sparklingBuilding a SaaS in 2026 Using Only EU Infrastructure
Good list but the biggest missing piece for most new SaaS products right now is AI/LLM APIs. If you're building anything with AI features you're calling OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar - all US. Mistral exists but the ecosystem around it is much thinner. That's probably the hardest US dependency to drop in 2026 that I can think of.
Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.
What are some useful ways SaaS companies are using AI? Great way to axe your customer support team.
I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".
I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field!
Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind.
I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so.
Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.
Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast.
Openrouter gives you exactly what you want and your choice of a huge number of models.
<American Company> European means nothing. They are all subject to the US Cloud Act, and the moment you start using their services, it inevitably has one or two services that end up contacting us-east-1 anyways. And that's without taking into account that they are all trying to fuck you over from.behind anyways as they sign data exchange agreements between Europe and the US.
The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US.
I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c...
