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 innoscripta

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

EU alternative

innoscripta

Forschungszulage

Finn GlasCo-Founder + Engineering

·May 15, 2026·

1 min read

If your reason for moving off innoscripta 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

innoscripta is an excellent platform if you're an established R&D-active company with payroll for technical staff and a recurring Forschungszulage claim each year. They're a Munich-headquartered SaaS with 2,500+ paying customers and an IPO in 2025 - they earned that scale by being good at the job. The job, however, is administering an ongoing R&D operation for tax-credit compliance - time tracking, audit-ready documentation, capacity planning. Grants does a different job: it gets a startup from a draft Ideenpapier to a submitted EXIST, IGP, KMU innovativ, BMBF, or Horizon application. Where innoscripta plugs into an HR/payroll system, Grants plugs into a writing workflow. Pick by job.

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. innoscripta'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 innoscripta: EU comparison

	Ours Grants	Theirs innoscripta
EXIST / Forschungstransfer / IGP / BMBF / EU grant writing
Forschungszulage time-tracking + audit-ready compliance
BSFZ certification workflow
Section-structured grant editor (Ideenpapier chapters)
PTJ / reviewer-language coaching inside the editor
HR / payroll-system integration for ongoing R&D ops
Startup-stage pricing		Enterprise tier
Hosted in Germany

When to pick which

Pick Grants when

You're pre-incorporation or in your first 1-2 years and need to actually write your first EXIST, IGP, or Horizon application.

Your team is two or three founders, no HR system, no payroll integration to plug into.

You want the application's section structure, reviewer-language coaching, and the 4-week revision window handed to you.

Pick innoscripta when

You're an established mid-sized R&D-active company with engineers on payroll and a yearly Forschungszulage claim worth optimising.

Your blocker is documentation + audit defence, not application writing.

You need a platform that integrates with SAP / DATEV / Personio for time tracking and capacity planning.

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