I started a new side project last weekend. Three hours in, it was live on a real domain, with a database behind it, file storage attached, and an API answering from the edge. Total spend so far: nothing.
That's not a flex. That's just Cloudflare's free tier doing the thing it does.
And every single time this happens, I get a little uneasy. Because the company making my Sunday this frictionless is American, and that alone tells a ton of people not to use my tool.
The free tier is the actual moat
Everyone talks about platform moats like they're about features. Nicer dashboards, better DX, the one magic deploy button. Fine. But the real lock-in starts way earlier than any of that. It starts the moment a broke person with an idea on a Sunday night types one command and gets something real running for zero euros.
Cloudflare gets this better than anyone in the market right now. Their free tier isn't a 30-day teaser that mugs you on day 31. It's a place you can genuinely live for a while.
Workers gives you 100,000 requests a day. D1, their SQLite database, hands you 5GB and millions of row reads. R2 gives you 10GB of object storage with no egress fees, which honestly matters more than the storage number if you've ever opened an AWS bandwidth bill and felt your stomach drop. Pages serves your frontend with no bandwidth cap at all. KV for the small stuff on top. All of it free, and not free-with-an-asterisk, just free. (Their own pricing page lays it out if you want to check me on the numbers.)
There's a catch, though, and for me it's the whole story. Cloudflare is American. It sits squarely under the US Cloud Act, which lets a US authority compel it to hand over data no matter which continent the servers physically sit on. For a lot of the people I'd want using my tool, that one fact is a dealbreaker. Honestly, it should be.
So the only question I actually care about is whether I can get anything close to that free tier from a provider a US warrant can't reach. Somewhere in Europe. Ideally in Germany.
I went looking properly, because I didn't want to just repeat something I'd half-convinced myself was true.
There isn't one
Providers a US warrant can't touch? Those exist, and the list isn't even short. Hetzner, IONOS and STACKIT in Germany. OVHcloud and Scaleway in France. Exoscale in Switzerland. None of them has a US parent or any Cloud Act exposure. On paper, plenty of sovereign options.
What none of them really has is the part that actually matters here. A free tier you can launch a side project on tonight, with no card on file.
Hetzner says no. It's one of the cheapest places on earth to rent a real server, a genuine national asset, and I use them constantly, but cheap isn't free and a box isn't a platform. IONOS, OVHcloud, STACKIT, Exoscale all want a card on day one, with pricing that quietly assumes you're a Mittelstand company with a procurement department rather than one tired person finding out whether an idea is worth anything yet. The "Deutschland Stack" conversation is finally happening somewhere above the level of LinkedIn posts, which is good, but it's pointed at government workloads and enterprises. Not at the kid with a Sunday and an idea.
There's exactly one honourable exception, and it deserves credit. Scaleway actually ships a real free tier: two million serverless function calls a month, a free allowance on containers, and it's French, so no Cloud Act. That's the closest thing Europe has to what I'm describing, and more people should know it's there.
But put it next to Cloudflare and the gap is impossible to miss. The free part of Scaleway is the compute. The database is paid. The object storage is paid. There's no zero-egress CDN sitting underneath it. You get a free function, and then you're back to assembling and paying for everything around it. It's the best sovereign free tier in Europe and it's still a sliver of what an American teenager gets handed for nothing.
And the cheapest sovereign path, Hetzner, is also the most work. Day one looks like this: install Postgres yourself, stand up object storage yourself, configure a CDN, wire up TLS, set up deploys, patch the OS, then babysit all of it forever. Wonderful iron, and nowhere close to a platform. The price of the server turns out to be the smallest line item. The real bill gets paid in my evenings.
Cheap iron, expensive everything else
Fine, paying it is. So is building sovereign at least cheaper once you accept there's no free lunch? Here's the twist :
On raw compute, the sovereign providers genuinely win. Some analyses put EU providers at 40 to 70 percent cheaper than the big hyperscalers for comparable VMs, mostly because they bundle traffic instead of nickel-and-diming you on every gigabyte out the door. Hetzner makes AWS look like a luxury boutique.
So that tidy "everything in Germany costs more" story I'd been half-telling myself? Not actually true at the hardware level.
It's true everywhere above the hardware. The expensive part was never the server. It's the assembly, the missing managed services, the dozen evenings you burn rebuilding, worse, the exact thing Cloudflare gives a fifteen-year-old for free. You move slower. You ship rougher. And the result is usually less polished, because you've spent your scarce hours being a part-time platform engineer instead of building the product anyone actually wanted.
That's the competitiveness gap that never shows up on a slide. Not the hourly rate of a VM. The total cost of getting from idea to live, which over here gets paid almost entirely in friction.
Why this is bigger than a hosting gripe
You can draw a pretty straight line from "no good free tier" to "fewer companies founded here."
The entire modern founding playbook assumes a floor near zero. Try ten things, kill nine of them, and those nine failures cost you basically nothing because the free tier quietly absorbed them. That cheap, disposable experimentation is the engine of the whole thing. More shots on goal, more weird little ideas that occasionally turn out to matter enormously.
Now raise that floor. Add procurement. Add setup time. Add a credit card required on day one. People just try fewer things. Not because anyone here is less ambitious or less talented. Because the math on a side project is already brutal, and most of them die long before they'd ever have justified the effort of self-hosting their own database.
If we actually want more companies founded under German or European sovereignty, the work doesn't start at the enterprise tier with a wall of compliance certifications. It starts at the bottom. At the broke-founder-on-a-Sunday tier. The exact tier we've handed, completely, to the Americans.
A real Deutschland Stack wouldn't only be a sovereign place for government IT to run its workloads. It'd be a place where a nineteen-year-old could deploy something dumb for free tonight and maybe, two years from now, be running a company that employs people. We don't have that. We don't have anything in the neighborhood.
So until somebody builds it, I'll keep doing exactly what I did last weekend. Shipping on Cloudflare, feeling slightly guilty about it, and writing posts like this one in the hope that someone with the means to fix it is also, somewhere, a little bit annoyed.
I'd switch tomorrow. There's just nothing to switch to.