Heabsy vs OpenAI
Heabsy is a European alternative to OpenAI: same ai & machine learning use case, headquartered in Slovakia and governed by EU GDPR, while OpenAI is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
OpenAI and Anthropic compatible API for open-weight models, with EEA-only processing and zero retention on its flagship models, billed per token.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- Primary privacy law
- EU GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- No
OpenAI ships the models most people mean when they say AI, and its API is the one tools integrate first, which makes it the default rather than a choice. The consumer product has a free tier, with paid subscriptions and usage-based API billing above. OpenAI works out of San Francisco, so prompts and uploaded files leave European jurisdiction.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Heabsy vs OpenAI at a glance
| Heabsy | OpenAI | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Slovakia | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | United States |
| Primary privacy law | EU GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need ai & machine learning built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the OpenAI ecosystem |
Choose Heabsy if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with OpenAI if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the OpenAI ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Heabsy
Heabsy is a pay-per-token inference API for open-weight language models that speaks both the OpenAI and the Anthropic API formats. Switching an existing app usually means changing the base URL to Heabsy's endpoint, and the Anthropic-compatible endpoint lets coding tools such as Claude Code run against open models instead.
The catalogue is split in two and labelled model by model. A small set of models, led by Qwen3.8 27B, runs on GPUs provisioned in data centres inside the European Economic Area, where prompts and completions are processed in memory only and never logged or used for training. Most of the catalogue is routed: Heabsy buys capacity from global providers through OpenRouter and bills it on one invoice, and those requests may be processed outside the EEA. Billing is per token, with no subscription and no minimum spend.
Key benefits:
- Drop-in OpenAI compatibility for chat completions, streaming, tool calling and structured output
- Anthropic-compatible endpoint for tools built on the Claude API format
- EEA-only processing for the models labelled EEA-only in the catalogue
- Zero data retention on those models, with only token counts and metadata kept for billing
- Clear labels showing which models are processed inside or outside the EEA
- One European invoice and DPA covering every model in the catalogue
Heabsy is a brand of FEYA, s.r.o., a limited liability company registered in Bratislava, Slovakia, under Slovak law. Only the models marked EEA-only stay in Europe: routed models are fulfilled through OpenRouter (US) and their upstream providers, and the privacy policy also lists Cloudflare and optional Google sign-in as global sub-processors under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses.
Ideal for developers who want an OpenAI-style API and can pin sensitive workloads to the EEA-only models.
Why choose Heabsy over OpenAI?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. OpenAI is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Heabsy removes that overhead. As a Slovakia-based provider, it operates under EU GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.