There was no EU GitHub for private code. So I built one.

A few months ago I went looking for a home for my private code with three simple requirements: hosted (I want to push code, not babysit a server), structurally sound, and sovereign - actually governed by European law, not just parked in the "EU region" of an American cloud. I found almost nothing.

There are good options if you're publishing open source. But for private code - client work, company code, the things you're contractually not allowed to hand to just anyone - the realistic options came down to two: stay on GitHub and accept the trade-offs, or self-host.

I've spent my career on both sides of that choice: sysadmin and network admin, then backend developer, DevOps specialist, and software architect. I know exactly what it takes to run a forge properly - the updates, the backups, the email deliverability, the monitoring - and I knew I could build the service I was looking for. So I did. It's called gitbuild.dev, and it's live today.

What happened to GitHub

This isn't really about GitHub's interface. It's about structure. GitHub is now part of Microsoft's AI organization. In April, training on user data became the default - opting out is your job now, buried in settings. Some of the highest-signal projects in our industry have already voted with their feet: Zig, FFmpeg, Ghostty, Gentoo.

Jurisdiction trumps geography. Testifying before the French Senate, Microsoft's own French legal chief admitted under oath that he cannot guarantee that data held by Microsoft in Europe is protected from US government demands. That's the CLOUD Act reality: "EU data residency" from an American provider determines where the disk spins, not whose law applies.

The reliability story is slipping. Dozens of major outages in the past twelve months alone. Your git host is now a division of an AI company - and it can't even stay up.

None of this makes GitHub evil. It makes it a rational actor optimizing for someone else's interests. The question worth asking is: whose interests does your git host optimize for?

The gap

If you want out, where do you go? Codeberg is genuinely great - but it's FOSS-only, donation-funded, and not built for commercial private work. (388,000 users, roughly 1,700 paying members: people love sovereign software, but almost nobody funds it.) SourceHut is principled, but its UX is a wall for most teams.

Self-hosting Forgejo is the honest answer many of us give - but it isn't the answer for every freelancer, agency, and company in Europe. There was no commercial, EU-jurisdiction Git forge with a normal, modern UX that a team could simply use. That gap is what gitbuild.dev is built to fill.

Introducing gitbuild.dev

gitbuild.dev is European Git hosting powered by Forgejo - the community-driven forge that the Dutch government chose for code.overheid.nl - plus the commercial layer around it: accounts, billing, operations, and support, run from the Netherlands under Dutch and EU law, end to end.

Two promises define the service. Both are contractual, written into the Terms - not toggles in a dashboard:

• Your code stays in the EU. European datacenters, EU-based sub-processors only, all listed publicly on our infrastructure transparency page. The service is offered exclusively to customers in the EU/EEA.
• Zero AI training. Not opt-out. Never. Your repositories, issues, and metadata are never used to train models. There is an explicit AI-training prohibition clause in the Terms.

And because conviction matters: gitbuild.dev is developed on gitbuild.dev. The platform hosts its own code - GitHub is just a mirror.

What you actually get

The workflow you already know. git push, git pull, merge. Pull requests, issues, code review, SSH and HTTPS. Boring on purpose. There is no AI roadmap.

Free forever for open source. Unlimited public repositories on the free tier. We see gitbuild.dev as a complement to Codeberg, not a competitor: Codeberg for community open source, gitbuild.dev for private and commercial work.

Escape in an afternoon. Import from GitHub in a few clicks - repositories, issues, pull requests, wikis - or set up mirroring and move at your own pace. Every clone is a backup; that's how git works. And there's no lock-in by design: the forge itself is GPLv3 open source, and everything you own can be exported, always.

Privacy in the details

Passwords are screened against known breaches using k-anonymity - only a hash prefix ever leaves the EU, and it's the single third-country data transfer we make. It's disclosed on the transparency page, like everything else.

Sustainable by construction

Free tier, paid plans from €8 a month. Funded by people paying for a service - no data business model, no growth-at-all-costs. That's the whole trick.

It's live

gitbuild.dev is open today. Sign up, import a repository, and be fully moved in an afternoon.

If you're a developer who refuses to let your source code train someone else's model - or a company whose DPO keeps asking where your code legally lives - I built this for you. I genuinely hope it helps the people and companies facing the same problem I ran into.

Ship your code without selling your code. Try gitbuild.dev today - questions or thoughts? Drop a note on our feedback page.