WelcomeWhy EU-native
Why EU-native
What "no US fallback" actually means — at the architecture level, not the marketing level.
"EU-hosted" is a phrase a lot of vendors use. CleverRouter makes it an architectural invariant: a piece of code can break the rule, a PR review will catch it, and a release won't ship until it does.
The three hard invariants
- Every provider is inside the EU.
Scaleway in Paris, Tensorix in Frankfurt, AWS Bedrock in
eu-central-1. No US-East, no US-West, no global re-routing layer. Bedrock model IDs must start witheu.orglobal.— the gateway rejectsus.*IDs at request validation. - Zero data retention by default. The gateway writes a metadata row per request (tokens, latency, status, cost in cents). The schema does not have columns for the prompt or completion. Streaming chunks flow through memory and out to the client without being persisted.
- No silent cross-border fallback.
When a provider returns
5xx, the gateway falls back to the next EU provider in the priority list. If no EU provider can serve the request, the gateway returns502 provider_down— it does not secretly call a US endpoint.
How those invariants are enforced
| Mechanism | Where |
|---|---|
eu.* / global.* model-id check | Gateway request validator |
| ZDR architecture | requests table has no prompt / completion column |
RETENTION_POLICY=72h opt-in | Per-workspace, requires signed DPA addendum |
| Sub-processor list | Public, 30-day notice for changes — see GDPR & DPA |
| Architecture invariant doc | ARCHITECTURE.md in repo, enforced by Claude PR-review |
The trade-offs
Honesty matters more than marketing here. EU-native means:
- Fewer models than a US-anchored gateway. ~98 instead of 300+. Anthropic via Bedrock-EU, Mistral, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Cohere, Amazon Nova are all available. GPT-4o is not — OpenAI does not host it in the EU.
- Sometimes higher latency than US-West. EU networks are fast, but if your users are in Singapore, an EU-anchored gateway is not the right tool.
- A smaller catalog of audio / rerank models. Whisper on Scaleway and Tensorix; Cohere Rerank and Amazon Rerank on Bedrock. That's it.
Who this is for
CleverRouter is built for teams that have to answer "where is the data?" with a regulator-grade answer:
- German and EU agencies, fintechs, healthtech, legaltech, public-sector procurement.
- Companies under DORA, NIS2, the EU AI Act or sector-specific GDPR guidance from a data-protection authority.
- Anyone whose security review requires sub-processor list, DPA and audit logs.
If you'd accept a us-east-1 fallback in exchange for one extra model,
this is the wrong gateway for you.
Want a model we don't have?
Email hello@clevermation.com. If a provider hosts it in the EU and we don't, we'll add it — auto-sync picks up new IDs from configured providers within 6h.
Related
- Providers — which provider hosts what.
- Zero Data Retention — what is and isn't logged.
- GDPR & DPA — sub-processor list, DPA, DPO contact.