Why I'm building Codebahn
Nobody chose to put European software on US infrastructure. It happened one sensible default at a time.
Very few people deliberately chose to centralize European software development on US infrastructure. It happened one sensible default at a time. Free tier here, familiar UI there. Each step made sense in isolation. The switching cost grew while nobody was looking.
This is how lock-in works. Not through a decision, but through the absence of one. You don’t choose a dependency. You just never choose against it, and one day it’s load-bearing.
Most European development teams run their entire workflow through companies incorporated in the US, subject to US jurisdiction, hosted on US infrastructure. Source code, CI pipelines, secrets, deployment configs. The full chain of custody for what they build. Not because they evaluated the options and picked this. Because the default was good enough, and the default was US.
The tools themselves are fine. Often excellent. The problem isn’t quality. It’s that “good enough and convenient” compounds into something nobody would design on purpose. A continent’s worth of software development, running on infrastructure it doesn’t control, in a jurisdiction it didn’t choose, with pricing models that reward scale they’ll never reach.
There’s a second mechanism at work. Products that win through scale develop a specific disease. They get slower. The interface fills with features most users never touch. Enterprise contracts pull the roadmap away from what small teams need. Every quarter adds surface area. Nothing ever gets removed. The thing that was simple when you started using it isn’t simple anymore, but your workflow is embedded in it now. You stay because leaving is expensive, not because staying is good.
This is the normal lifecycle of developer tools that need to grow. It isn’t malice. It’s incentive structure. When growth is the metric, serving your current users well is never quite enough.
I’ve spent twenty years in this industry. Built products, led engineering and product teams, watched this pattern repeat. At some point I stopped wanting to describe the problem and started wanting to solve a piece of it.
I’m building Codebahn, managed Git hosting and CI for small teams. Built on open source. Swedish company, EU infrastructure, funded by customers. Try it, you might like it.