When I was building johnie.eu, the site that shaped my thinking the most was European Alternatives. Making European digital services easier to find and compare is useful work on its own.
If you want services rooted in Europe, the hard part is often not the switch. It is finding credible options quickly.
What the site does well
European Alternatives is a directory of European digital products and services across cloud infrastructure, analytics, email, hosting, file sharing, and other SaaS categories. It also explains why those alternatives matter and documents the criteria it uses for inclusion. The About page is one of the better parts of the site because it makes the definition explicit.
Why it matters
If you are trying to replace large non-European platforms, you usually spend more time finding real options than making the switch. Search results, vendor pages, Reddit threads, and stale comparison lists do not give you a clean picture. A focused directory helps.
That matters if you care about GDPR, European legal frameworks, EU ownership, EU hosting, or a stronger European software ecosystem. You do not need to make every one of those criteria absolute for the directory to be useful.
A good place to start
If someone asked me where to start looking for European alternatives to common digital services, I would point them to European Alternatives. It is not the only resource you should use, but it is one of the best starting points I have found for SaaS, hosting, cloud services, email providers, analytics tools, and related software.