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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

coinerella.com

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Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#161

Post by snayan »

palata wrote: post #49

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

I assume your circle is mostly tech people? Outside that bubble, it's pretty obvious. People just want easy, don't understand security in many cases, it's the simplest path.

Even absent the above. Imagine a signup flow. I can either click or I can go through a manual flow with input fields. The former is much faster than the latter. It surprises you people choose the path of least resistance?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#162

Post by mgol94 »

piokoch wrote: post #156

All of those considerations are driven by politics, not technical matters. What if in Germany next election will be won by AfD, in France by Lepenists (Jordan Bardella is going for the win in 2027 election). And next US election will be won by Democrats. What's then? Moving back to the USA?

Data sovereignty, avoiding monopolistic dark patterns by big American corporations and choosing local business partners that you can keep accountable is not political, it’s logical choice.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#163

Post by Macha »

rithdmc wrote: post #140
palata wrote: post #49

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

HN is going to skew towards people with password managers & concerns about vendors locking you out. I think most people just want low friction - be that 'Sign in with', or passwordless-based authentication like 404media (you want to sign in? You've been emailed a code)

I'm not sure non-technical people have a good understanding of or experience with password less email login either. While doing tech support I've seen people get very confused at the need to open another app to login in or the fact that they're now logged in in the webview of their email app and not logged in in the app or browser they had been using (especially if the first thing that web view does is pop up a giant "try the app" modal)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#164

Post by samrus »

Its a really good sign that this worked out at all. And the takeaways are enlightening

- EU domain registrars might have some bullshit under the hood making the same TLDs more expensive. Might need to investigate - eu needs its own mobile app ecosystem, easy auth, and genAI offerings - - but interested to see why mistral wasnt feasible - other things need to be scaled up to have the community and maturity to function well. This come with time and adoption

Id love if this took off. If more and more people did this

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#165

Post by yuppiepuppie »

williamdclt wrote: post #90
palata wrote: post #49

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

You really don't? It's just a ton easier for most users: it's (almost) like already having an account. Just click a couple times and you're in, no typing at all, no email confirmation or anything like that. I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care…

Not to mention that B2B SaaS needs to provide the login methods that their customers need for their operations, and these typically rely on Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc.

I work on auth for a European startup and this is the case.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#166

Post by apublicfrog »

deaux wrote: post #108

> Google Ads and Apple's Developer Program. If you want to acquire users and distribute a mobile app, you're paying the toll to Mountain View and Cupertino. If you said Play Store, then sure, though at least distribution on there is free. But you said Google Ads, which you really do not need to acquire users. Returns on Google Ads were already low, and have only continued getting worse and worse. I'm sure someone her…

Different industries have different customers with different needs and funnels.

None of my businesses use a "sign in with..." option and I highly doubt it would increase conversions, however the article and many commenters here are adament (based on their experience) that it is integral.

I'm not sure it's day trading per se, I think it's just a lot more relevant to some industries/products than others.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#167

Post by willy__ »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #50
willy__ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still baffled.. compare a domain like .party or .parts between porkbun or your major US based providers and a EU based registrar of your choosing.... It's not pretty, at least it wasn't to me.

Porkbun has .party for $21.09 (bar the first year promotion, not sure about VAT) and INWX (DE, VAT included) has it 32.80€ . It is definitely more but not as scary as you made it sound.

Wow, gotta check out INWX. I am paying in the 50s now..so double the cost..No VAT at porkbun!

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#168

Post by apexalpha »

Cool post, thanks. Though I would want to know how much cheaper Hetzner actually is compared to AWS?

We looked at StackIT at my company and they were twice as expensive... Which was a bit surprising to me.

I currently rent a full, dedicated AMD Ryzen 5 64GB ram server for €35 a month. Its amazing how much you can actually run on a dedicated machine

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#169

Post by apexalpha »

HenriTEL wrote: post #145
znnajdla wrote: post #74

Thank you for this. I'm in Europe with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house. Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply back…

Ah yes, MinIO, that open source S3 alternative that got archived last week. To me that's the biggest problem when self-hosting services. On day to day operations, some times it just breaks and the time to get it back varies from a couple of hours to a couple of days. And for the longer term you regularly have to upgrade things yourself which takes time and energy and is stressing for stateful deployment. And then you…

You can still selfhost MinIO you just have to pay. You also pay for software when renting a cloud service so this seems similar.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#170

Post by apexalpha »

palata wrote: post #49

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

My email goes to the same company I can login with so might as well tap the button.
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