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 Google Docs

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

EU alternative

EXIST

Google Docs

Finn GlasCo-Founder + Engineering

·March 6, 2026·

1 min read

If your reason for moving off Google Docs 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

Google Docs is the default for two-person founder teams - free, real-time, share-by-link. Grants trades the generic-document flexibility for purpose-built grant structure: an Ideenpapier outline reviewers expect, deadline + status carried forward, the 4-week post-rejection revision window tracked. Hosted in Germany. Pick Docs for the long tail of "any document"; pick us for the EXIST.

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. Google Docs'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 Google Docs: EU comparison

	Ours Grants	Theirs Google Docs
Hosted in Germany
Real-time co-editing
Section structure for EXIST/IGP
Deadline + status tracking
Free tier
Numbering survives 30+ pages

When to pick which

Pick Grants when

EU/German hosting is required by your university, your investors, or your own conviction.

Submission is more than 20 pages, with figures, references, and a budget table.

Pick Google Docs when

Your team already lives in Workspace and the cost of a tool switch outweighs the structure win.

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