02/06/2026

Eggs and Baskets

I recently finished the first working version of Eikon,1 a media microblog that runs on Cloudflare. The compute, the database, the image storage, the CDN, the DNS – all eggs in one basket. A question I asked myself, prompted by an article on moving a digital stack to Europe:2 is Cloudflare really without a serious competitor?

The bundle is the trap

If you weigh Cloudflare as a bundle – edge compute, object storage, a SQL database, key-value, CDN, DNS, DDoS mitigation, all from one account, with a free tier generous enough to run a real site on, and a developer experience that mostly stays out of your way – then no, there is no second vendor that matches it. That bundle is the product.

But decompose the stack into the things it actually does, and the picture inverts. Almost every layer has a real competitor, and several of them are European:

LayerCloudflareReal competitors (★ European)
Object storageR2Scaleway★, OVHcloud★, Hetzner★, Exoscale★ (CH), Infomaniak★ (CH), Backblaze
SQL databaseD1 (SQLite)Turso / libSQL, self-hosted SQLite or Postgres, Aiven★ (FI)
CDNCloudflare CDNbunny.net★ (SI), Gcore★ (LU), Fastly
Edge computeWorkersDeno Deploy, Gcore Functions★, Scaleway Containers★, self-hosted WASM
DNS · DDoS · WAFCloudflareGcore★, Bunny Shield★, Akamai, Fastly

So “no alternative” really means “no alternative to the convenience of one bill and one dashboard.” That is a genuine thing of value – but it is not the same thing as a technical moat, and it pays to know which one is keeping you in place.

Where the moat is actually real

A few of these layers are harder to replace than a table suggests. The first is DDoS mitigation at scale. Soaking up a large flood is a problem of raw network capacity, and only a handful of organisations on earth operate at that level – Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, the hyperscalers, and Gcore among them. This is the part of Cloudflare that genuinely has few peers.

The second is the edge compute model. Cloudflare Workers run as V8 isolates rather than containers, which is why they start with effectively no cold-start penalty.3 Most “edge function” competitors run containers or micro-VMs and pay for it in latency. The tell here is that Vercel’s own edge runtime, for years, ran on top of Cloudflare Workers.4 Cloudflare is frequently the layer underneath its own competitors.

The third is quieter but adds up: R2 charges no egress fees.5 Most S3-compatible storage still bills you to read your own data back out; Hetzner and Backblaze are the friendly exceptions.

And the fourth is simply that all of it is one free account. Independence has a bill attached.

Sovereignty

Cloudflare is a US company, and the US CLOUD Act reaches US companies regardless of where their disks spin.6 Independence is not “European servers” but a non-US-owned provider. Infomaniak and Exoscale both operate under Swiss jurisdiction in their own data centres,7 Scaleway and OVHcloud in France, Hetzner in Germany, Gcore out of Luxembourg, bunny.net out of Slovenia. Bunny started as a pure CDN and has been quietly assembling a Cloudflare-shaped silhouette – S3-compatible storage, a Deno-based edge scripting runtime, and Bunny Shield for WAF and DDoS.8 It is the most plausible “European Cloudflare-lite” today. 9 But, if sovereignty survives threats – of taxes or withdrawal of military aid – is a different question.

A European stack could be a Swiss or German VPS – Infomaniak, Exoscale, or Hetzner – running Node or Bun. SQLite on local disk, or Turso if I wanted it replicated.10 Bunny in front for the CDN. And an accepted, eyes-open downgrade in DDoS protection. That means managing a server instead of leaning on a free serverless tier. A question of convenviance.

Footnotes

  1. Eikon (Greek εἰκών, “image”) is a personal Instagram-style media microblog – push a photo and a caption from any device and it appears almost instantly in a public feed. It runs as a single Cloudflare Worker. ↩

  2. “How I moved my digital stack to Europe”. The author moved analytics to self-hosted Matomo, mail to Proton, compute and storage to Scaleway, backups to OVHcloud – but kept Cloudflare, reasoning that it fronts already-public data. ↩

  3. Workers execute as V8 isolates: many lightweight JavaScript contexts share one process, rather than each request spinning up a container or micro-VM. The practical payoff is near-zero cold start. Deno Deploy uses a similar isolate model; most others (Lambda, Fastly Compute, container-based “edge” runtimes) do not. ↩

  4. Vercel’s Edge Functions / Edge Runtime ran on Cloudflare Workers infrastructure for several years before Vercel migrated to its own platform – a neat illustration of how often Cloudflare sits beneath its competitors rather than beside them. ↩

  5. Cloudflare R2 charges for storage and operations but not for egress bandwidth, in deliberate contrast to AWS S3 and most S3-compatible stores. For an image-serving workload this is often the dominant cost line elsewhere. ↩

  6. The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act of 2018 lets US authorities compel US-based providers to hand over data under their control regardless of where in the world that data is physically stored. EU data-residency options do not change the jurisdiction of the company holding the keys. ↩

  7. Infomaniak operates its own data centres in Switzerland and markets strongly on Swiss jurisdiction and energy use. Exoscale (owned by the Austrian A1 group) runs Swiss and EU regions with S3-compatible object storage and compute. Switzerland sits outside the EU, with its own Federal Act on Data Protection (revised 2023), and is bound to neither US nor EU disclosure regimes. ↩

  8. bunny.net began as a CDN and has since added S3-compatible Edge Storage, a Deno-based Edge Scripting runtime, Magic Containers, DNS, and Bunny Shield (WAF/DDoS). It is European-owned and the closest thing to an integrated Cloudflare alternative on the continent – though not at Cloudflare’s network scale. ↩

  9. Scaleway (Iliad group, France), OVHcloud (France), Hetzner (Germany – cheap VPS plus S3-compatible object storage), Gcore (headquartered in Luxembourg, with its own global CDN, edge functions, and DDoS protection), bunny.net (Slovenia). ↩

  10. Turso is a managed service built on libSQL, an open-source fork of SQLite that adds a network/HTTP protocol and edge replication. Because the dialect is SQLite, a schema written for Cloudflare D1 ports to it almost unchanged. ↩

l>