Is Grants 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. Grants 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 Grants 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.

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Grants: the EU alternative to Ayming

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

EU alternative

Ayming

Consultancy

Finn GlasCo-Founder + Engineering

·May 15, 2026·

1 min read

If your reason for moving off Ayming is data sovereignty, the comparison gets simpler. Grants 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

Ayming is a serious, decades-old management consultancy with 1,600 consultants across 14 countries and 15,000+ active clients. For a complex multi-million Horizon EIC or BMBF Verbundprojekt where the documentation burden is genuinely enormous, hiring Ayming is rational - their compliance depth pays off at that scale. For an EXIST Gründerstipendium, IGP, or KMU innovativ application under €500k, the math rarely works: the success fee (typically 10%+) exceeds what an unfunded founding team can sensibly cede, and you still do most of the writing yourself. Grants keeps the cap-table whole, hands you the structure + reviewer-language coaching the consultancy would have charged for, and lets you learn how to write these applications - knowledge that pays off on every future submission. Ayming wins on enterprise complexity; Grants wins on startup economics.

EU jurisdiction

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

Grants 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. Ayming's setup is the variable - if their primary infra is US-based, the CLOUD Act applies regardless of what their privacy page claims.

Grants vs Ayming: EU comparison

	Ours Grants	Theirs Ayming
Multi-country tax structure advisory
Success-fee model		10%+ typical
Software subscription pricing
Senior compliance experts on staff
EXIST / EXIST Forschungstransfer / IGP / KMU innovativ depth
Founders write the document (learning + control)
EU funding programme depth (Horizon, Marie Curie, ERC)
Hosted in Germany		EU-wide

When to pick which

Pick Grants when

Your total grant is under €1M and a 10%+ success fee would consume your living-cost runway.

You want to keep learning how grant applications work - the next four programmes will use similar criteria.

Cap-table cleanliness matters because you're heading into a seed round.

Pick Ayming when

You're applying to Horizon EIC at €17.5M or a multi-million BMBF Verbundprojekt where documentation depth genuinely justifies a partner.

You're a mid-sized established company with no in-house grant capacity and a multi-country footprint.

You need international tax-structure advice alongside the funding application.

EU-jurisdiction questions

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

Start with Grants

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