I built a directory of EU software alternatives. Then HN pointed out I was running it on Cloudflare.

only-eu.eu is a directory of verified European alternatives to common US software. Proton instead of Gmail, filen instead of Dropbox, that kind of thing. 332 pages, EN and DE, 88+ products. This is about how it's built. Some decisions I'd make again. One I had to fix while 6,100 people were on the site. Why Astro The site is content: product pages, category pages, a landing page. No user accounts, no dynamic feeds, nothing that needs a server at render time. Astro was the obvious fit. Static output, fast builds, and you only ship client-side JS where you explicitly add it. In practice the site has two interactive elements: a "switch tool" widget on the homepage (shows EU alternatives based on what US tool you use) and a suggestion modal for submitting new products. Both are Astro islands. Everything else is plain HTML from the build. Build time for 332 pages is around 40 seconds. That includes generating both language variants for every product and category page from a single TypeScrip