Software from Germany

Anyone who has software built entrusts a service provider with business logic, customer data and often the heart of their own company. That is precisely why it matters where the work and the hosting happen: software from Germany means contracts under German law, data protection under the GDPR and a place of jurisdiction you know.

With US cloud providers, by contrast, the CLOUD Act applies: US authorities can access data even when the servers stand in Europe. Anyone processing sensitive data — patient records, client information, design data — should think hard about that dependency.

Then there is everyday life: short paths, the same time zone and German-speaking contacts who really know your project. Requirements are best discussed directly — not through three intermediate stops in an offshore chain.

“From Germany” is written by many and evidenced by few. With us it means: Lucksmith e.K., Untere Trift Straße 11 in Bogel near Nastätten in the Rhein-Lahn district, entered in the commercial register of the district court of Koblenz. The place of jurisdiction is Koblenz, invoices come with German VAT, and your contact does not sit in another time zone.

Development happens here, operations happen in German data centres. There is no team in the background to which the actual work is passed on — that is the difference between a location and a billing address.

For on-site appointments, Koblenz is about 25 km away; Limburg an der Lahn, Wiesbaden and the rest of the Rhein-Lahn district are part of our regular catchment area. Clients elsewhere in Germany we look after remotely — that changes nothing about who is responsible.

Many projects break at the seam between “built” and “run”: one agency develops, another provider hosts, and when something fails each points at the other. We do both — since 2014.

Our software development delivers applications designed for operation from the start: containerised, observable, scalable. They are hosted on our own Kubernetes platform in German data centres — more on that under managed Kubernetes hosting.

For you that means one contract, one point of contact and one team responsible for the entire life cycle of your software — from the first line of code to the update five years later.

With software development in Germany, GDPR compliance is not a compliance check bolted on at the end but part of the architecture: data minimisation, clean deletion concepts and processing without third-country transfers. We also take NIS2 and sector-specific requirements into account from the start.

That we mean digital sovereignty seriously is something we show with our own product: AWYN is our sovereign email and groupware platform from Germany — an Exchange alternative, GDPR-compliant and NIS2-ready, developed and operated by Lucksmith. So we do not merely sell “made in Germany”, we build and run it ourselves.

The same principles apply to your custom software: open standards, documented source code that belongs to you, and infrastructure you can leave at any time without lock-in.

In e-commerce too we rely on software from Germany: Shopware 6 is the leading German shop platform — open source, flexible and with no licence dependency on US providers.

As a Shopware 6 agency we develop storefronts, custom plugins and connections to ERP and inventory management. And because shop and custom software come from the same team here, the two grow together instead of running side by side.

On request your shop is hosted on the same Kubernetes platform as the rest of your software — in German data centres, with monitoring and defined response times. That way your e-commerce stays fully “made in Germany” as well.

Our clients are mainly small and medium-sized businesses and the German Mittelstand: companies that want to replace a landscape grown out of spreadsheets and isolated tools, digitise processes or build a digital product of their own.

Then there are medical practices and law firms working with particularly sensitive data who therefore deliberately choose hosting in Germany — and public sector projects where digital sovereignty is not a bonus but an award criterion.

You can get an impression of previous projects on our clients page. Or simply tell us about your plans — the initial call is free.