Alternatives in UK
A little piece of resistance
If the UK is to become anything other than a digital vassal of the US, we have to have a nose-to-tail digital service infrastructure…
What I mean is… how many digital products, platforms and services are built on Big Tech foundations? It’s incredibly hard to find UK owned and run services. Many, many service-tier offerings (after all, we’re a nation of digital greengrocers), but it’s quite tricky to find replacements for things like Vercel, Digital Ocean or even Dropbox.
When you do, I’m afraid the offerings are often a little lacklustre. It’s as if many of the UK digital service infra providers found a dozen customers in around 2007, and simply stopped trying. So many websites that are obviously half-baked B2B brochures. Very few free-tier offers for developer tools. Very few DevEx-focussed services. No community around these services, other than some ropey old PHP forum software, with a guy called Nobby that posted they’d fixed an issue in 2021.
Oh, but there are some exceptions. If you want Wordpress hosting, that’s there in bucket loads. This along with lots of other born-in-the-noughties, php-based, CMS and e-commerce systems. It’s like nothing moved beyond the LAMP stack.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m genuinely impressed any service infra business in the UK can survive in the wake of MAGA (Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple) and all the rest of US (ish) big tech. But if we want to survive much longer, we need to try a bit harder, don’t we?
So, this is why I started Alternatives in UK. This is my attempt to celebrate what we have got, and highlight some of the gaps that we might fill.
Finding UK alternatives for digital products and services, ranging from enterprise hosting and SaaS, to consumer services.
alternatives-in.uk