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DESeptember 7, 2026
Eurava is a directory of physical products, but the question that started it applies just as much to the services running on our screens. Before we built the site we tried, as an experiment, to move our own working lives onto European services one category at a time. This is what we learnt. We are deliberately not naming products here: the market moves quickly, our experience is one household’s, and asserting facts about companies we have not researched would be exactly the thing this site exists to avoid.
The easiest switch and the one most worth making. Several European providers offer mailboxes with a custom domain, calendars and contacts, and the migration is mostly a matter of patience: forward the old address, move the archive, update the logins that matter over a few months. The friction is not technical. It is that your email address is your identity to a hundred services, and changing it means touching every one. Do it once, on a domain you own, and you never have to do it again.
Search
Harder, and the one where the honest answer is mixed. European search engines exist and have improved, and for most everyday queries they are perfectly usable. For obscure technical questions the results are sometimes thinner, and you notice. Some rely partly on indexes from larger non-European engines, which is worth knowing when deciding what you are actually switching to. Our approach was to set a European engine as the default and keep another a keystroke away. After a few weeks the keystroke was rarely needed.
Maps
The category where the gap is widest, and where we were most tempted to give up. Open, collaboratively maintained map data is excellent in many European cities and patchy elsewhere, and the apps built on it vary a great deal in polish. Live traffic, transit timetables and business opening hours are where the large incumbents have spent a decade and it shows. We now use a European app for walking, cycling and planning, and accept that there are journeys where we still reach for something else. Partial is an honest badge for maps.
Cloud storage and documents
More options than we expected, ranging from simple file sync to full office suites, and several hosted entirely on European infrastructure. The switch was easy for files and harder for collaboration, because collaboration means persuading other people to switch too. We kept one non-European account purely for documents shared with people who were not going to move. The lesson: your own storage is your decision; shared storage is a negotiation.
The questions we now ask
Doing this made us more careful about what “European” means for a service, and the questions turned out to be the same ones we ask about a factory:
- Who owns the company, all the way up, and where is it incorporated?
- Where are the servers, and who operates the data centre? A European brand on non-European infrastructure is a thinner claim than it looks.
- Whose law applies to the data, and can the answer change if the company is sold?
- What does it depend on underneath? Many services are a European layer over someone else’s index, model or cloud.
None of these has a moral answer. A service can be excellent and non-European, or European and mediocre. But if the point of switching is where your data and your money end up, it is worth knowing where they actually end up. That is the same principle as a provenance badge, applied to something you cannot hold.