Why Codebahn exists
Simon
I've spent about twenty years building and running infrastructure, on the kind of platform and ops teams where you learn, usually at uncomfortable hours in the middle of the night, what it costs to depend on something you don't control.
Somewhere in those twenty years a quiet thing happened, and almost nobody chose it on purpose. European software got built on American roads.
Look at where your code actually lives. Your repos, your pipelines, your container registries, the secrets your builds read at runtime, and most recently, where you write code in the first place. For most European teams, all of it sits with companies incorporated under US law. That isn't a problem until it is: the day the terms change, the price moves, an account gets locked over something you didn't do, or a legal request you'll never hear about reaches across the Atlantic. The CLOUD Act makes the jurisdiction follow the company, not the server. Picking "EU region" in a dropdown changes the datacenter. It doesn't change who can be compelled to hand over your data, or under whose law.
Almost no one decided this. We inherited it as the default, one sensible-looking choice at a time, and the cost of leaving quietly grew while we weren't looking.
I don't think you fix that with a manifesto, or by waiting for a regulation, or by being angry on the internet. The EU now has a policy agenda for this. It's called tech sovereignty. Good. But policy follows infrastructure, not the other way around. It changes the way it always has: one workload at a time, moved by someone who got tired of the default.
So that's what Codebahn is. A managed Git host, built on Forgejo. Run by Hackerman AB, a Swedish company, on European infrastructure (Scaleway in France, backups on Hetzner in Germany). Every company in the chain is EU-incorporated. Entity, servers, law.
Sovereignty isn't something you buy, it's something that accumulates. Every team that moves a piece of its work to a company answering to European law shifts the ground a little. Not all at once.
But sovereignty that exists because a regulation requires it doesn't hold. We've seen this in other verticals: the compliant option, always a step behind, tolerated until something better offers a way back. When it does, the compliance story ends, because nobody was there for the product.
If Codebahn is only worth using because of where it's hosted, it's not worth using. European teams don't need a worse tool with better jurisdiction. They need infrastructure that earns the switch on its own, and happens to sit in the right place.
Most "sovereignty" pitches sell you a new dependence wearing a European flag. We built Codebahn to be left. One-click export, standard Forgejo format, no support ticket, no waiting, ever. The day we stop earning your stay, you leave with everything.
That answers the fair question about a company this young: what if you don't make it? You aren't betting that Codebahn lasts forever. You're betting that if it doesn't, you walk away with everything, in one click, the same as any ordinary day. That is a smaller bet than the one you're making right now, on terms you can't export and an exit you've never tested. I'd rather build something people stay with because it works than something they can't leave.
Codebahn is for private and commercial work. For open source, use Codeberg. Free, EU-hosted, run by a non-profit. I recommend them by name and mean it. Same foundation, different jobs.
We're early. Some edges might still be rough, and SOC 2 is on the roadmap, not on the shelf yet. If something breaks, tell me.
Codebahn is self-funded and independent. That's deliberate. It's the same idea as the rest, applied to the relationship instead of the data: independence that runs both ways. We answer only to our customers, and you can leave when you want.
This is for European developers who'd rather not sleepwalk into a dependence they never consciously chose. AI is making it worse on both ends, fast: more lock-in, more compute running through tools you don't control, and the longer you wait the more it costs to move. You don't have to move everything. Move one thing. A side project, one repo, one pipeline. See if it holds up.
That's the whole pitch. There's a road back, it stays in Europe, and you can leave the day it stops being worth your while.