EU Killed My Company. I Open Source the Code. Back on the Trail.
Deltabadger is Dead. Long Live Deltabadger.
Over the last six years, my small SaaS helped users dollar-cost average $72M into digital assets, mostly Bitcoin. Now, MiCA regulates it out, and the only option left to not throw the beautiful product away is to open the code.
Here are the story, the pain, the lessons, and what's next.
Long Story Short
The irony is that when I started Deltabadger I spent a long time carefully planning and checking to not build a regulated financial product: I didn’t hold customers’ assets, I didn’t do financial advisory: the idea was a subscription-based service offering simple vanilla automation… so I thought.
When I started my company in 2019, the “crypto license” in Estonia cost €345, but I didn’t even need it.
A few months later, in 2020, the cost of the license suddenly rose to €3,300.
In 2022, the cost of the license reached ~€12,000, but I still didn’t need it.
Finally MiCA raised the cost to €200,000 + recurring ~€70k a year and now I discovered that I do need it.
I’m pretty sure that the license eventually will get even more expensive, making starting anything in the space available only for a large corporation. Poland already tries to be proactive regulating the space twice as strictly as the EU requires.
If you're wondering, what changed is that now being involved in execution of user transaction in any way requires a more expensive CASP license than for custodian wallets. Of course, it’s completely unnecessary absurd: the money was never going through my service, why I didn't need any license until now. All users were already AMLd and KYCd on Kraken or Coinbase. Requiring it again at my external SaaS just because users want to have some convenient automation using the API access makes no sense.
Regulations are not the biggest problem here. The regulatory instability is.
This is why the EU is such a business-unfriendly environment right now. No business can anticipate what changes politicians will impose on it next year. As if surviving in a market weren’t difficult enough: your business idea may be completely invalidated by newly added rules and taxes, sometimes even applied retroactively.
There is also no sandbox to try anything—this applies also to other cutting-edge technologies like AI. The initial compliance required to be able to even test an idea is overwhelming and often completely blocking. What has become the “gold standard” is simply bootstrapping projects outside of the EU, but for an already established platform with users from Europe, it’s too late for that.
Deltabadger is dead.
There is an amazing fulfillment coming from building a product that thousands of people use and love. It’s a great feeling. It’s addictive.
Shutting down the same product is emotionally the opposite. Six years of my life gone. I think about the over 700 long-term and lifetime subscribers that trusted me. I can’t sleep at night. I start to see all the bridges I’ve burned, sacrifices made to build the thing. The phrase “opportunity cost” hits hard.
But it’s done.
This chapter ends here.
Long live Deltabadger.
I’m a big fan of open source. I wouldn't have been able to build such a product as open source from day one, but since I have to do it now, I will enjoy every second of it.
There is a whole new category of users excited about open source and Deltabadger becoming an Umbrel app, and I am too. I’m ready to continue working on it and supporting it as long as I can.
Now, it’s time to make use of all the lessons learned.
What I’ve Learned
I’m slowly getting over being disappointed with myself, and all the big mistakes on the way. I’m not sure if my disappointment with the EU goes away as quickly. I really hoped to build the business here. I made the conscious decision to try, and I did.
Now, it’s time to move on. I’m quitting the EU as the direction moving forward. It doesn’t mean I physically leave tomorrow, but my plans no longer rely on it.
I always felt European. It was my primary identity, before being a Pole. Now? I am not sure what it means today. Greek philosophy still speaks to my heart. Maybe I’m a Slav? It’s another identity that comes to my head before my nationality, but the word has a shared root with “slave,” so I pass for now.
I’m moving toward the future where I rely on the EU bureaucracy as little as possible. I don’t see it as a political declaration, as much as a matter of practicality. It looks like I like doing things considered here “off the books” and if I want to continue, I need to look for solutions that work.
I’m a “second time founder” now: yes, the one that thinks distribution first, product second. This may be the best part of the story: everything I learned about the business. At Deltabadger, I had a lot of luck I didn’t properly leverage, or leveraged it just a tiny bit too late. Whatever comes next, I have tools I didn’t have when I started, and I cannot stop building now: in the builders’ renaissance of the AI-era.
I’m back on the trail.
✦
In a way, starting again brings me closer to you, the reader, and what I’m writing about: making the best out of the narrow window of opportunity we are in.
During those six years, I spent a lot of hours writing emails and messages to my users. One of the things I realized is how much I enjoy writing. I’m making Substack the new home for those words.
Today, I close a chapter. Tomorrow, I start again.
Happy New Year.