European Alternatives to US Big Tech: Cloud, Software, and Data Privacy

01 / The story

The law: what the Data Act and GDPR actually say

The EU Data Act, which generally applies from September 12, 2025, requires cloud providers to remove contractual, technical and commercial obstacles to switching. Contracts must support switching, with a standard maximum transitional period of 30 days. From January 12, 2027, switching charges are prohibited outright; until then, reduced charges may not exceed directly incurred costs. This is not a guarantee that any complex application migrates in 30 days, and it does not abolish normal service bills or your own engineering costs. [1, 2]

On the privacy side, two frameworks get conflated. The U.S. CLOUD Act clarifies that providers under U.S. jurisdiction can be compelled to produce data in their possession, custody or control regardless of where it is stored—but it does not create unrestricted government access to every account; legal process and jurisdiction still matter. [3]

The European Data Protection Board's Article 48 guidelines, adopted June 2025, hold that foreign authority demands cannot be automatically recognized in the EU, and that answering one with personal data requires a GDPR legal basis. Neither 'GDPR makes foreign demands impossible' nor 'U.S. law automatically overrides EU law' is accurate. [4]

02 / The story

Three columns to keep separate

Every 'European alternative' claim mixes three different questions. Ownership and governance: who are the parent entities and beneficial owners? Hosting and access: where are production data, backups, logs and support staff? Legal and technical control: which entity contracts with you, which jurisdictions apply, and who holds the keys? [3, 4]

The examples show why this matters. ONLYOFFICE's intellectual-property company is Latvian, but its own disclosures describe a Singapore holding structure—a registered EU address is not the whole story. Hetzner is a German company with German and Finnish infrastructure, but also U.S. and Singapore locations—provider nationality does not select your region. IONOS is majority-held by United Internet at 63.8%, so 'European provider' does not mean exclusively EU-owned. [5, 6, 7]

03 / The story

The cloud providers, with the fine print

OVHcloud, registered in Roubaix, France, offers compute, storage, managed databases and Kubernetes. Its French price list quotes a 2-vCore/8-GB instance at €0.0512 per hour excluding tax, with a highlighted monthly figure that is explicitly a 12-month commitment. [8]

Scaleway, owned by iliad Group with operations in France, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands, lists a 2-vCPU/2-GB instance at €0.00898 per hour—but egress and IPv6 are included while storage and a public IPv4 are not, so it is not comparable to an all-inclusive price. Do not adopt its 'sovereign' marketing as a legal finding. [9]

Hetzner's EU cloud families include 20 TB of monthly traffic, but other locations and families differ, and a June 15, 2026 price adjustment changed rates for new orders—historical bargain-price comparisons need rechecking. [6, 10]

STACKIT, part of the Schwarz Group, publishes a dated price list (version of October 6, 2026) quoting an 8-vCPU/32-GB server at €0.409165 per hour excluding tax, and explicitly states the list is not a binding offer. IONOS prices are usage-based with separate U.S., UK and German price lists—compare the correct contracting entity and region. [7, 11]

04 / The story

Email, office and storage

Proton is Swiss, not EU—a distinction that matters for legal analysis. It announced a nonprofit foundation as a governance mechanism in June 2024, and launched Proton Workspace on March 31, 2026 with Mail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, VPN and Pass at launch pricing of €12.99 per month on annual billing. That is a dated launch price, not a live quote. Its end-to-end encrypted Docs should be scoped to the product, not extended to a claim that all metadata or every component is inaccessible under all circumstances. [12, 13]

Tuta offers focused encrypted mail and calendar, with a free 1 GB tier and paid tiers; its family pricing figures are not verified business quotes. Nextcloud, a German company, is software you deploy—self-hosting moves patching, backups, monitoring and incident response to you or your hosting partner. 'Open source' is not 'zero operating cost.' [14, 15]

Infomaniak, also Swiss, designs and manages its own data centers and says employees hold a majority of its capital; its kSuite covers mail, drive, meetings and chat. ONLYOFFICE's document editors integrate into SaaS or on-premises setups—test file fidelity and macros on your actual documents rather than inferring Microsoft Office parity from compatibility marketing. [5, 16]

05 / The story

When switching makes sense—and when it doesn't

Consider switching when a verified legal or access requirement is unmet, the workload fits tested services, export and restore work, and total cost plus migration risk is acceptable. Start with a bounded workload and keep a rollback path.

Do not switch purely for a nationality badge if the destination fails your feature, security, recovery or integration requirements—and do not assume that keeping a U.S. provider means unlawful processing. A partial migration often outperforms an all-or-nothing move.

For migration itself, test what matters: identity and access policies, database extensions, object-storage API behavior and restore procedures for cloud; shared mailboxes, archives, DNS records and rollback for email; representative spreadsheets, macros and tracked changes for office suites. The Data Act's switching-charge prohibition arriving on January 12, 2027 will help—but it will not do the engineering for you. [1]