This summer we moved every part of Playerence onto European infrastructure. Not mostly. Not the database but not the email. All of it.
I want to be straight about why, because the usual version of this announcement is a compliance story, and that is not my reason. It is part of it, but it is not the reason.
If you have arrived here from somewhere other than our product pages, some context. Playerence is a gamification marketing platform. Marketing teams use it to build quizzes, advent calendars and campaigns that people come back to more than once, and those campaigns collect customer data along the way. Which is precisely why where that data lives is not an academic question.
The reason is that I think we should buy local
I am a European founder (Belgian) running a Swedish company serving European customers. It always sat wrong with me that I could not tell you your data lived solely on European soil.
Where we spend matters. Every euro that leaves for an American hyperscaler is a euro that does not build a European supplier, employ European engineers, or keep the capability to run our own digital infrastructure inside our own economy. Europe spent two decades outsourcing that capability and is now discovering what it costs to rent something you cannot build.
So where a European supplier can do the job, we buy from the European supplier. That is a choice, not a compliance exercise, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up as something more neutral. I also felt that we didn’t want to be exposed or exposing our clients to highly changeable tariff strategies which would impact us significantly if they came to fruition.
The part that is not about feelings
I am a designer, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. But two things are worth knowing, because they shaped what I built.
The US CLOUD Act of 2018 lets US authorities compel a US-headquartered provider to hand over data it controls, regardless of which country the server sits in. Ownership decides that, not geography. A European data centre run by an American company is still run by an American company.
As a lot of you know because of our data processing agreements is that we used to host our infrastructure on the EU- West and North servers on AWS owned by Amazon. We did enquire about their European cloud, which ironically was line for line more expensive than the original one even if those were equally hosted in Europe. It would have been easier to migrate to a like for like structure. But they remain an American company carrying the same risks no matter which part of their business we pay. Their team was unwilling to answer that question and also took me for a fool when quoting higher prices on each line and telling me it was a great deal.
And the current arrangement for EU to US data transfers, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, rests on a US executive order. It is valid: the EU General Court dismissed a challenge to it in September 2025. But it is also the third such arrangement in ten years. Safe Harbour lasted fifteen years before the Court struck it down in 2015. Privacy Shield lasted four before the Court struck it down in 2020.
I have no idea whether the current one holds. What I do know is that I did not want to rebuild my infrastructure every time a court rules or an administration changes its mind, and I did not want to carry that risk on my customers’ behalf.
Moving the whole thing to European suppliers takes the question off the table rather than answering it. It makes it less risky financially as well as in terms of infrastructure.
Where everything lives now
Vague claims about European hosting are easy to make, so here is the full list.
- UpCloud, Finland. Our servers and our database.
- Scaleway, France. Email delivery.
- Bunny, Slovenia. Content delivery and caching.
- Raidboxes, Germany. Our website.
Four providers, four EU countries, all European-owned rather than European branch offices of companies headquartered elsewhere.
And who can reach it
Infrastructure is only half the question. The other half is who can log in.
Our whole team works inside the EU. We are remote-first but we are not borderless. Nobody accesses your data from outside the European Union. By moving off the AWS stack we also removed our only US-based team member who had already moved to another role in any case, so it was better for everyone.
What it cost us
On 3 August, Playerence was down from 13:20 to 16:55 CEST. Quizzes and calendars could not be reached for three and a half hours.
The cause was us. As part of the migration we switched off a legacy server we were confident nobody was using. It still held hardcoded links to fonts and other assets, and once it went dark those broken links stopped pages loading. It took longer than it should have to find.
No data was lost, and we then swept the entire platform for other legacy leftovers. But I am not going to write about a migration and leave out the afternoon it broke. If you run campaigns on somebody else’s platform, you deserve to know how they behave when it goes wrong.
What it means for you
Your data stays in Europe. A cleaner answer for your own GDPR obligations, with no transatlantic caveats to explain to a compliance team. If yours wants documentation, ask and we will send it.
It costs less, not more. This surprised us. When we asked AWS to quote for keeping everything inside their European cloud, the number came back higher than their global setup. Same service, line for line, more money, because the data would stay in Europe. We chose not to pay a premium for that, and the European providers came in lower.
More green. Both our marketing website, app and database now work off green powered servers. So whilst we are aware technology does impact the environment, having the choice to have a greener service mattered to us and I hope to you too.
What this is not
Plenty of platforms host in Europe, and a good many of our competitors genuinely do. I am not going to pretend a European server is a feature nobody else has.
What is less common is being able to name every provider, say who can log in and from where, and hand over the documentation without a meeting first. That is the test worth applying to any supplier, us included.
One more thing that came out of it
Moving gave us the excuse to rebuild Playerence’s data layer on a modern PostgreSQL foundation, which was overdue.
The first thing it unlocks is more quiz and questions types, that don’t clash with one another for attention and then also conditional logic, so a quiz can send players down different paths depending on how they answer. That is one of the more useful things you can do in gamification marketing, because it turns a single campaign into a segmented one without asking anybody to fill in a form. It is on the development schedule now.
Migrations are rarely fun and this one was less fun than most. Buying European was still the right call, and I would make it again.
