Anti-competition is also anti free market capitalism

Hi everyone,

I'm going to Japan this January, and I'm looking for a pair of waterproof sneakers for the trip. Ideally they'd use Gore-Tex or a similar waterproof membrane (bonus points if it's a more sustainable alternative).

My main priority is comfort. I'll be walking all day, every day, so I want something that's comfortable for long distances.

I'm not really looking for hiking shoes, since I've always heard they tend to have stiffer soles and are less comfortable for walking around cities all day.

Do you have any specific models you'd recommend, or is there a particular category of shoes I should be looking at?

For example, I noticed Salomon has some shoes marketed as "backpacking" shoes, but I'm not sure if that's actually a distinct type of footwear or just a fancy marketing term for something that already exists.

My budget is around €200.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Uber to buy Germany’s Delivery Hero in $14.8bn global deal.

Uber has reached an agreement to take over the German takeaway company Delivery Hero in a $14.8bn (£11bn, or €12.9bn) deal that would create a global food delivery giant.

The US tech firm said it had offered to pay €41.50 a share to Delivery Hero’s shareholders, valuing the business at $14.8bn. Uber will pay $13.7bn after accounting for its previous purchases of a quarter of Delivery Hero’s shares, most recently in May.

The deal would combine Uber Eats with Delivery Hero’s brands across 99 countries, including Asia’s foodpanda, Latin America’s PedidosYa, and talabat in the Middle East. The combined company booked $236bn in orders in 2025.

This community is basically the reason I finished this. People here keep asking "what's the European version of [US tool]?" and answering it one comment at a time.

So I put it all in one place. 400+ European software tools across ~36 categories, each one tagged with the country it's based in and the US product it's an alternative to. You can go category by category (cloud, analytics, email, CRM, hosting) or search for the specific thing you're trying to replace.

I want it to be useful, so if you know a solid EU alternative I'm missing, tell me and I'll add it. Especially interested in gaps, categories where there just isn't a good European option yet.

https://euroalternative.eu

Hello BuyFromEU community,

I‘d like to obtain a pair of white linen pants for the summer.

1) It should be manufactured in a European country. 2) The linen used should be of high quality. I’m more than willing to pay for a premium garment if it’ll last me a longer time.

There’s just so many brands to choose from so I’d be glad to receive some tried and tested recommendations from you guys.

During the summer season, as someone from Germany, I love going to the Italian or Austrian Alps for hiking. Recently, I needed a new pair of hiking shorts. When looking into what different brands offer, I noticed that even German manufacturers produce both in the EU and in Bangladesh. It feels like a black box because you have no control over where your specific item comes from until you check the label.

Because of this, I searched for high-quality hiking shorts made in the EU and discovered a Czech brand. I absolutely love these shorts. They are extremely comfortable to wear, and the price is completely reasonable for the quality you get. I can highly recommend them.

https://www.directalpine.eu

I am searching for a new phone. I usully read about phones when I need one so I do not know the market now. Is there a brand that makes their phone in Europe?

Hi everyone,

If we want to build a sustainable future and finally become independent of pricey foreign oil imports, we need to make switching to electric vehicles as easy and attractive as possible.

That is why I want to share Ladesofort – an independent app made in Germany for the entire European community. It is designed to give you easy, transparent, and cheap ad-hoc charging options without forcing you into expensive subscriptions.

Here is where you can download it:
IOS: https://apps.apple.com/at/app/ad-hoc-map-ladesofort-de/id6754520673?l=en-GB

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ladesofort.ladesofort_app&hl=en

Why this matters for Europe:
-True Independence: By making EV charging simpler and more accessible, we accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and expensive oil imports.
-Fair & Cheap Pricing: No subscription traps. The app helps you find the most direct, cost-effective ad-hoc charging options.
-Community-Driven: The app already supports many European countries, but to keep the data accurate and fight unfair pricing, it relies on us – the community – to keep it updated.

Supporting independent, European-made software like this keeps our data local, our grids smart, and our transition to green energy in our own hands.

Give it a try and let me know your thoughts!

Disclosure, I make SpeakUp (getspeakup.app), a Mac dictation app, built and run solo out of Berlin. The actual product, on-device dictation, no cloud, was the easy part to build. What took longer to figure out was EU VAT compliance for digital goods sold across 27 different countries, since each one technically has its own VAT rate that a solo seller is on the hook for without a merchant of record. Ended up routing payments through an Estonian company that handles VAT and acts as merchant of record so I'm not personally liable for miscalculating a tax rate in a country I've never sold into. None of this is specific to dictation apps, it's just the tax reality of selling digital products directly to EU consumers as an individual. Curious how other solo European sellers here handled this, did you also go the merchant-of-record route, or set up VAT MOSS registration yourselves, or something else entirely?

Soofi S 30B-A3B
is a sovereign, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid Mamba–Transformer foundation model for German and English.

Its hybrid design activates only 3B of 30B parameters per token and keeps the inference cache near-constant as context grows, giving it a decisive throughput advantage over dense models for long-context, high-concurrency deployment.

Pretrained on roughly 27 trillion tokens with deliberately up-weighted German, Soofi S matches dense 14–27B models on aggregate English and German benchmarks, achieves the best code aggregates in both languages among 17 open base models, and outperforms every European sovereign baseline in our comparison — including ones far larger in active parameters.

Among fully open models, it obtains the highest English and German evaluation scores, ahead of Olmo 3 32B and Apertus 70B.

Soofi S was built end-to-end on the German Industrial AI Cloud, a sovereign HPC-scale AI infrastructure operated by Deutsche Telekom in Munich.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Soofi-Project/Pretraining-Tech-Report

Fellow Europeans concerned about our privacy; a week ago the Global Device Identifier (GDID) was revealed in Windows 10 and 11 which is a hidden persistent, unique digital fingerprint generated when you link your Windows PC to a Microsoft Account.

Microsoft might be able to track the online activity of your Windows PC without third-party browser cookies. Therefore, a VPN does not hide you from their tracking either.

The problem is that "Legal requests, such as subpoenas, can compel Microsoft to share GDID activity data with law enforcement, as exemplified by the Scattered Spider case. GDID is present on all Windows installations linked to a Microsoft Account."

Here you find (possible) way to deactivate it: https://github.com/SmtimesIWndr/gdid-reversal/tree/main

This is half a rant, half a genuine question for the sales/founder people here.

I do B2B outbound and I've been trying to move off US tools where I can. Email, storage, browsers... fine, plenty of European options. But the second I got to sales tooling I basically hit a wall. Apollo, ZoomInfo, Outreach, Clay, all the shiny new "AI SDR" things, American, top to bottom.

And here's what actually bugs me about it: it's not just a sovereignty preference. Half that US stack is genuinely awkward to run compliantly over here. It's all built around scraped contact data and firing off cold email at volume, which walks straight into GDPR and, if you're selling into Germany like me, UWG. So it's not "I'd prefer European", it's "the American default doesn't actually fit the rules I have to work under".

So I went digging for what's actually on the European side, and honestly couldn't find a straight answer anywhere. For contact data, Cognism (UK) and Dropcontact (FR) seem to be the go-tos for properly consented EU data instead of scraped lists. The outreach/AI SDR layer is thinner, but there's movement, Venta (DE) is the one I keep running into that's built EU compliance-first rather than a US tool with a GDPR page taped on. And for email/sequencing, lemlist (FR) is the obvious European name. If people know others, genuinely throw them in, that's half why I'm posting.

Two honest caveats so this isn't just cheerleading. "European" gets slippery, HQ, hosting, and where the data physically sits are three different things, and for compliance the last two matter way more than where the company's from. And some of these are earlier-stage than their US twins, so it's a real tradeoff, not a clean swap.

Anyway, my questions is: anyone here running a mostly-European outbound stack yet, or are we all still quietly defaulting to the US tools because the alternatives aren't there yet?

Hi! I will be visiting Italy soon, and want to find and check a reliable European websites or apps besides the usual ones, like Booking and Airbnb, to book places to stay. Appreciate any suggestions!

Hi guys, iam currently researching for my next bag.

as i am used to field bag and messenger type bags (not polished office messenger or briefcases)

iam lkooking into this type of bag. But it seems like there are not many brands offering handmade or at least made in the EU.

And the bag should be made from Canvas or Leather. Not from Cordura, nylon or plastic type materials. The Bag should be able to hold up a long time and patina nicely.

Bleu de chauffe is on my radar but not many more.

Do you have any suggestions? Thank you in advance.