Guide
AI email and the GDPR, what to check before you buy
One question decides most of it: which company holds the body of your email, in which country, and under which contract.
Thinking
Guides
How to choose, set up and survive the software you have to run.
Guide
AI email and the GDPR, what to check before you buy
One question decides most of it: which company holds the body of your email, in which country, and under which contract.
Guide
SumUp, the quiet European giant: how the card reader became a till
SumUp sells cheap hardware and free till software and earns on the card, charging 2,75 percent in Luxembourg unless the merchant pays 29 euro a month to drop to 1,29 percent, which is the whole business model in one line.
Guide
Zoho and the suite strategy: how bundling prices out point solutions
Zoho is a privately held company that has never taken outside investment, sells more than fifty applications for a single per-employee fee, and prices several of its point products per organisation rather than per user, which is what makes single-product competitors hard to sustain.
Guide
Salonkee and the Benelux booking market: who owns it and how it earns
Salonkee is a Luxembourg joint-stock company, RCS B207855, backed by a 28 million euro Series B led by PeakSpan Capital, and it is the only one of the regional booking platforms that publishes no marketplace commission at all.
Guide
Mistral AI and the European software stack: what depending on it means
Mistral is a Paris company now valued at more than 21 billion euro that sells European inference regions, open-weight models and an enterprise platform, and the sovereignty it offers is narrower and more conditional than the word suggests.
Guide
Block and Square in Europe: which countries it actually serves
Square is owned by Block, Inc., a Delaware company listed in New York under the symbol XYZ, and in Europe it accepts card payments in only four countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Spain.
Guide
Odoo open source model: what the free edition really leaves out
Odoo gives away a genuinely usable Community edition under an open source licence, then keeps accounting, payroll, Studio, the mobile apps and version upgrades in the paid Enterprise edition, which is where the business actually is.
Software directories in Europe, where to get listed
Start with G2, which now also covers Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice, then SaaSHub, AlternativeTo and the directory for your language.
Guide
How Fresha actually makes money from your salon
Fresha earns from card processing, metered messages, paid add-ons and, since the free plan ended, a per-seat subscription, and its UK accounts show the company is still being funded to get to break-even.
Guide
How to get your software recommended by AI assistants
An assistant names your product when it appears in the documents retrieved while answering, and retrieval explains about ten times more than your page copy does.
Guide
How to choose a POS system for a restaurant
Settle three things first, who processes your cards, what your country demands of the till, and what keeps working offline, and most of the market disqualifies itself.
Guide
Who owns Lightspeed, and what its numbers say before you sign
Lightspeed Restaurant and Lightspeed Retail belong to Lightspeed Commerce Inc., a Montreal company listed in New York and Toronto that now earns two thirds of its revenue from processing your card payments, not from your software licence.
Weekly, Thursday morning, Central European Time.
The Thinking briefing
One email a week: what changed in European business software, which prices moved, and which comparison we published. No sales mail.