Is Contact Book 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. Contact Book 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 Contact Book 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.

Contact Book

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Contact Book: the EU alternative to Notion

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

EU alternative

Personal CRM

Notion

Julia YukovichCo-Founder + CEO

·April 9, 2026·

1 min read

If your reason for moving off Notion is data sovereignty, the comparison gets simpler. Contact Book 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

A Notion CRM template is a great starting point. It's free, it's flexible, and it works for the first month. After that, three things tend to break: cadence reminders are flaky, life-event reminders rely on calendar tricks, and adding a custom field to a contact gradually fills the page with property pills nobody cleans up. Contact Book is the next step up - the same idea, but with the relationship-specific surface baked in.

EU jurisdiction

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

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

Contact Book vs Notion: EU comparison

	Ours Contact Book	Theirs Notion
Hosted in Germany
Custom fields per contact
Native cadence reminders
Life events with built-in reminders
Activity / conversation log		Manual
Live multi-tab updates
Mobile-first quick add		Slow
Free tier
Build it yourself

When to pick which

Pick Contact Book when

You've already outgrown a Notion template once and don't want to do it again.

Cadence reminders need to actually fire on time.

You want the contact page to load in under a second on a phone.

Pick Notion when

Your CRM is one of fifteen things in your Notion workspace and you like having one tool.

You enjoy building your own database. The work is the point.

You only have ~30 contacts and never write more than a sentence per interaction.

EU-jurisdiction questions

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

Start with Contact Book

Free plan, no credit card. We host in Germany. Export + delete are self-serve.

Written by

Julia Yukovich

Co-Founder + CEO

Julia is one of the Co-Founders. She handles design, product direction, and most of the support replies that arrive in the morning.

julia.yukovich at aicuflow dot comLinkedIn