The EU Indie Starter Pack: A Simple European Stack for Indie SaaS Builders (2026 Guide)

Most indie developers reach for the same set of tools when starting a new project. Firebase for the backend. Auth0 for authentication. Typeform for user research and onboarding surveys. Stripe for billing. It is a reasonable default. These tools are well-documented, have generous free tiers, and are used widely enough that there is plenty of community support.

But if you are building a SaaS in Europe — or serving European customers — a few things start to pull at your attention over time.

There is the question of GDPR compliance. Where is user data stored? Under what jurisdiction? The EU Cloud Act discussions, the Schrems II fallout, and the ongoing legal complexity around US-hosted data have created genuine uncertainty for European businesses. Not catastrophe, but friction. The kind that comes up in customer conversations, in data processing agreements, and occasionally in legal reviews.

There is also something more practical: dependency. When your entire infrastructure is spread across five US-based services, you are subject to their pricing decisions, their support queues, their enterprise pivots, and their terms of service changes. For an indie developer or a small team, that is a lot of exposure.

This post describes what I am calling the EU Indie Starter Pack — a set of tools I have been building with exactly this problem in mind. This is not a roundup of established, battle-tested services. Three of the tools in this stack (FjordID, FormVault, and Invoicia) are projects I built myself, and they are early. No large user base yet. No years of production hardening. I am sharing them because I think the problem they address is real, and I am genuinely curious whether other European indie builders find them useful. Take them for what they are: early-stage tools with a clear design intent, not a definitive answer.

What Is the EU Indie Starter Pack?

The EU Indie Starter Pack is a stack I put together by combining a few tools I built with some well-established EU-based infrastructure providers. It covers authentication, forms, billing, hosting, and data storage — the five areas most indie products need to address early.

My design goals for the parts I built were:

Data stored in EU jurisdictions by default
Simple enough for a solo founder to integrate in a day
No enterprise pricing tiers that make no sense at small scale
Something I would actually want to use myself

The honest framing: these tools exist because I wanted them to exist, and I built them to scratch my own itch. Whether they are useful to others is something I am still figuring out.

The Core Stack

Authentication — A Solid Auth0 Alternative in the EU

Authentication is one of those problems that looks simple and is not. Rolling your own auth is a known footgun. Social logins, session management, password resets, MFA — there is a lot of surface area, and most of it is boring enough that you will not notice a bug until a user reports a problem.

FjordID is an authentication tool I built as an Auth0 alternative aimed at indie developers. The goal was to handle the standard flows — email/password, magic links, OAuth providers — with an API and SDK that fits a Next.js or similar setup without requiring you to read enterprise documentation to get started.

What I tried to prioritise:

Data residency: User credentials and session data stay within EU infrastructure.

Pricing: Structured around how small products actually grow, not around seat counts that do not apply.

Simplicity: I wanted the integration to be something a solo founder could complete in an afternoon.

FjordID is early. I am using it myself and continuing to build on it, but I would not claim it is a drop-in replacement for Auth0 in every scenario today. If you try it and hit something missing or broken, I want to hear about it.

Forms and Data Collection — A Typeform Alternative Built for Europe

Forms show up everywhere in SaaS products. Onboarding surveys. Feedback collection. Feature request intake. Waitlist signups. Most builders reach for Typeform or Google Forms by default, but both of those involve sending user data to US-based infrastructure.

FormVault is a form tool I built because I kept running into the same problem: I wanted simple embeddable forms for small products, but most options either stored data in the US or required me to pay for a plan designed for marketing teams.

What I built into it:

Embeddable forms with a clean UI
Webhook support for piping responses to your backend or a notification channel
EU data storage
No unnecessary complexity

The intended flow: embed a FormVault form for onboarding feedback or feature requests, connect it via webhook, and move on. It is not competing with enterprise form builders. It is trying to be the thing you reach for when you just need a form and do not want to think about data residency.

FormVault is early-stage. The core functionality works, but it is a project in progress. If you are looking for a Typeform alternative in Europe and are willing to try something new, I would be glad to hear what you think.

Billing and Invoicing — EU-Friendly from the Start

Billing is where many EU indie developers feel the most friction. Stripe is dominant and genuinely good, but it introduces US data processing into your stack and occasionally creates complications around EU VAT handling.

Invoicia is a billing and invoicing tool I built with European indie SaaS in mind. The specific problems I was trying to solve: EU VAT handling, generating invoices that meet local legal requirements, and keeping payment data within EU infrastructure.

What I designed it for:

Subscription management for small SaaS products
EU VAT OSS support baked in rather than bolted on
Invoicing that looks right to European B2B customers
Something simpler than configuring Stripe for EU VAT edge cases

To be transparent: Invoicia is the most early-stage of the three tools here. The foundations are in place, but I am still actively building it out. If EU-based billing tooling is something you have been looking for, I am interested in what the requirements actually look like in practice for other founders.

Hosting — EU Cloud Providers Worth Knowing

For compute and hosting, you have several strong options that are based entirely in Europe:

Hetzner (Germany) is the go-to for indie developers who want cheap, fast dedicated servers and cloud VMs. The price-to-performance ratio is hard to match. Hetzner's object storage and managed databases round out a starter setup without sending your data outside the EU.

Scaleway (France) offers a broader managed-services portfolio including serverless functions, container registries, and managed Kubernetes. It is a credible alternative to AWS or GCP for projects that need more than raw compute.

OVHcloud (France) covers everything from bare metal to managed cloud, with data centers across Europe and a long track record for reliability.

For a typical indie SaaS — a Next.js or similar app with a PostgreSQL database — Hetzner is often the simplest starting point. A small cloud server and a managed database instance is enough to run a product serving thousands of users.

Database — Managed PostgreSQL in the EU

PostgreSQL is the default database for most new SaaS products at this point, and for good reason. It is reliable, well-understood, and has strong ecosystem support.

Most EU cloud providers offer managed PostgreSQL:

Hetzner Managed Databases — straightforward, affordable, backed up in EU data centers
Scaleway Managed Databases — slightly more feature-rich, with read replicas and connection pooling
Aiven (Finnish company, EU-hosted option available) — a managed database platform with good tooling for teams that want operational simplicity

For an indie product, the priority is getting automated backups, a reliable connection from your application server, and staying within EU infrastructure. All of these options deliver that without much configuration overhead.

Why I Designed the Stack This Way

For the tools I built, each decision came from the same question: what would I actually want when starting a new product?

Simplicity over completeness. I did not try to build Auth0 or Typeform. I tried to build the subset of those tools that a solo founder needs to get to launch. That is a smaller, more tractable problem.

EU data residency as a default, not a configuration. The compliance question should not require research every time you start a project. If everything is EU-hosted from the start, that is one less thing to figure out.

Pricing that makes sense at small scale. I have no interest in building enterprise pricing into tools aimed at indie builders. That said, I am still figuring out the right model — these tools are early and pricing will evolve.

Direct feedback loop. Because I built these tools and am actively using them, feedback goes directly into what gets built next. That is a different relationship than filing a support ticket with a vendor who has thousands of enterprise customers.

These are aspirations as much as claims. The tools are new, and whether they deliver on this in practice is something that depends on people actually using them and telling me where they fall short.

How to Build an MVP Using This Stack

Here is a realistic outline of how to build a simple SaaS MVP using the EU Indie Starter Pack:

Step 1: Set Up Hosting

Provision a Hetzner Cloud server (or a managed app platform from Scaleway) and a managed PostgreSQL instance. Point your domain at it. This takes less than an hour.

Step 2: Authentication

Integrate FjordID into your application. Most frameworks have straightforward SDK support. Set up email/password sign-in plus at least one OAuth provider. Define your session handling. Most of this is configuration rather than code.

Step 3: Core Application and Protected Dashboard

Build your landing page and the main product flow. Use middleware to protect dashboard routes — check session validity on each request and redirect unauthenticated users. Your database, running on Hetzner or Scaleway Managed Postgres, stores user data and application state.

Step 4: Feedback Form

Embed a FormVault form in your app — on the onboarding screen, at the end of a key user flow, or on a dedicated feedback page. Connect it via webhook to a Slack channel or your own database so feedback is immediately actionable.

Step 5: Billing

Once your product is ready to charge users, integrate Invoicia for subscription management and invoicing. Set up your pricing plans, connect the payment flow to your onboarding sequence, and test the full checkout-to-dashboard path before launch.

This is not a five-year architecture plan. It is the minimum viable infrastructure for a product you ship, learn from, and iterate on.

Who This Is For (and Who It Is Not For)

This stack is for:

Indie developers and solo founders building their first or second SaaS product
Small European teams who want to reduce vendor dependency
Builders serving European customers who have started asking questions about data residency
Developers who want predictable pricing and direct support
Anyone who has found themselves managing five different enterprise-tier vendor relationships for a product with 200 users

This stack is not ideal for:

Teams that need deep integrations with the AWS or GCP ecosystems
Products with primarily US-based customers and no EU compliance requirements
Builders who need a very specific feature (advanced ML infrastructure, specialized analytics) that only US-based vendors currently offer well
Enterprise teams with procurement processes that require specific vendor certifications

The EU Indie Starter Pack is not trying to be everything for everyone. It is trying to be the right starting point for a specific kind of builder.

Final Thoughts

Infrastructure choices compound over time. A decision you make in week one of a project — which auth provider to use, where to host your database — shapes your costs, your compliance posture, and your operational overhead for years. Most of the time, those choices are made quickly and without much deliberation, because you are focused on the product.

FjordID, FormVault, and Invoicia are tools I built because I wanted them to exist. They are early, and they are probably incomplete in ways I have not discovered yet. But the design intent is clear, the data stays in Europe, and I am actively working on them.

If you try any of them and find something missing or broken, I would genuinely like to know. That feedback is what shapes what gets built next.

These tools are listed on eualts.eu alongside a broader catalogue of EU alternatives to common US-based software. If you are looking for something specific with a European footprint, it is worth browsing.

Are you building an indie SaaS in Europe? Let us know what tools you're using.

We are always looking to expand the catalogue with tools that are actually useful to builders, not just technically EU-hosted. Reach out or submit a tool through the site.