Hello,
I can’t find an email address where I would normally send a question like this, but since support questions are directed here to the forum, here goes.
Like many others in the Europe and Canada, I’m in the process of disengaging myself from US vendors so far as possible. I believe Readlang is UK-based, but I am billed in US dollars. Can you clarify the business relationship to the US?
I couldn’t have imagined the need to ask this a short time ago, but here we are. Thanks and all the best.
You might check this out about Steve Ridout
I’m British but live in Madrid, Spain. Readlang is run by “Readlang SL” which is a Spanish limited company completely owned by me. The reason everything is billed in dollars is simply that the US is my biggest market. I always figured that one day I would also accept Euros and Pounds depending on the country, but I’ve never got around to it. (It’s more fun to work on the rest of the product instead of the payment stuff)
Please note that Readlang does rely on a bunch of US services, including Akamai, Google, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.
BTW: I’m a US citizen, and would very much like to disengage myself as well 
For better or worse, I live in a Republic where people are allowed to vote with whom I very much disagree with.
Well, things escalated quite a bit now. I wonder if you’ve considered moving away from OpenAI, Microsoft and the like since this was first posted?
I don’t think anything OpenAI creates is necessary for a tool like Readlang. I’ve built a small prototype of a text reader that uses spaCy for lemmatization and translategemma on a local LLM via Ollama and had good results with that. It also works with smaller gemma models but I’m not sure if they would cover all the languages Readlang supports.
This combo can be run on sustainable European infrastructure (e.g. Infomaniak in Switzerland offers both servers and AI models, and it has the bonus of running on 100% renewables and being carbon-negative by heating homes around the DC with the “waste” heat).
Of course that’s just for a single instance and I don’t know how Readlang does scaling, I suppose there are some devils in those details.
