About
Why this site exists.
A working answer to a simple question: how much of a real website can you run on European infrastructure today?
More than I expected. Enough to ship. Enough to make the habit worth building.
The honest part
I work as Head of Engineering, and most of my daily stack still comes from the US. Anthropic for Claude. OpenAI for GPT. Google for Gemini. AWS under most of it. The setup works, and I use those tools every week.
What bothered me was something simpler: I could not name solid EU replacements without stopping to think. That is a weak position if you care about resilience, leverage, or where your money lands.
I built this site to answer the question with something concrete. How far can you get today if you choose European infrastructure on purpose?
The optimistic part
Pretty far, it turns out.
Mistral writes good code. Bunny serves the site from European POPs. Codeberg hosts the source. Inleed handles the domain. Umami gives me traffic numbers without dropping a cookie.
These services do not win every feature comparison. They do enough. They improve fast. They get better when customers use them and say what is missing.
That is the bet behind this site. A stronger European stack will not appear because people ask for it. It grows when builders choose it, pay for it, and report what breaks.
What this site is
This is a real site on the public internet. I write on it, deploy it, break it, fix it, and pay for the services behind it.
That matters more than a principles page. One production workload teaches you more than ten opinion threads.
What this site isn't
This page makes a narrow claim. Europe already has enough infrastructure to host, ship, and maintain a real website. The stack still has gaps, and I still have one US service left in the chain.
I am not chasing purity. I am trying to build a habit: check the European option first, and use it when it clears the bar.
About me
I am Johnie Hjelm. I have spent 17 years in tech, I work as Head of Engineering, and I founded Crip in Tech.
I care about products, teams, and the systems that decide who gets to build. A longer bio lives at johnie.se/about.
The rule
Pick the European option when it clears the bar.
I do not pick tools because they carry an EU flag. I pick them when they handle the job, fit the budget, and let me sleep after deploys. European ownership or hosting breaks the tie.
That rule keeps the experiment honest. If an EU service cannot do the work yet, I say so. If it can, I use it.
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