One Week to Leave Big Tech: A Retrospective on Replacing 17 US Tech Dependencies

A One-Week "De-Americanization" Migration

In the summer of 2025, startup team fluado set a goal while building their product: minimize reliance on US tech giants. But with company registration and product development demanding constant attention, that goal kept getting deprioritized. The team ultimately started with the familiar Google Cloud — reluctantly, but it meant one less thing to worry about.

A year later, they found themselves deeper than ever into US services: Cloudflare, GCP, Supabase, GitHub, Slack, Google Workspace — the full lineup. So at the end of August, the team made a firm decision to migrate away from the US tech stack. What surprised even the author: the bulk of the migration was done in a single week.

The post sparked considerable discussion on Reddit, zeroing in on a topic increasingly on the minds of European developers: tech sovereignty and vendor diversification.

What They Moved Away From — and What They Moved To

The author laid out the migration clearly:

OUT:

• Google Cloud / Cloud Run
• GitHub
• Supabase Cloud
• Firebase
• Cloudflare
• Slack

IN:

• Hetzner (established German cloud and bare-metal provider)
• Forgejo (open-source self-hosted GitHub alternative, a community fork of Gitea)
• Self-hosted Supabase
• Scaleway (French cloud provider)
• Mattermost (open-source self-hosted Slack alternative)

A clear philosophy runs through this list: use European providers where possible, and self-host core components where you can. Hetzner and Scaleway are mature cloud vendors from Germany and France respectively, with solid reputations and competitive pricing. Forgejo and Mattermost represent proven open-source projects as credible replacements for commercial SaaS.

The author made one key assertion: regardless of whether you're running on GCP, AWS, or Azure, most of what a team needs can be found in European or self-hostable alternatives. That's the central argument of the post — and its most compelling point. Migration isn't idealistic hand-waving; it's an engineering decision with a concrete execution path.

Forgejo is a hard fork of Gitea, born in late 2022 out of community dissatisfaction with Gitea's corporate direction. It's fully compatible with Gitea's data format and API, and supports most GitHub workflow conventions (including Actions CI/CD syntax), meaning existing workflow scripts typically need minimal or no changes when migrating from GitHub. Forgejo is maintained by Codeberg, a European free software nonprofit, and is one of the most recommended self-hosted Git solutions in the European developer community.

Self-hosted Supabase deserves a separate mention: Supabase is itself an open-source project (Apache 2.0), with official Docker Compose deployment support. This means teams can run an instance on their own servers with nearly identical functionality to Supabase Cloud — including PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage, and Edge Functions. Migration costs are primarily in environment setup and operational overhead, not code-level refactoring.

Why This Kind of Migration Matters

The "reduce US Big Tech dependency" movement has gained significant momentum in European developer communities over the past year or two. The drivers are multifaceted:

Data sovereignty and compliance. Europe's data localization and GDPR requirements are tightening. Keeping critical data and infrastructure with providers under EU jurisdiction meaningfully reduces compliance uncertainty.

Vendor lock-in risk. Deep integration with a single ecosystem — especially all-in-one platforms like Firebase or Supabase Cloud — causes migration costs to compound exponentially over time. The author's own experience illustrates this perfectly: from "one less thing to worry about" to "deeper than ever into US services" is the classic lock-in trajectory.

Maturing open-source and self-hosted options. The existence of Forgejo, Mattermost, and self-hosted Supabase means the core developer collaboration toolchain can now operate independently of commercial SaaS. That wasn't easy to say a few years ago.

It's worth noting the author's own surprise at the pace — what they expected to be a long campaign turned out to be mostly done in a week. That's a strong signal that the ecosystem completeness and migration-friendliness of open-source and European alternatives has reached a genuinely usable level.

GDPR and data localization have direct, practical implications for technology decisions. Under GDPR Articles 44–49, transferring EU residents' data to "third countries" (i.e., outside the EU, including the US) requires an adequacy decision, Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), or another approved mechanism. While the EU-US Data Privacy Framework passed in 2023 simplified the compliance path somewhat, the European Court of Justice has previously struck down two similar agreements (Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield), leaving a persistent window of legal uncertainty for US-provider dependencies. Keeping infrastructure and data within EU jurisdiction is fundamentally an engineering approach to eliminating that uncertainty — not just a political stance.

The Problems That Remain Unsolved

The author doesn't sugarcoat the migration. Several "hard bones" are explicitly listed:

Google Workspace hasn't been replaced. Finding a European alternative to email, docs, and calendar with equivalent experience and a smooth migration path is genuinely difficult.

Coding agents. Almost every mainstream AI coding assistant comes from a US company. European providers have no mature direct alternatives in this space — the most realistic gap in "de-Americanizing" the AI toolchain.

Let's Encrypt has no equivalent. The author admits they couldn't find a European certificate authority that works as a drop-in replacement. A free, automated, universally trusted certificate service simply has no peer option in the near term.

These "open items" are actually more informative than the completed parts — they precisely map the current capability boundaries of the European tech ecosystem: infrastructure, code hosting, and collaboration tools are largely replaceable, but office suites, AI tools, and foundational public services (like certificate issuance) remain heavily dependent on US-dominated ecosystems.

Let's Encrypt's unique position requires some context. Let's Encrypt is operated by the nonprofit ISRG (Internet Security Research Group) and provides free, automated TLS certificates. Its core protocol, ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment), is now an RFC standard. It's "nearly irreplaceable" for three compounding reasons: it's free, it's trusted natively by all major browsers and operating systems, and it offers deeply integrated automated renewal through tools like Certbot and Caddy. Existing European alternatives (such as Germany's HARICA or SwissSign) mostly target the enterprise paid market, lack equivalent automation ecosystems, and have limited free tiers. This isn't a technical capability gap — it's a structural difference in public infrastructure positioning and business model that won't close quickly.

Takeaways for Similar Teams

For technical teams considering vendor diversification, this case offers several actionable lessons:

Assess dependencies in layers. Categorize your stack into "self-hostable," "has local alternative," and "no alternative yet." Prioritize the first two; monitor the third rather than forcing a migration.

Watch for hidden lock-in with all-in-one platforms. The out-of-the-box convenience of Firebase or Supabase Cloud often comes at the cost of future migration complexity. If long-term flexibility matters, self-hosted open-source options (like self-hosted Supabase) are the safer bet.

The migration window is narrower than you think. The author's one-week experience shows that the earlier you act — while project complexity is still manageable — the lower the migration cost. Once dependencies are deeply tangled, the price only goes up.

This isn't a black-and-white "boycott" — it's a rational exercise in technical autonomy, cost structure, and risk distribution. Whether or not you ultimately want to "leave Big Tech," understanding your stack's dependency structure and replaceability is homework every team should do.