Building an app independent from US tech in 2025

As a European, can you be 100% independent from US tech?

That's probably the wrong question.

Why would you want to be?

"Why" is the better question.

Being dependent on any single country means taking risks with your own freedom of expression and security.

Europe has always been influenced by the US, but that country has now become hostile. Recent events have shown us the real risks of this dependency:

• Multiple scandals involving social networks—X and Facebook—used to influence European elections
• Grok, Musk's AI, repeatedly generating hateful content
• Sanctions against the International Criminal Court investigating potential war crimes in Gaza

Overnight, ICC judges found themselves cut off from the global economic system—largely controlled by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Their accounts on all US platforms were shut down (Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, you name it). Even non-American banks closed their accounts to avoid violating US rules.

At the same time, the entire ICC administration was cut off from their tools—emails, documentation, everything.

I could also mention the National Security Strategy published two days ago. This report explicitly states the intent to influence domestic politics in European countries.

Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor, created a foundation in Brussels with the goal of weakening the European Union by uniting far-right parties across Europe around a common goal: "maiming the European Union."

This isn't paranoia. It's a documented and official strategy. European tech dependency isn't just a theoretical risk—it's being actively exploited as a geopolitical lever.

Going 100% European seems hard to achieve, but everyone can take small steps to shift the balance by using more non-US solutions.

Back in April, I tried to list all the services I depended on calculating my tech dependency score.

Since then, I've made progress:

• Switched to Proton for email, document storage, VPN, and password management. Proton has grown 5x in users over the past 4 years.
• Left X, and soon Facebook (just waiting to post this article there before I do)
• Stopped using Airbnb entirely—Booking only

It's still far from perfect. It's really hard to quit Amazon, LinkedIn, and even harder when it comes to entertainment—Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll. The US dominates.

But technically, nothing prevents us from having a decentralized, non-US LinkedIn.

We're starting to see interesting things emerge, leveraging decentralized protocols like Mastodon's ActivityPub or Bluesky's AT Protocol:

• Instagram alternatives: Pixelfed (ActivityPub), Sprk.so, Flashes and Pinksky (AT Protocol)
• Reddit alternative: Lemmy (ActivityPub)
• TikTok alternative: Skylight (AT Protocol)
• YouTube alternative: PeerTube (ActivityPub)
• An initiative to create a European PDS for Bluesky, removing dependency on the sole US-based PDS

EDIT: There's a great directory of AT Protocol alternatives here: https://blueskydirectory.com/

It's far from perfect. A social network needs critical mass to become attractive. Some of these initiatives are nowhere near replacing their big sisters.

But technology is no longer a barrier.

And that alone is good news. Because the day we get cut off, we'll know how to manage without. But we shouldn't wait for that moment.

This is the responsibility of everyone who builds apps or decides which ones to buy for their companies.

I work in software development. I set myself a goal: avoid US tools as much as possible when building new projects.

Last month, I started a new app: Writizzy. The project itself is an attempt to offer an alternative to US platforms like Substack, Medium, or WordPress.

I managed to use mostly non-US alternatives:

• Hosting on Hetzner servers (Germany)
• Coolify as a self-hosted PaaS (Hungary)
• CDN and web storage on Bunny.net (Slovenia)—one of my favorites, easily replaces Cloudflare and goes way beyond just CDN
• DNS on Hostinger(Germany), gradually moving to Bunny.net
• Transactional emails on Brevo(France)
• Email accounts for me and Thomas (my cofounder) on Proton(Switzerland)
• S3 storage on Scaleway (France)

I still have some pain points:

• Stripe. Hard to replace with something equally simple and affordable. I should probably look at Paddle (UK), but payment infrastructure isn't something you switch easily.
• GitHub. I don't know any obvious alternatives. GitLab is also US-based. Bitbucket (Australia) might work, but it's felt half-dead for a while. This is less critical than payments—switching providers would be straightforward. I need to find something.
• Claude Code. I have zero non-US alternatives to suggest. I could try DeepSeek, but swapping US influence for Chinese influence has its own risks. And Mistral wasn't up to par last time I tried. This one is genuinely bad news.

Anyway, if you're starting an app today, you owe it to yourself to think about this. Don't start on the wrong foundations.

Also understand: by using these services, you help them improve. They'll have the revenue and feedback to get better.

I get that this is a real handicap for legacy applications. I know the effort required to transform an existing app, especially with no direct financial gain. But you need to consider this as a risk factor.

Imagine what happens tomorrow when Trump decides to sanction your company because... whatever… he doesn't need a good reason. All of US Big Tech funded Trump and served him hors d'oeuvres at his inauguration. They're expecting returns on investment, and that will come through industrial espionage and/or blockades. Any European company can be targeted at any moment.

In public administrations, there's a growing movement to move away from Microsoft tools. In Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, and Spain, we're seeing administrations migrate to Linux, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and more.

That's good news. But it needs to be followed by private companies—and for that, we need to be more ambitious about the quality of software we create. Naive sovereignty that just sells "being European" while delivering poor quality doesn't work.

So it's on us to make the right choices and be ambitious. Let's not wait until it's too late.