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Scaleway | French | S3 storage |
| Hetzner | German | Dedicated machine to run Coolify. |
| Coolify | Hungary | PAAS I'm thinking of switching to Scaleway which is more suited to infrastructure as code |
| Rickub | FR | Git hosting |
Payment
Criteria: Merchant of record, metered billing, coupons, connect
| Actor | Country | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | US | Sorry… For now I haven't been able to get around it |
Alternatives that I couldn't test:
| creem.io | Estonia | Missing metered billing and connect part |
| Mollie | Netherlands | All pricing management and metered billing has to be done manually |
| Paddle | UK | no Stripe Connect equivalent |
Analytics
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Openpanel | Sweden | Web and product analytics |
DNS - CDN
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Bunny.net | Slovenia | DNS, CDN, WAF, Optimization, Edge |
Support
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Fernand | France | Help desk |
alternative often cited: Crisp (France)
Monitoring - logging - observability
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Phare.io | Estonia | uptime |
| Sentry | US | error tracking (currently switching to bugsink) |
Alternatives currently being evaluated to replace Sentry:
| BugSink | Self hosted (Europe) | error tracking |
| OpenObserve | Self hosted (US) | Observability |
Feedbacks
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Fider | Open source (country ?) | Feedback, changelog, roadmap |
European Alternatives: upvoty (FR), LiteFeedback (FR), Feedfast (RO),
Emails
| Actor | Country | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Scaleway TEM | France | Transactional emails |
| AWS | US | Marketing emails |
No European actor allows me to send marketing emails at AWS prices. It's on average x10 on prices, which is totally prohibitive.
Company blog
| Actor | Country |
|---|---|
| Writizzy | France |
Well yes, of course I use my own product, what did you think I was going to put? :)
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