Makerkit.dev's answer

Indie Hackers and Companies who want to launch quickly, without compromising on quality.

Alplink's answer:

Alplink is built for European organizations that take data sovereignty and operational reliability seriously but do not have an in-house DevOps team.

In practice, that means:

• Privacy-conscious SMBs running their main web presence or ERP on WordPress or Odoo, where GDPR alignment needs to be a settled question rather than an ongoing risk
• Digital agencies and consultancies hosting client sites and looking for an EU-sovereign white-label partner
• Public-sector and regulated organisations (healthcare, legal, education, NGOs) where US-jurisdiction hosting is increasingly difficult to justify in procurement
• Companies actively migrating off US hyperscalers for compliance, cost, or principle

Common thread: technical literacy without dedicated infrastructure staff, and a preference for working directly with operators rather than support queues.

Makerkit.dev's answer

Makerkit uses Next.js 15 (App Router), Supabase, React.js, Typescript and Stripe.

Alplink's answer:

Operating system & configuration - NixOS (declarative, reproducible system configuration) - sops-nix (encrypted secrets, version-controlled)

Application stack - nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB (WordPress) - PostgreSQL, Python (Odoo Community Edition) - Redis (caching, queues)

Infrastructure & networking - Hetzner Cloud (compute, datacenters in Germany and Finland) - S3-Compatible Object Storage (encrypted backups via restic) - Cloudflare (EU edge, DDoS, DNS) - Tailscale (mesh networking, zero-trust access) - HashiCorp Vault (secret management, SSH certificate authority)

Observability - Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Blackbox Exporter, Grafana Alloy - Public status page (Better Stack)

Operations - Supabase for customer dashboard authentication - Stripe (EU entity) for billing

Makerkit.dev's answer

Makerkit stands out by offering a truly modular architecture built with Turborepo, where core features like auth, billing, and notifications live in their own packages for better maintainability.

While most starters lock you into specific patterns or providers, Makerkit gives you flexibility with a multi-account system supporting both B2B and B2C scenarios, provider-agnostic billing, and edge-ready deployment options.

Beyond the basics, it includes production-ready features like multi-factor auth, real-time notifications, and team permissions - all built with Supabase, TypeScript, React Query, and modern tooling to make development a genuine pleasure.

Alplink's answer:

Three properties set Alplink apart in the European managed hosting market.

Full-stack EU sovereignty, Not just "servers in Frankfurt". Every layer of the stack, from data centers to edge network to transactional mail to billing and the legal entity itself, operates exclusively under EU jurisdiction.

Engineer-operated, end to end. The people who design and run the infrastructure are the same people who answer support requests. No tiered support, no offshore handoff, no scripted responses.

Reproducible by design. Every server is defined declaratively in NixOS, version-controlled, and rebuildable from source. This is uncommon in managed hosting and it shows up directly in reliability, incident response, and audit readiness.

Makerkit.dev's answer

While other starters give you basic auth and a dashboard, Makerkit provides a genuinely modular foundation with the real features SaaS products need - like multi-factor auth, team permissions, real-time notifications, and provider-agnostic billing, all organized in clean, maintainable packages using Turborepo.

You get a first-class developer experience with TypeScript, React Query, and modern tooling, plus the flexibility to support both B2B and B2C scenarios, different payment providers, and edge deployment options.

Best of all, Makerkit is actively maintained with regular updates and responsive support, so you're building on a foundation that grows with your needs rather than painting yourself into a corner.

Alplink's answer:

European businesses currently choose between two unsatisfying options.

US-based managed specialists (Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, Pressable and similar) offer strong products but remain subject to US data-access law regardless of where they place EU servers. CLOUD Act and Schrems II exposure cannot be eliminated by datacenter location alone; it requires an EU legal entity, which they do not have.

EU generalist providers (OVH, Scaleway, IONOS, Hetzner direct) are sovereign, but offer either unmanaged infrastructure or limited managed product depth, particularly for Odoo, which is essentially absent from their managed catalogues.

Alplink sits in the gap: a specialized managed product for WordPress and Odoo, full end-to-end EU jurisdictional alignment, and direct access to the engineers who run the infrastructure. Competitively priced, with no compliance asterisk and no support escalation chain.

Alplink's answer:

Alplink was founded by two European engineers who spent years operating production systems for European clients and watched the same pattern repeat: organizations that genuinely cared about data sovereignty would still default to US-based managed hosting, simply because the European alternatives were either unmanaged or unspecialized.

Schrems II made the legal exposure explicit, and ENISA's EUCS framework is now codifying it. It became clear that "EU datacenter" was no longer enough — the entire stack, including the legal entity, needed to be European for the sovereignty claim to actually hold.

The company is incorporated in Estonia, chosen for its e-Residency programme and transparent legal framework. It runs on EU-only infrastructure and is operated directly by its two co-founders, who continue to do both the engineering and the support. The goal is straightforward: make EU-sovereign managed hosting a serious product rather than a marketing checkbox.

Alplink's answer:

Alplink is in its early customer-acquisition phase following public launch. As a matter of policy, we do not publish customer names without explicit written consent. References from existing customers can be provided on request to qualified prospects under NDA.