Why Codebahn exists.
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 Git, your pipelines, your container registries, the secrets your builds read at runtime. 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. They call it 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), with no US company anywhere in the chain. Entity, servers, law. You can name every part of it.
This is the part most people get wrong. 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. One workload at a time.
And here is the part that matters most to me, because it's where most "sovereignty" pitches quietly betray themselves: they sell you a new dependence wearing a European flag. So 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.
A few things Codebahn is not, because saying so is the only way the rest of this is believable.
If you're doing open source, use Codeberg. Free, EU-hosted, run by a non-profit. I recommend them by name and I mean it: Codeberg for your open work, Codebahn for your private and commercial work. Same foundation, same values, different jobs.
If your procurement needs a signed SOC 2 report today, we aren't your vendor yet. We will be. We're not there now, and I'd rather say so than waste your afternoon.
And some edges are still rough. We're early. I'll name them before you sign up, not after.
Codebahn has no investors setting the roadmap and no acquirer waiting to rewrite the terms you agreed to. That's deliberate. It's the same idea as the rest, applied to the relationship instead of the data: independence that runs both ways. I don't answer to a board, and you don't answer to me.
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.
Simon
Codebahn, Hackerman AB, Gothenburg