IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Five prevalent themes in the discussion

  1. Cloudflare’s dominance and the lure of its free tier
    Many commenters note that Cloudflare’s free offering (especially Tunnels and DDoS protection) makes it the default choice, often overwhelming competitors.
  2. “People rarely reach for a CDN. They only ever reach for Cloudflare. Nobody's reaching for Akamai without a good sales pitch, nobody's tossing up between Akamai and Cloudflare, everyone's using CF because it's free.” — mitxela

  3. “Cloudflare is a great service and nearly free on low traffic sites.” — arjie

  4. Technical strengths and limits of Cloudflare
    Praise for features like Tunnels, edge scripting, and DDoS mitigation is balanced by criticism of missing capabilities (e.g., limited dev‑experience, API key restrictions) and the cost of using tunnels.

  5. “They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.” — CommanderData (highlighting a key Cloudflare advantage)
  6. “They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.” — tao_oat

  7. “Lots of people will run http over the tunnel rather than https, so that actually comes out cheaper for CF overall because they don't have to start new TLS sessions.” — viraptor

  8. Privacy, surveillance, and data‑collection concerns
    The man‑in‑the‑middle nature of Cloudflare’s TLS termination raises worries about NSA or other intelligence‑agency access to traffic.

  9. “The hidden cost, of course, is the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.” — pocksuppet
  10. “Well it is known SSL termination servers are a popular target…” — bcye (referencing known NSA tapping of SSL termination)

  11. “The NSA couldn't care less about you and your customers, nor do they have any interest whatsoever in the megaton of worthless internet traffic that goes through Cloudflare.” — strictnein (counter‑view)

  12. Maturity and support of European alternatives (e.g., Bunny.net)
    While Bunny.net and similar services are cheaper, users cite limited feature sets, questionable support channels, and occasional reliability issues.

  13. “I tried them with our small company. They seem … young. Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners. We sent a ticket that activating some of their services instantly caused bad bots to scan our site, and never got a decent reply on that.” — jarco
  14. “There is a normal support ticket system not on Discord, which they loudly advertise for having a very good response time. The Discord server is not the primary support method.” — bcye

  15. “We use them en they have improved a lot in the last year. For edge services they have all the important thing like ddos protection and edge scripting. There is no replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel, but frp [1] is a good alternative.” — frevib

  16. Geopolitical / sovereignty worries: EU dependence on US tech
    Several participants frame the dominance of Cloudflare (and US tech generally) as a strategic risk, citing political will, possible retaliation, and the difficulty of building a truly European alternative.

  17. “US domination of 'tech' is near total… unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.” — noir_lord
  18. “Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.” — embedding-shape
  19. “While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine.” — microtonal

🚀 Project Ideas

EuroShield CDN

Summary

  • A privacy‑first CDN that does not terminate TLS (uses Encrypted Client Hello/ECH) so origin traffic stays encrypted end‑to‑end, eliminating the NSA/TLS‑termination concern raised by HN users.
  • Provides DDoS mitigation at the network layer (IP reputation, rate‑limiting, challenge/response) without inspecting plaintext, offering the same “free DDoS” feel Cloudflare users love but with GDPR‑compliant data handling.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience EU‑based businesses, developers, and site owners who want Cloudflare‑like performance without exposing plaintext to a middleman
Core Feature TLS‑passthrough edge network with built‑in DDoS protection, global anycast, and optional caching of static assets
Tech Stack Anycast BGP routing (FRR), eBPF/XDP for packet filtering, NGINX/Envoy for optional caching, Rust‑based control plane, Prometheus/Grafana for metrics
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: tiered pricing based on bandwidth + requests (free tier up to 10 GB/mo, paid tiers start at €5/mo)

Notes

  • HN commenters worried about “the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers” (pocksuppet, mitxela) and about Cloudflare being a “MITM project” – EuroShield removes that MITM step.
  • Addresses the desire for a European alternative that “doesn’t have the crappier bits of CF” (jarym) while still offering “free DDoS” protection that many small sites rely on (mschuster91, stronglikedan).

TunnelEU

Summary

  • An open‑source reverse‑tunnel service (similar to Cloudflare Tunnel) hosted exclusively in EU data centers, allowing users to expose local services via a persistent outbound connection without opening inbound firewall ports.
  • Includes automatic certificate management (Let’s Encrypt/EU‑based CA) and integrates with EuroShield CDN for edge delivery and DDoS shielding.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers, SMEs, and hobbyists who need to expose internal web services, APIs, or IoT devices securely (e.g., for remote access, webhooks, or dev‑preview)
Core Feature Persistent outbound TLS/WireGuard tunnel from client to EU edge nodes, with HTTP/SNI routing, automatic certs, and optional mTLS
Tech Stack Go (client daemon), Rust (edge proxy), WireGuard/TLS, PostgreSQL for config, Docker/Kubernetes for edge deployment, CI/CD via GitHub Actions
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby (free self‑hostable binaries; optional hosted premium relay at €2/mo per active tunnel)

Notes

  • Users explicitly missed “Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up” (CommanderData) and asked for a European equivalent (“frp [1] is a good alternative” – frevib). TunnelEU offers a drop‑in replacement with EU jurisdiction.
  • Solves the support pain point: “Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners” (jarco) – TunnelEU provides clear documentation, ticket‑based support, and SLA for the hosted relay.

EuroEdge

Summary

  • A serverless edge‑functions platform (Workers‑compatible) that runs user code in EU‑only locations, with data‑residency guarantees for KV storage and D1‑style SQLite, enabling GDPR‑compliant compute at the edge.
  • Built on WebAssembly/WasmTime for language‑agnostic support (JS, Rust, C, etc.) and integrates with EuroShield CDN for caching and routing.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers building Jamstack apps, APIs, or edge‑logic who require EU data residency and want to avoid US‑based function-as‑a‑service
Core Feature Deploy JS/Wasm functions at edge nodes, with automatic scaling, built‑in KV store, and optional durable SQLite (D1‑like) storage, all EU‑hosted
Tech Stack Wasmtime/WASI, Rust‑based runtime, etcd for KV, SQLite for durable storage, Envoy for traffic routing, GitHub‑based CI for deployments
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: pay‑per‑invocation (first 1M free) + GB‑second compute + storage (pricing similar to Cloudflare Workers but EU‑only)

Notes

  • Commenters praised Cloudflare Workers (“edge scripting, Edge workers, databases (Sqlite compatible) etc.” – sparkling) but lamented lack of EU alternatives. EuroEdge gives them the same dev experience with data staying in the EU.
  • Addresses the sovereignty concern: “EU should… Invite the UK back in once they are an economic powerhouse… Invest heavily in telecom and data center infrastructure” (quadrifoliate) – EuroEdge is a concrete step toward that goal.

BotGuard EU

Summary

  • A bot‑mitigation service focused on stopping AI scrapers, LLM crawlers, and abusive bots while preserving user privacy (no fingerprinting, uses privacy‑preserving challenges and behavioral analysis).
  • Offers JavaScript challenges, rate‑limiting per IP/ASN, and optional CAPTCH‑free interaction, with detailed analytics that are aggregated and anonymized.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Site owners, blogs, APIs, and public‑facing services experiencing high traffic from AI scrapers or botnets (e.g., sites seeing “AI scrapers” spikes – spiderfarmer)
Core Feature Real‑time bot scoring using TLS fingerprinting, JA3, request‑behavior heuristics, and lightweight JS challenges; automated mitigations (rate limit, redirect, or serve static fallback)
Tech Stack Rust‑based edge service (running on EuroShield nodes), ClickHouse for aggregated analytics, Prometheus for metrics, optional Cloudflare‑compatible Workers script for easy onboarding
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: priced per million requests (e.g., €0.50 per 1M requests) with a free tier up to 100k requests/mo

Notes

  • Users noted “spend 40 euros per month, with 75% because of AI scrapers” (spiderfarmer) and wanted a way to curb that cost without over‑blocking legitimate traffic.
  • BotGuard EU offers a privacy‑friendly alternative to invasive bot‑management tools, addressing the HN thread’s desire for effective protection without compromising user data (mitxela’s concerns about rate‑limiting being insufficient).

EuroStack

Summary

  • An all‑in‑one developer portal that bundles EuroShield CDN, DNS, EuroEdge Workers, TunnelEU, and BotGuard EU under a unified billing, UI, and SLA, with EU‑based support (ticket system, email, phone) and transparent data‑processing agreements.
  • Aimed at businesses seeking to replace Cloudflare with a European‑hosted, GDPR‑compliant stack without losing functionality.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience European SMEs, startups, and tech teams that want a single vendor for CDN, DNS, edge compute, tunneling, and bot protection, with local support and compliance guarantees
Core Feature One‑stop dashboard to manage domains, CDN settings, edge functions, tunnel connections, and bot rules; consolidated invoicing; EU‑based support with SLAs
Tech Stack React/TypeScript frontend, Go/backend microservices, PostgreSQL for billing/config, Kafka for event streaming, deployed on EuroShield‑powered Kubernetes clusters across EU regions
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: subscription plans (Starter €19/mo includes 100 GB CDN, 1M Workers invocations, 5 active tunnels; Business €99/mo scales up; Enterprise custom)

Notes

  • HN users complained “Support on discord is not something I can sell to our owners” (jarco) and wanted a European alternative that “doesn’t have the crappier bits of CF” (jarym). EuroStack provides proper business‑grade support and a feature‑complete stack.
  • Addresses the broader desire for EU sovereignty: “EU should… Invite the UK back in… Invest heavily in telecom and data center infrastructure” (quadrifoliate) – EuroStack is a concrete product that keeps traffic, data, and control within Europe.

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