Hi all,
I am trying to find out if there is interest in a hosted Forgejo service with a strong emphasis on EU sovereignty and independence from big tech. Forgejo is an open-source Git hosting platform that I think is great and deserves wider use. For that reason, we will donate 5% of our plan revenue to the Forgejo project.
The plan is to cover what developers and small teams need:
- Forgejo for Git hosting
- Servers at Scaleway (a European cloud provider)
- CI/CD runners
- Dependency vulnerability alerts on every plan
- Daily backups
- Other essentials, as listed on our features page
Vault42 (that’s us) has no US parent company and uses only EU-based subprocessors, so your code stays outside US jurisdiction. ISO 27001 certification is a goal for later on.
The focus will be on private repositories, since Codeberg already serves open-source projects very well. There will also be a free plan for open source with unlimited public repositories, not to compete with Codeberg but to give people another option.
If this interests you, you can join the waitlist at vault42.eu.
Questions and suggestions are welcome in the comments or by DM.
Cheers,
Marijn from Vault42
Disclosure: I am the founder of Vault42.
Having european alternatives is great but honestly for private repos I’d rather just spin up a Forgejo instance myself on my own hardware.
Yes. Just don’t forget to never expose them publicly, those things are full of CVEs
While I’d like to spin my own hardware, I still have to pay for external service to punch through my ISP’s NAT and access my server from outside. I also have to buy external backups from someone and all this costs pile up and running my own server is prohibitively expensive compared to just using codeberg.
Ah, neither my office nor my home is plagued by cgnat. That would certainly make a difference in options.
And wireguard and duplicati/proxmox-backup don’t get you there?
You know the community: they’d love to help you set up any of those. ;-)
Can wireguard alone let me access my servwr from outside the NAT without having an external server?
Does duplicati have free tier for external backups?
If by ISP NAT you mean you never have a unique external IP for your ISPs router then no, wireguard does nothing for you there.
Was about to suggest something like Netbird (also uses Wireguard), which has free tier I believe. Also using that myself for some instances I don’t need public facing.
Atleast Netbird is European. Thanks!
Exactly. Since Vault42’s market appears to be corporate clients, its sole value proposition then is to handle the infrastructure a company would have maintain otherwise, is it?
Pretty much and by large, yes, compared with self-hosting: we run the servers, upgrades, backups and CI. Compared with GitHub or GitLab.com, the difference is jurisdiction: no US parent company, and most importantly, no Cloud Act, and only EU subprocessors.
Vault42 is meant for people who want both, for mainly freelancers, small agencies and small teams without anyone to spare for running such infrastructure.
I’d say using ARM or RISC-V CPUs is a good idea just in case.
That’s what I do as well. There’s interest (in a Github alternative) from my side and that’s why I already spun up my own Forgejo instance. So I’m fine. I suppose the perspective here is skewed, though. There’s probably also people who don’t selfhost.