And if you’d like to do something more, reach out to all the online shops you use that don’t yet offer WERO as a payment method and let them know that this is something you, as a customer, would like to see.

Hi everyone! I'm Teije, founder of Cheqi, a Dutch startup.

About 7 years ago, I started wondering why we'd completely digitalized payments but were still getting paper receipts, or PDFs scattered across inboxes and retailer apps.

I wanted to change that. One problem: I had absolutely ZERO programming skills.

So at 28, I went back to school to study Software Engineering alongside my full-time job.

Four years later, while lying in a hammock on holiday, it suddenly came back.

THOSE DAMNED PAPER RECEIPTS!

But this time, I actually knew how to build it! I opened my laptop and haven't really stopped since.

The result is Cheqi.

At connected merchants, Cheqi users simply pay with their card and receive their receipts automatically, end-to-end encrypted, in their wallet or connected accounting and expense apps.

Everyone else scans a QR code for an encrypted browser receipt. No app or account needed.

We've already built integrations with Odoo and Moneybird, with Dutch POS providers next.

The goal? No more paper receipts, no more digging through retailer apps and portals, and no more giving stores your email just to get a receipt (and somehow their newsletter too).

Would you use something like this?

https://cheqi.io

After retiring from it for months, since it really fell off, I recently tried Vibe Chat – the new name of Le Chat and I have to say, I'm amazed.

The chat is now very good, having a Work (Cowork-like) mode as a default chat option which really makes it useful, even compared to ChatGPT and Claude, since it natively creates files and analyzes files instinctively, without needing to use Cowork etc. I have also scheduled newsletter and portfolio analysis jobs set up, which function much better with tool integrations than Gemini and in some cases even Claude. It has a free mode which has very large allowance, that has rarely ever ran out for me even with token heavy task.

On conversation side, I find it to be a much better conversationalist than Opus 5.5 or Gemini Argon, especially when trying to discuss humanities or philosophical question or just having a normal debate or brainstorming session.

I am not saying it's a Claude replacement, since it's still not catching up on the most complex tasks, but for normal daily queries, for free mode or very cheap student mode, it's awesome. My new favourite for daily quick searches and smaller-scope tasks.

Hello again, BuyFromEU!

In April, I posted here about the project we, a small Ukrainian team, have been building for quite some time. Back then, it was a web-only feed with a whitepaper and a 20m long video explainer with me talking to the camera. You were far kinder than the internet usually is, and your comments here made us keep going and shaped the seven months since. Before I jump on what’s been done since, here is a short tldr for what differentiates our feed from other news feeds:

1. posts/news only get in the feed when the community members have consensus that they should.
2. When voting, people are asked a more explicit question about whether they think community members will find it worth reading.
3. mods are not permanent and auto-rotated based on their track record of alignment with the community.
4. no ads, no tracking, no engagement algo, and we don’t need to count likes/upvotes/views for it to work.

Short explainer (~2m): https://youtu.be/Gr_WvVuHrwc

Full explainer: https://veridonia.com/how-it-works 

The project itself: https://veridonia.com 

What’s been done since:

Without an app, I'd forget it in a day.

Absolutely right. The honest answer is that I spent 12y as a web engineer and 0 as a mobile engineer, so it took a little bit of learning to solve this properly. It's now on iOS and Android.

What kind of communities is it for?

Back then, I replied that it is best for nationwide news, but at the same time treated it as a full-fledged European Reddit alternative, which meant news+hobby communities. Now I see I made a strategic mistake, so we decided to double down on making it what our voting system is best designed to do- being, most of all, a great European news feed, while keeping hobby communities possible but not the main focus.

You are, as always, most welcome to give it a try and tell us what you think - I can assure you your feedback will be much appreciated and likely taken into account. Cheers!

Hey everyone! ​Someone recently shared a link with me about a brand based in Augsburg, Germany—Manomama—and I had no idea they existed!

​For a bit of context: Augsburg has a rich history in textiles dating back centuries to the era of the Fugger family—in fact, the German idiom "betucht sein" (literally "to be well-clothed/clothed in fine fabrics", meaning wealthy) originates from this local heritage. Over the decades, most of the big textile production moved away, but it’s super exciting to see European companies slowly reviving this tradition locally.

​It’s always great to discover local alternatives producing right here in Europe instead of relying on fast fashion from overseas.

​Have any of you come across other hidden gems or traditional textile hubs in Europe that are making a comeback? Would love to hear your recommendations!

Hello to the community. I stumble upon this search meta engine https://uruky.com but I haven't found any real information about it apart from an interview from the owner of the service. So I'm reaching out the community to see if anyone has used it already for some insights on how it works. It looks like Kagi, but I'm not so sure.

I am looking for running gear and shoes that is from eu.

specially for women and with pockets.

hoping someone can help me

It’s getting cold here in Northern Europe and I need boots to keep my feet dry and warm. What should I buy? I’m talking about everyday boots, for work etc. not for trekking.

I don’t have a budget for €4-500 boots, so that would be the total max.

In recent years, the Swiss army has considered collaborating with Palantir five times but rejected overtures from the controversial  United States technology company each time.

This is shown by research conducted by the online magazine Republik and the research collective WAV. According to the research, one reason was concern about the security of confidential data.

“We not only discovered these five contacts between experts from the Swiss army, but also the reasons why the cooperation was rejected,” Balz Oertli, one of the journalists involved in the Palantir investigation, told Swiss public broadcaster (RSI). “In three of the five cases, it was the lack of control over the data that led to the rejection.”

For the army experts, it was a question of sovereignty in handling confidential information. “They obviously didn’t trust Palantir enough,” Oertli concludes.

The journalistic investigation into Palantir was conducted at the European level through a collaboration between various media outlets. It revealed a contract volume of €1.44 billion for Palantir in Europe. The tech company generates the majority of its total revenue of approximately €4 billion in the US.

I canceled my Office 365 subscription and want to replace it. Right now I got an Openmediavault NAS und a Windows Laptop. I installed LibreOffice and it works for me. What I am missing is a cloud backup of my documens. In Office I just saved them in the cloud and could open them anywhere I want from another computer. I want to replicate that, I do not want to save my documents on my laptop I want them central on my NAS where it also has a proper backup. Can you recommend something?

Cloud infrastructure is now as critical as energy, transport and telecommunications. we need our own secure European-controlled alternatives.

A friend of mine couldn't pay for his shopping at Tesco with his Revolut debit card.

Recording, transcribing and summarizing online meetings is a great service - but so far I have not seen a European alternative. Does it exist?

And as someone who just used this product for the first time today, I can confirm it is of top toer quality! ☺️

Hi

Christmas is coming up, and I could use a new LED flashlight. The one I have now is a cheap one I bought years ago from eBay. It never really worked, so I think it's time for some European quality.

I need something small, rechargeable and durable.
I know about Varta, but I'm not sure the flashlights are built in the EU.

Any brand recommendations are most welcome.

Hi all,

I am the founder of Vault42, and I am trying to find out whether there is interest in a hosted Forgejo service built around EU sovereignty and independence from big tech. Forgejo is an open-source Git hosting platform that I think deserves wider use, so we will donate 5% of our plan revenue to the project.

Vault42 is meant for freelancers, small agencies and small teams who want their code in the EU but have no one to spare for running their own servers. We handle the hosting, upgrades, security patches and backups. The plan is to offer:

• Forgejo for Git hosting
• Servers at Scaleway, a European cloud provider
• CI/CD runners
• Dependency vulnerability alerts on every plan
• Daily backups
• Custom domains, so your code lives at your own address

Vault42 has no US parent company and uses only EU-based subprocessors, so your code is not subject to the US CLOUD Act. ISO 27001 certification is a goal for later on.

The focus is on private and commercial repositories. Codeberg serves open-source projects very well, but its terms are not intended for private commercial work, which is the gap we want to fill. There will also be a free plan for open source with unlimited public repositories, as another option alongside Codeberg.

If this interests you, you can join the waitlist at vault42.eu.

I would especially like to hear from people who have considered leaving GitHub or GitLab: what would make you switch, and what has stopped you so far?

Marijn

Just as a note: it could be likely, that if there is a narrow margin win, or the Dems don't take the Senate, the US will not change due to the Democrats that flipped Republican (this is why Leaders We Deserve is trying to increase the margin).

Should the Blue Wave not happen or not be effective, what are you willing to do to send a message to the US?

Hello! I recently had to move to a different office at work, and as my coworkers had warned, the insulation here is terrible. Heatwaves are (finally) over in my region, so I'm left freezing at my desk.

So yeah, does anyone have glove recommendations?

Preferably fingerless gloves because I need to type on a keyboard. Bonus point if said gloves are made of natural fibers (no hate on synthetic fibers, they have various purposes but I prefer natural fibers for clothes that have direct contact with my skin).

Thank you for reading ❄ (ó﹏ò｡) ❄

I recently created an account on an audiobook platform from Sweden (for some reason 3 of the 4 Audible alternatives are from Sweden).

I'm in France but I like to listen to audiobooks in Italian, and when I subscribed I had the website language set to Italian. To my surprise they blocked my subscription based on my Bank information. If you want to access the "Italy market" you need an Italian bank account. VPN didn't help, it was specifically about the bank info.

I understand these streaming platforms have licensing agreements with publishers. But why isn't the EU treated as a single market?

I had to create a separate account, pay with my French bank. And now I feel the catalog of books in Italian is smaller. And the search engine won't let me remove French content from the search results so it's much harder to find things, the entire experience is French-oriented which I never asked for.

I also noticed the subscription price is different which I find very weird.

Similary on Netflix I noticed that the catalogs of available movies/shows are quite different when I'm in France vs when I'm in Spain.

Why isn't the EU treated as a single entity for licensing rights?

Why can't these platforms let me set my preferred language independently of my location?