Is Sourdough Tracker subject to the CLOUD Act?

No. The CLOUD Act compels US-based companies (or US subsidiaries) to hand over data they control, regardless of where it physically lives. Sourdough Tracker has no US entity, no US contracts, and no US-controlled infrastructure in the data plane. Stripe processes payment data and is US-headquartered, but that boundary is well-defined: payment metadata only, never your records.

Where exactly is my data stored?

On dedicated servers we operate ourselves, physically located in Germany. The audit log, attachments, embeddings - everything in the data plane - lives there. Backups stay within the same EU jurisdiction in different physical locations and roll off on a 30-day window. We deliberately do not name the exact data centre - knowing the rack does not buy the customer anything and would make operator changes a public event.

Do you log IPs or session metadata to a US service?

No third-party analytics, no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no third-country tag manager. The first-party device + session ledger lives in our own Postgres + Redis - same EU boundary as the rest of the data plane. Logs are operational only and rotate at 30 days.

What happens if I'm a customer outside the EU?

You can use Sourdough Tracker from anywhere. The data still lives in the EU; the request travels from your location to our servers and back. That's a posture choice on our side, not a geo-restriction on yours.

Sourdough Tracker

Compare

Sourdough Tracker: the EU alternative to Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes

Same job, hosted in the EU. Sourdough Tracker runs in Germany under German law - your data stays in EU jurisdiction end to end.

EU alternative

Comparison

Notes

Finn GlasCo-Founder + Engineering

·February 9, 2026·

1 min read

If your reason for moving off Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes is data sovereignty, the comparison gets simpler. Sourdough Tracker is hosted in Germany on infrastructure we operate ourselves - no US-headquartered company in the request path. The CLOUD Act does not reach what physically lives here.

At a glance

A free-form notes app can absolutely hold sourdough notes - I used Notion for two years before building this. The trade-off is the friction of structure: every entry needs to be hand-formatted, you can't filter feeds vs bakes without templating discipline, and 'show me every bake at 75% hydration' is a manual exercise. Sourdough Tracker trades the flexibility of free text for purpose-built fields - rise %, hydration, outcome rating, ambient temp - so the analysis happens by itself. If your bakes are weekly and you care about patterns, the structured version pays back fast.

EU jurisdiction

What 'EU-hosted' actually means here, end to end

Sourdough Tracker runs on dedicated machines we operate ourselves, physically located in Germany. There is no US-headquartered subprocessor in the request path - the data plane (your records, your files, your audit log) lives entirely in EU jurisdiction. Two third parties exist outside that boundary: Stripe (payment information only, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) and the mail relay for transactional email. Neither sees your records. Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes's setup is the variable - if their primary infra is US-based, the CLOUD Act applies regardless of what their privacy page claims.

Sourdough Tracker vs Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes: EU comparison

	Ours Sourdough Tracker	Theirs Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes
EU-hosted, no AI training		Depends
Free-form text	Body field
Per-feed structured fields
Filter feeds vs bakes		DIY
Photos inline with the entry
Per-starter share		Page-level only
Free tier

When to pick which

Pick Sourdough Tracker when

You want patterns over time without manual templating.

Sharing one starter (not the whole notebook) matters.

EU-hosted + no third-party AI ingest is a requirement.

Pick Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes when

You already live in Notion / Obsidian and one more page is the path of least resistance.

You want maximum flexibility, even at the cost of structure.

EU-jurisdiction questions

Specific to where the data lives, who can subpoena it, and what crosses borders.

Start with Sourdough Tracker

Free plan, no credit card. We host in Germany. Export + delete are self-serve.

Written by

Finn Glas

Co-Founder + Engineering

Finn is one of the Co-Founders. He owns the engineering side, the infrastructure, and most of the late-night fixes that ship before anyone notices.

finn.glas at aicuflow dot comLinkedIn Website