I submitted my project EasyInvoicePDF (a free & open-source invoice generator) a couple of months ago to European Alternatives but never heard back unfortunately.
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
I think the purpose of the site is more about the alternatives to 'large players', platforms and infrastructure companies. Still Constantin Graf should have clarified out of politeness but possibly he's busy or doesn't have time to respond to every email.
However I'd point out there is a market for European 'Product Hunt' that would include more of these smaller projects.
Older members of HN will remember that Product Hunt probably came to life a lot because of HN and the submissions/comments from rrhoover (founder of Product Hunt). He's still active here, but before/during Product Hunt launch he was very active if I remember correctly.
Maybe a grander idea is a European Hacker News, that has the potential to spawn the European Product Hunts of tomorrow :)
I can see it now, if you have a European Hacker news, you'll have a bunch of people complaining about how Europe isn't the world and admonish posters to not be so eurocentric on the site --that other people besides Europeans would read it... but anyway, good luck on the endeavour.
I already have this feeling on french-speaking forums where everything is very France-centric despite there are french speaking people from other countries reading it.
I don't know that an EU Hacker News makes sense, a core EU idea is Freedom of Movement.
This started out as an ideal about Goods. You make a Doodad in Venice, clearly there should be as few obstacles as possible to prevent somebody in Dublin having that Doodad, so no export taxes between Venice and Dublin, shared regulatory framework so that your Venice "This Doodad won't choke a baby/ burn down a house/ spy on you/ etc." paperwork is valid in Dublin, and so on.
But immediately people who make goods said well this rule needs to include Capital, it's great that I can sell Doodads from Venice in Dublin, but if I want to build a Doodad factory in Venice but my money is in Dublin that should be easy too. And Workers realised if it's just Capital and Goods then it's a race to the bottom for Labour, the Capital and Goods will go where it's cheapest but the workers can't move. So very soon Workers can move freely too, in order that Hans the Doodad Engineer can move to Venice and the courts ended up deciding that in practice everybody gets this freedom, a 5 year old can't have a job and a 105 year old probably doesn't want one, but maybe Hans needs to support his 5 year old grand-daughter and his 105 year old grandfather, so Freedom of Movement must apply to all EU citizens.
So, with that idea in mind, I suspect the EU's perspective is that you should come to Europe and write software here, rather than that you should stay exactly where you are and if it's not an EU country then too bad, no EU Product Hunt for you.
I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Yes, a core idea is freedom of movement, but you make no case for why that makes EU Hacker News infeasible? It has nothing to do with where people write software. I'm using US Hacker News, and I'm in Europe, is that wrong/bad, or what's your argument here?
EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless. The EU should avoid key US dependencies, but that means things like we shouldn't design a system that needs Microsoft's stupid "Co-pilot 365" or whatever they are now calling Word and Excel, rather than it's important never to visit a web site hosted in the US.
"The new government policy shouldn't require iPhones" is a long way from "Nobody can read The Onion", and even in its hardcore "Sign up for YCombinator" mode Hacker News really isn't anywhere close to the former.
Although because idiots I am no longer in the EU I'm in Europe too.
Just seems needless. Like "We should have Hacker News for musicians" or "We should have Hacker News for City Dwellers". I think there's more value from the broader audience than from specialising what is already a fairly niche site. This isn't Facebook or Youtube, it's both less technically sophisticated (no offence to Dan & co keeping it working) but also much smaller in scope.
I'm sure musicians and city dwellers could have some stories they're more interested in versus less interested in, but this gets into the newsgroup hierarchy problem where too much specialisation means there's nothing left to talk about. We presumably agree that a Hacker News for people named Brian who work at Meta is a bad idea?
I used to think like you, but in the last few years I have become tired of American-dominated spaces that ignore other world views and push their narratives endlessly, so I am very much in favour of European-focused forums and social media.
I am sorry but no. This is a common myth, but go way back to the original treaty of Rome and you’ll see much more than free movement for goods. It was just a convenient first step.
I don't think creating an invoice is "niche". It is such a common need for users that invoicing software should be included in the operating system application suite. (Which it is somewhat if you consider Pages invoice templates).
Millions and millions of people need to make and send invoices. Many more than people who need domain name registrars, uptime monitoring services, content delivery networks, or microblogging services.
Open-source security framework (1). Applied 16 August 2025. Company registered in Switzerland (EFTA). No reply.
However, European Alternatives is a personal (sole proprietorship) website and has nothing to do with Europe, despite the name and style, which are slightly misleading as they mimic official EU website aesthetics.
I have been working on https://1launch.eu for the past two months. Very MVP stage. I don't plan to be in the same niche as european-alternatives, but it is very much inspired by this. It is largely meant to be a ProductHunt / AngelList for Europe with a couple of key features especially for the European market (like instant translation into all 24 languages of the EU to launch in the whole European market in one go). If you want to launch on the platform or want to be involved in a different way, send me an email on hackernews@1launch.eu
Euro-Stack.eu is a scam that promotes European software using:
A wordpress.com based website hosted in California by the US company Auttomatic
Fronted by Cloudflare, a US monopoly (this is probably part of wordpress.com paid subscription)
Edits its letter to EU Commission asking to support European IT industry in Microsoft Word.
Converts it to PDF with Adobe software
I think the biggest issue is that your product is not from a company generating money (and taxes).
IMO as an european, I think we should aim for open source, not corporate software, but free and open source software is generating way less jobs and taxes money.
The site has a lot of open source projects though, in fact i found about copyparty[0] from it because it was listed as an alternative to file hosting services (though it was removed since then, probably because it isn't a service :-P but still there are various FLOSS projects).
The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project =)
App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf