Replace your US SaaS with open-source hosted in Europe

The 2018 CLOUD Act lets US authorities obtain, through a court warrant, data held by a company subject to US law, wherever that data is stored, including a European data centre. Separately, Section 702 of FISA lets US intelligence agencies collect, without an individual warrant, the communications of people located outside the United States by compelling US-based providers to cooperate. No contract clause neutralises those statutes.

On the European side, the 2020 Schrems II ruling struck down the Privacy Shield and required real safeguards for any transfer of personal data to the United States. Regulators have since found common US analytics tools to breach the GDPR. The Data Privacy Framework that replaced it in 2023 faces a pending annulment action before the General Court of the EU, and stays exposed to another invalidation.

As long as a tool depends on a vendor subject to US law, you carry a compliance risk that standard contract clauses and a data centre in Frankfurt do not close on their own. Moving to an open-source equivalent hosted in Europe fixes it at the source.

For each service we install the open-source software, host it on our cloud in Europe, keep it updated, back it up and monitor it. You use it like a SaaS, with no machine to run.

The real difference is portability. The code is open-source, your data is yours, and you can bring the service back to your own servers whenever you want. You do not swap a US lock-in for a European one.