Methodology, affiliate policy and corrections
What counts as European, how the editor tests products, how affiliate partnerships work, how sources and datasets are handled, and the log of past corrections.
What counts as European
A product is listed only when the company that makes it has its legal headquarters in one of these 32 countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. That is the 27 EU member states, the three other EEA countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Founder nationality does not count: a company incorporated outside these countries, for example in Delaware, is not listed even when its team works in Europe.
The owner counts too. A company whose parent is headquartered outside these countries is not listed, even when the product is built in Europe. Products that are not yet available, such as a waitlist or a private beta, are not listed either.
New submissions are checked against the company's own website and, where one covers the company, an official register: the EU VAT system (VIES), the Global LEI index (GLEIF, which also records direct and ultimate parent companies), the Brønnøysund Register Centre (Norway), ARES (Czechia), the Estonian e-Business Register and Zefix (Switzerland). A parent outside Europe found in GLEIF blocks the listing and cannot be overridden. A register that cannot be reached counts as not checked, never as passed.
Not checked yet: whether a service runs on infrastructure owned by a company outside Europe, such as a US cloud provider or content delivery network.
How we test
Reviews on this site are written by the editor, not by a staff of reviewers. Every product is placed into one of three categories, stated plainly wherever it matters:
- Desk researched: built from the provider's own documentation, pricing pages and support articles, each claim tied to a dated source. No account was created and no feature was used directly.
- Hands-on tested: the editor used the product directly and recorded what happened. A hands-on test record states who ran it, the account state (signed in or out, fresh or existing), the plan or tier used, the dataset or input used for the test, the date it was run, how many runs were made, the results, and the test's limitations. Device and screenshots are recorded when the test involves them. The published DeepL and Google Translate Dutch comparison is an example of this record format: a signed-out, screenshot-free test with its limitations stated openly.
- Confirmed by the company: a factual claim (encryption model, headquarters, ownership) that the provider has confirmed directly, beyond what its own marketing pages state.
Screenshots are reviewed for account or file identifiers before publication; that review removed three unsafe screenshots in the September 2026 corrections (see below). Pricing carries a capture date because prices change; a price without a date should be treated as unverified.
Affiliate policy
Some of the products listed here have affiliate partnerships. When you sign up through a partner link, the editor may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That revenue funds hosting, research time and testing.
Partner status never decides order. Lists, comparison tables, “Which should you choose?” sections and calculator results are ordered without reference to affiliate partnerships. On an alternatives page the order is the editor's judgement of fit for someone leaving that product. A calculator orders by its published score and breaks an exact tie alphabetically. A partner can appear in a separate slot labelled Partner, and partner products carry a Partner badge wherever they are listed.
Commissions do not change verdicts. A verdict or a “Pick it if” line is written from the checked facts on the page, never from whether a commission is paid or how large it is.
Until 29 September 2026 a house rule put the affiliate partner first among otherwise comparable products. That rule is withdrawn. Older blog posts that still follow it are corrected when they are next updated.
Every tracked affiliate link carries rel="sponsored", the attribute search engines expect for a paid or commission-bearing link. The site is cookieless: clicking an affiliate link records the page path, the placement on that page, a CTA identifier and the partner's sub-ID, with no cookie and no visitor identifier attached.
Data and sources
Factual attributes (whether a product is open source, whether it is self-hostable, whether it has a free tier, its headquarters, its parent company, its price) are published only when there is an exact-quote source behind them. When no such source exists, the field is left null rather than approximated or inferred.
Published pricing datasets, such as the European Cloud Storage Cost Index, link every price to the provider's own pricing page and the date we captured it. Prices are never converted between currencies: a price quoted in US dollars is shown in US dollars, a price quoted in euros is shown in euros, and the two are never mixed into a single comparison figure.
Corrections
When a published claim turns out to be wrong, outdated or unsupported, it is corrected and logged here with the date, the pages affected, and a one-sentence summary. Spotted something that belongs on this list? Write to info@builtineu.eu.
Removed a five-star review of Proton Mail that the editor had posted as a community review. Proton Mail is an affiliate partner, and that single review produced the 5.0 rating shown beside it on alternatives pages and in the rating markup read by search engines. Ratings are now summarised, and rating markup emitted, only once a product has three reviews.
Withdrew the house rule that listed an affiliate partner first among otherwise comparable products, which sat beside the homepage line 'Rankings are never sold'. Partner status no longer affects the order of any list, table, 'Which should you choose?' section or calculator result, and paid banners that were labelled 'Editor's pick' are now labelled 'Partner'.
- /, /methodology, /about, /faq
Removed claims the site could not back: that every listing is checked for where your data is hosted (no hosting check exists yet), and a weighted evaluation score (data sovereignty 25 percent and so on) that no process computed. The methodology page now states what counts as European, which registers new submissions are checked against, and what is not checked yet. The About page no longer lists EU candidate countries, which the directory does not accept.
The 'How do I leave Gmail?' route on Switch Lab, and the verdict box of the Proton Mail vs Gmail comparison, linked a migration guide for Outlook. Switch Lab now starts each 'leave' route at the researched comparison for that product (Gmail, Google Drive, Dropbox), and a guide is only linked when it starts from the product being left.
Removed badges from 422 listings that no source supported: 'GDPR Compliant' (a law every listing must follow, not a certification), 'EU-Based' (the flag already shows the country), 'EU-hosted' on 37 companies based outside the EU, and 'Open Source' or 'Self-Hostable' where our own audit found otherwise. Product pages now show plan prices only from a source: our Cloud Storage Cost Index, or a price quoted with the page it came from. Proton Mail's page had shown Mail Plus at €2.99 a month; the price captured from Proton's own page is €4.99 a month, or €47.88 a year. The remaining badges are being re-checked against each vendor's own pages.
- Proton Mail Plus price: https://proton.me/support/proton-plans
The post called Incogni a Lithuanian, EU-based company. Its privacy policy names Incogni Inc., registered in Mission Viejo, California, as the operator. The post now says so, and Incogni is no longer listed.
- Incogni operator: https://incogni.com/privacy-policy
Removed 32 listings. Twenty-six are not European by their own pages or registers: Freedcamp, Venice AI, Authentik, Lightspeed, Incogni, GlitchTip, EspoCRM and Medusa name only companies outside Europe, Omio's site is operated by a Delaware corporation, Exness's site by entities in the Seychelles, Curaçao, the British Virgin Islands and Belize, and Mubi's privacy policy names MUBI Inc., with its terms under California law; GoCardless, Sky, Sky Go and Deliveroo (now part of DoorDash) have US parents in GLEIF, Yonder belongs to TSS, whose parent is Constellation Software (Canada); Pipedrive says its headquarters is in New York; Vonage is a US company owned by Ericsson; Timeneye (now Lucen Track) was bought in 2025 by Lucen Software, a US company, and YouCanBook.me joined Capacity, based in St. Louis, USA; Just Eat is majority-owned by Naspers/Prosus, whose controlling shareholder Naspers is South African; Keycloak, mCaptcha and Kanboard name no European company; IVPN is registered in Gibraltar, which is not on our country list; Easybrain runs a company in Minsk, Belarus. Three no longer exist: dns0.eu, Fortech's website and Infomaniak my Easy Site. ModernMT is closed to new customers and shuts down at the end of 2026, Mullvad's public DNS service ends on 2 November 2026, and EARLY (formerly Timeular) now sends new sign-ups to TimeTac. Corrected the country of ten listings to the one on the company's own legal pages (UptimeRobot SK, DataForSEO EE, Cradle CH, blockbuster.dk SE, BlazingCDN PL, Phare EE, Uptimia DE, PingPing NL, INWX CH, Luminar Neo CY), updated renamed products and moved websites (Platform.sh is Upsun, Yousign is Youtrust, MessageBird is Bird, Lexoffice is Lexware Office), and corrected four founding years to the ones the companies state (eclipso 2003, Passbolt 2017, Plausible 2018, Simple Analytics 2018).
- GoCardless parent: https://search.gleif.org/#/record/25490076D2BHGL7IT794
- IVPN registration: https://www.ivpn.net/en/tos/
- Easybrain offices: https://easybrain.com/
- Mubi operator: https://mubi.com/en/privacy_policy
- YouCanBook.me owner: https://youcanbook.me/about-us
Removed the claim that Gmail reads your emails to serve ads and train AI. It appeared in the excerpt, the opening paragraph and the social copy, and therefore in the article's structured data. Google's own pages state that Gmail messages are not scanned or read to show ads and that personalised ads are not based on Gmail content. The article now states what Google documents that it does process (spam, phishing and malware filtering, and smart features that the user can switch off), notes that Google's no-training commitment is written for Workspace customers rather than consumer Gmail, and relocates the comparison to the encryption model, the jurisdiction and the business model.
- Gmail messages are not scanned or read to show ads: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603
- Personalised ads are not based on content from Drive, Gmail or Photos, and automated systems analyse content to provide features: https://policies.google.com/privacy
- Smart features use Gmail content to personalise the apps and are a setting the user can turn off: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10079371
- Gmail blocks more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing attempts and malware, which requires inspecting message content: https://safety.google/intl/en_us/gmail/
- Google Workspace does not use customer data to train generative AI models without the customer's prior permission or instruction: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/generative-ai-in-google-workspace-privacy-hub
- Proton Mail encrypts message bodies and attachments end to end, but subject lines and sender and recipient addresses are encrypted without being end-to-end encrypted: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
- /research/european-ai-index-2026, /research/european-ai-index-2026/press, /blog/european-ai-companies-2026
Recalculated the European AI Index totals from the company rows. Two comparisons were stated backwards (the European total of $73.16 billion exceeds Cursor's $50 billion, and Germany excluding Helsing exceeds France excluding Mistral), the press kit counted seven countries and five defence companies where the dataset holds six and four, and the Dataset structured data pointed at download URLs that did not exist. Removed a 2020 to 2026 valuation timeline and two graphics whose figures could not be reproduced from the dataset, and replaced a 'triple-sourced' claim with the per-row source links. No company valuation changed; funding rounds and legal headquarters were not re-verified.
Replaced an exposed Proton Drive screenshot with a lossless conversion of Proton's own official version-history illustration. Decoded pixels match, and the retention example is explained as configurable, not a new account test.
- Official Proton help illustration showing configurable version-history retention: https://proton.me/support/version-history
Removed three screenshots and their identifier-bearing captions and alt text (an Internxt dashboard image and two Proton Pass vault screenshots) because they exposed account or item detail. No replacement screenshots were substituted.
Stripped EXIF, XMP and IPTC metadata from 14 inline screenshots, with decoded pixels verified unchanged, and corrected captions describing pCloud's Rewind, encryption and business pricing screens and Proton Pass's import screen so the text matches what each screenshot shows.
Corrected kDrive's encryption model, Proton's ownership structure, and Tresorit's cryptography and business-compliance claims, and removed an unsupported CLOUD Act immunity claim, an unsourced 70 percent statistic, breach guarantees, an acquisition prediction, and stale prices.
- kDrive encrypts at rest and in transit and sits under the Infomaniak foundation's control structure: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/trust-center
- Proton is majority owned by the Proton Foundation: https://proton.me/support/who-owns-protonmail
- Tresorit's headquarters and its majority ownership by Swiss Post: https://tresorit.com/contact
- Tresorit's encryption and ISO 27001:2022 certification, with HIPAA covered by a separate business associate agreement: https://tresorit.com/security
- Internxt's company details and reported security audit results: https://internxt.com/about
- CLOUD Act jurisdiction reaches data within a provider's possession, custody or control regardless of where it is stored: https://www.justice.gov/d9/press-releases/attachments/2019/04/10/department_of_justice_cloud_act_white_paper_2019_04_10_final_0.pdf
Distinguished pCloud's 6 September USD promotional pricing, historical EUR screenshots, and the separately captured 5 September lifetime Crypto price, and made lifetime terms and region-switch costs explicit instead of presenting historical quotes as current offers.
- pCloud's current displayed USD lifetime offers: https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html
- pCloud Crypto yearly price of USD 49.99, with a separately captured USD 150 lifetime price dated 5 September: https://www.pcloud.com/encrypted-cloud-storage.html
- Lifetime means the owner's life or 99 years, whichever is shorter, and the service can cease operating: https://wwwte.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions
- Region selection between Luxembourg and Dallas, and a US$19.99 fee to relocate an account: https://www.pcloud.com/data-regions.html
Removed an obsolete transcript field from the public rendering of a historical pCloud video while preserving the video's ID, date, title and chapters, and added a note that the recording has not been re-recorded or corrected.
Separated Proton Pass account reset from data recovery so losing one recovery method is no longer described as inevitable vault loss, corrected Bitwarden Premium to US$19.80 billed annually before tax with third-party alias costs and offline caveats stated separately, and labelled historical Proton pricing instead of presenting a mixed-currency savings claim as current.
- Proton's account recovery methods and their effect on data recovery: https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods
- Proton Pass desktop offline access and the historical 2024 lifetime offer: https://proton.me/support/how-to-use-proton-pass-desktop-app
- Bitwarden Premium pricing and its alias generator integrations: https://bitwarden.com/pricing/
Required every listed deal to have both active European software and a valid, configured affiliate destination, and rejected empty, unsafe or misassigned links so the page no longer implies a commission-bearing offer where only an ordinary website link exists.
Fixed a campaign mismatch on Proton Pass's affiliate link, resolved historical Proton campaign aliases to their current equivalents, and kept Proton Meet on its ordinary website until an approved affiliate campaign exists for it.
Removed unsupported blanket GDPR, data-use and data-sovereignty claims from free and open-source category pages, in both visible text and structured data, and aligned the visible FAQ answers with what the page's schema markup states.
