| ▲ | dmk 5 hours ago |
| Good list but the biggest missing piece for most new SaaS products right now is AI/LLM APIs. If you're building anything with AI features you're calling OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar - all US. Mistral exists but the ecosystem around it is much thinner. That's probably the hardest US dependency to drop in 2026 that I can think of. Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns. |
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| ▲ | mjorgers 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders. [1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/generative-apis/reference-c... |
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| ▲ | wcallahan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter). |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | tmpz22 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What are some useful ways SaaS companies are using AI? Great way to axe your customer support team. |
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| ▲ | joshvm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics). By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task. | |
| ▲ | sheiyei 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Great ways to get buzzwords on your investor slides! | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity". | | |
| ▲ | sheiyei 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mostly meant getting to call your product barely used AI toilet paper instead of just barely used toilet paper. | | |
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| ▲ | sassymuffinz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field! Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind. |
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| ▲ | cedws 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apparently AWS's European Sovereign Cloud has Bedrock, so that could be an option. |
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| ▲ | sparkling 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The AWS Sovereign Cloud is still owned 100% by Amazon Inc. in the US. Not saying that rules it out for all use cases, but something that should be mentioned. "Sovereignty" is a somewhat vague term. | |
| ▲ | well_ackshually 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | <American Company> European means nothing. They are all subject to the US Cloud Act, and the moment you start using their services, it inevitably has one or two services that end up contacting us-east-1 anyways. And that's without taking into account that they are all trying to fuck you over from.behind anyways as they sign data exchange agreements between Europe and the US. The large US players are not an option if you want your data safe from the US. | | |
| ▲ | cedws 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I haven't looked into the details but I remember from the announcement that the EU cloud is owned specifically by an EU entity headed by EU citizens. There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US. | | |
| ▲ | Garlef 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | ... And this entity is again owned by AWS. And so the cloud act still applies. > There would be no point spinning up a 'sovereign cloud' beholden to the US. Of course: It gives (both sides) a narrative that let's them pretend everything is alright. | | |
| ▲ | progbits 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Edit: Looks like the below is not true. However, such setup is technically possible and if they were serious about making it truly isolated from US influence, it can be done. Original comment: No it's not owned by AWS. It's a separate legal entity with EU based board and they license the technology from the US company. | | |
| ▲ | Garlef 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This source says it's 100% owned by AWS USA: https://openregister.de/company/DE-HRB-G1312-40853 | | |
| ▲ | progbits 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hmm I'm not sure how to interpret that page but it looks like you are right, I'll edit my comment. I was told by GCP PMs that is how the GCP/tsystems setup is structured (see sibling comment) and that it mirrored AWS setup, but maybe that was not correct. |
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| ▲ | overfeed 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How difficult would it be for the "independent" licensor to exfiltrate data from the "sovereign cloud" via logging or replication? The control-planes have to be completely independent for anything approaching real independence, not just some legal fiction that's lightly different[1] from the traditional big-tech practice of having an Irish subsidiary licensing the parent company's tech for tax optimization purposes. 1. No different at all, according to sibling comment. | | |
| ▲ | progbits 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't know about AWS but I dealt with some (small / tangential) aspects of the GCP setup: https://www.t-systems.com/dk/en/sovereign-cloud/solutions/so... It is completely separate. There isn't a shared control plane. You don't manage this in the GCP console, its a separate white-label product. Any updates GCP wants to push are sent as update bundles that must be reviewed and approved by the operator (tsystems). During an outage, the GCP oncall or product team has no access and talks to operator who can run commands or queries on their behalf, or share screenshots of monitoring graphs etc. (This information is ~3 years stale, but this was such fundamental design principle that I strongly doubt it has changed) |
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| ▲ | UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How would the cloud act apply if none of the employees of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud are US citizens? | | |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so. Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now. |
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| ▲ | dmk 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast. | | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Openrouter gives you exactly what you want and your choice of a huge number of models. |
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