There’s a conversation happening in European tech circles right now. It goes something like: we need European alternatives to American software. And most people stop there — at the geopolitical framing, the sovereignty argument, the regulatory angle. That framing is fine, but it’s also a trap. Because the real opportunity isn’t political. (I strongly believe in EU-INC creating more opportunity, but it’s not the main blocker now) It’s product. The question worth asking isn’t “how do we replace American tools for ideological reasons?” It’s “why haven’t European builders shipped products that developers actually love?” Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different companies.

It’s harder than it looks — and that’s the point

Robert Heide wrote a post recently about trying to build his startup entirely on European infrastructure. He did it. And his honest conclusion was: it’s doable, but you have to actively fight the current. The defaults pull you toward American providers — not because European alternatives don’t exist, but because the developer experience gap is real.

That gap isn’t a crisis. It’s a business opportunity.

When a European developer chooses Resend over a European email provider, they’re not making a political statement. They’re choosing the tool that took onboarding seriously, that had clean documentation, that made the first API call feel effortless. The European alternative exists in many cases. It just doesn’t feel as good yet.

That’s what’s worth fixing. And fixing it is a product problem — one that good product teams and founders are actually equipped to solve.

Three categories where the opportunity is obvious

Transactional email and developer communication tooling

Resend is the clearest example of what’s possible. They didn’t invent transactional email. Sendgrid had been doing it for years. Mailgun existed. The category was saturated. And yet Resend came in with a clean API, a React-based email templating system, and documentation that didn’t make you want to close the tab — and developers loved them for it.

There is no European Resend. There are European email providers that technically work. But “technically works” isn’t a product strategy.

The market is there. Developers and product teams care more now than ever about where their data goes and which jurisdiction their infrastructure lives in. Someone who ships a genuinely great developer experience on top of European infrastructure wins twice: on product and on positioning.

Voice, SMS, and telephony infrastructure

Twilio built a billion-dollar company by making phone stuff easy. That’s it. That’s the whole thesis. Before Twilio, integrating voice or SMS into an application required dealing with telecom vendors, XML hell, and contracts that felt like they were written in 1994. Twilio made it an afternoon project.

Europe still doesn’t have a true equivalent. There are providers. None of them have shipped the experience that makes a developer say oh, this is how it should work. The regulatory environment in Europe around telecoms is complex — but complexity is exactly where good product thinking creates moats. If it were easy, someone would have done it already.

Just recently I read a post on LinkedIn where someone was using a Germen provider to retrieve a phone number for their AI Agent. There was no API. There was a “get in touch with us” email that would require you to talk to sales. This is not happening on a Friday afternoon project. So again Twilio was the solution. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Payments that don’t make you default to PayPal

This one I find genuinely strange, and worth unpacking carefully. Europe is not weak in payments. Mollie exists. Paddle exists. Klarna has built a globally recognized brand. Revolut has millions of users and is quietly becoming one of the most capable financial platforms on the continent. The infrastructure is real. And yet, when I look at smaller European products and marketplaces, PayPal is still everywhere. Not because operators love PayPal. Because the integration experience hasn’t been made compelling enough to pull developers and product teams in. Stripe didn’t win because it had better financial rails — it won because it made the first integration so smooth that developers became advocates, and that advocacy did the enterprise sales almost by accident.

Mollie and Paddle haven’t done that yet. They have the product. They haven’t cracked the developer-love flywheel the same way. That’s a product and go-to-market problem, not an infrastructure problem — and it’s eminently solvable.

But here’s the deeper issue, and the one that I think represents the real billion-dollar gap: every European payment company — Mollie, Klarna, Revolut, all of them — is still sitting on top of Visa and Mastercard rails. At the end of the day, the core infrastructure of European payments is American-owned. Every card transaction, every tap-to-pay, routes through networks controlled by two US companies. Europe doesn’t have its own card scheme at scale. There have been attempts — Girocard in Germany, Cartes Bancaires in France — but they’re fragmented and national, not a unified European stack. We have SEPA for bank transfers, which is genuinely good infrastructure, but SEPA doesn’t issue cards. It doesn’t power the tap at the coffee shop or the one-click checkout.

What Europe is missing is something that sits beneath all of this: a European card network and issuing infrastructure that Klarna, Revolut, and the next generation of fintech products can build on. Not another wallet app. Not another checkout flow. The actual rails.

That’s not a startup, that’s probably a decade-long institutional project. But the companies closest to it — Revolut especially, given their banking license trajectory and scale — are in a position to make a serious run at it. And if they or someone else does, the value doesn’t just accrue to them. It flows to every European product that builds on top of it.

The opportunity in payments isn’t just “build a better Stripe.” It’s build the infrastructure layer that makes Europe’s version of the payment stack coherent, sovereign, and something developers and businesses actually want to build on.

What this isn’t

This isn’t a “European tech good, American tech bad” argument. American developer tools are good because they obsessed over the developer experience. That’s the lesson, not the geography.

And this isn’t about building something sloppy and slapping a EU flag on it and calling it a political choice. That’s the failure mode to avoid. European developers will not use worse tools out of solidarity — and they shouldn’t have to. The bet is that you can build something genuinely great and benefit from the tailwinds of data sovereignty, GDPR compliance by default, and a European market that is increasingly motivated to keep its infrastructure close.

The timing is right

I’m not saying this is easy. The Coinerella post makes clear that even using a European-first stack takes active effort. Building one of these products is harder still — smaller communities, thinner ecosystems, less forgiveness when something breaks.

But the conditions are better than they’ve ever been. European cloud infrastructure has matured significantly. (Check out Scaleway) The regulatory pressure on American platforms is creating real switching intent — not just sentiment, but actual procurement decisions. And there’s a generation of European engineers and product people who have spent years at great companies and know exactly what “good” looks like.

The gap exists. It’s well-documented. The question is who decides to close it.