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I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
- mgaunard 9mo agoI Spend 0. I don't understand why anyone would need most of these services.
- Herring 9mo agoTry reading more books, eg autobiographies or fiction. Understanding other people’s perspectives is a skill like any other.
- lone-cloud 9mo agoMaybe you should take your own advise and try to understand his perspective.
- gandalfgreybeer 9mo agoUnderstanding a perspective and agreeing with it aren’t the same thing. Herring’s point was about the ‘I don’t see why anyone would need this’ framing, not that the position itself is hard to grasp.
- cromka 9mo agoThis is a logical fallacy like saying one should tolerate the intolerance, because otherwise it's intolerance.
- jfvinueza 9mo ago[flagged]
- cromka 9mo agoStill looking for that microphone you dropped!
- mgaunard 9mo agoTrying to understand everyone is a foolish endeavor, if not outwardly judgemental. What's more valuable is simply accepting that there are others who are different.
- tapete1 9mo agoSame. I mean you can tell about the level of tech literacy just by reading that OP uses NordVPN.
- wizzwizz4 9mo ago> Blogging, Newsletter & Co.: Well, as you can see, I’m writing on Substack. There are no alternatives except to host it entirely yourself, but that doesn’t make sense to me right now. This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/ https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?
- davidw 9mo agohttps://www.beehiiv.com/ https://www.beehiiv.com/ is another one.
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoThey appear to be based in New York, which is in the US. They're also not very privacy-friendly.
- davidw 9mo agoAh, yes. They're a step up from Substack in some ways though, from what people say, so it might be worth a switch compared to staying on Substack.
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoIf you're comfortable going with a US-based provider, https://www.scipress.io/ https://www.scipress.io/ seems a lot more honest. They've DIY'd their legal documents badly, but they prohibit AI-farms and don't appear to sell user data. If I had to pick based on first impressions, I'm far more inclined to trust Scipress.
- tough 9mo agoSubstack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most
- AuthAuth 9mo agoFor me its going from $0 to $15 a month using Proton which feels way to high. Im cutting proton and switching to Proton free tier for email and Backblaze for storage. Getting a little $100 pc to put in my draw to handle hosting all the stuff i need. My budget is around $10 a month to cover all the tech NEEDS. I think its doable but I will need to pay with my time to learn about/setup a foss stack. I'll also need to put some money aside to drop a donation to each project in the stack yearly.
- cinntaile 9mo agoI don't think a $10 budget will suffice.
- AuthAuth 9mo agoMy tech needs arent huge. Email+email alias service, cloud storage for PC backups and syncing data across devices, VPN, server to host internet thangs, domain, mobile data. Yeah now that im laying it out $10 is not going to be enough but i'll try my best to work within the constraints and see what I can do. I'll probably do a need budget for $10 and a wants budget of $20.
- subscribed 9mo agoYou really don't want to host email yourself. Major PITA, time sink and constant possibility of your emails being just silently discarded after being accepted at the big providers.
- dvdkon 9mo ago10 USD seems like it should cover the electricity for a small mini PC server (counting maybe 30 watts idle), and if your electricity isn't expensive, it will cover the purchase cost spread over a few years too. That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.
- ahofmann 9mo agoIf Proton is too expensive, you can use zoho. I switched from Google and I'm missing nothing.
- nocchedure 9mo agoI’m heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and nothing would make me happier than switching to a privacy-focused European alternative. However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think. I get: - granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.) - 2tb of google drive space - and now Gemini, which is quite nice It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :( * note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above
- fersarr 9mo agoHow do people get more than 2tb of backup/cloud storage? it seems expensive to pay 20+ per month for this. 2tb+ should be very common these days?
- stanmancan 9mo agoIt’s far from impossible, you just have to prioritize your privacy at more than a few bucks a month.
- mbirth 9mo agoOr in this case have a look at the Google Graveyard and/or those many stories of users that lost access to their Google account without any way to contact an actual person that could help them.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo agoIf it was just privacy it would be an easy sell but there is nothing close to a fully functional alternative then Microsoft.
- rconti 9mo agoNothing would make parent happier, but they've placed a very small price on their happiness.
- aiisjustanif 9mo ago
- kavouras 9mo agoI don't like the idea of moving from google's ecosystem to proton. While they're better, ecosystems tend to get locked down or change for the worse.I'm not planning to repeat the google cycle. I got my own domain for email, bitwarden for passwords, firefox forks for browsing, and many other stuff to get off google. Also I realised that stuff like contacts, notes, calendar don't really need to be on the cloud, but I'm planning to self host some services like that, mostly for the nerd in me.
- omnimus 9mo agoWell WebDav/CalDav/CardDav works quite OK. Baïkal is trivial to selfhost (cal+card) then you just pick some webdav implementation like KaraDav/PicoDav/FlyDav and you are good. Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoYou can self host email in an afternoon, its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
- cromka 9mo agoIt's not about configuration but rather your IP reputation and the struggle to not have your mail go straight to addressee's spam folder.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoThats just a matter of buying a decent IP and setting up DMARC and DKIM. I see this reasoning as the #1 reason not to self host, but it really isn't a big issue once you do the initial setup.
- kassner 9mo ago> Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?
- drob518 9mo agoI have fully bought into Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a walled garden but it’s a pretty nice walled garden, and of all the big tech companies, they are better about privacy (not perfect, but better) than most. I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
- websiteapi 9mo ago> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized. just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money... so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue. assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.
- stanmancan 9mo agoHow so?
- websiteapi 9mo agowhere's the proof of the claim? for one the privacy policy contradicts.
- SbEpUBz2 9mo agoIt sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo ago> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?
- ape4 9mo agoThey moved from platform A to platform B.
- petcat 9mo agoAnd platform B is basically a worse version of everything than platform A. I admire the motivation though
- ranguna 9mo agoCare to elaborate?
- stanmancan 9mo ago“Worse” is fully dependant on what you’re looking to get out of a product. I consider anything Google/Meta to be about as bad as it gets because I disagree with their business practices and value my privacy.
- wiseowise 9mo ago“Worse” has a defined meaning and they’re right. Proton stuff doesn’t hold a candle to the level of polish of Google.
- cromka 9mo agoSo that definition does not cover "privacy"? Where does one look up the definition of "worse" you're referring to?
- avh02 9mo agoah yes, the polish that keeps begging you to give them your address for your "own safety" the polish that can't even delete your entire spam folder half the time the polish that asks you to verify you own your own email address via email if you want to add an alias to send an email from your own domain (e.g: if you have wildcard inbox and want to reply from one of the addresses you used) the same polish that gives you no results if you search "one" and the email actually contains "oneword" - you know, search, the thing google is known for. such amazing polish.
- zie 9mo agoVivaldi doesn't block ads as well as uBlock Origin, so I'll stick with uBlock Origin which means Firefox and friends anymore.
- cdmckay 9mo agoI really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace. It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoOutlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason. The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365. But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.
- andrehacker 9mo ago>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s). Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better. edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.
- lostlogin 9mo ago> I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.
- bradley13 9mo agoI hear good things about Proton, but you are still sticking yourself into an ecosystem. For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important. For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider. All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.
- cyberpunk 9mo agoWhy are you stuck? To migrate to another provider i just have to change some MX records which I control myself anyway? Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…
- c16 9mo agoI tired NextCloud the other day on a 2GB DigitalOcean VPS. It ground to a halt pretty quickly. My plan was to try run it on a Pi, but I gave up on that idea. It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
- TsiCClawOfLight 9mo agoA pi is too small. But a cheap n100/n150 box will do it just fine and is very energy efficient!
- simianparrot 9mo ago50% expenditure saving sounds good, but how many more hours per month are you now spending making it all work?
- oriettaxx 9mo agoI would remove grammarly (due to privacy)
- wtcactus 9mo agoI find it funny that right at the start the author claims he wants "privacy and data sovereignty" and then he comes into the EU. Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty". Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1] So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words. They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime. [1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-investigation-social-media-user-calling-female-politician-fat https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...
- shaky-carrousel 9mo agoYes, countries in EU prosecute crime. This may be a surprise to some people, but for a long time publicly insulting someone has been a crime in Germany. In America they don't wait for you to commit a thought crime, they throw you into a gulag right after trying to enter the country: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detention-denied-entry/ https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detenti... But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.
- scrollaway 9mo agoI started watching YouTuber Evan Edinger recently and it’s been a breath of fresh air because he’s been saying things I understood to be true a long time ago, but never quite verified until now. One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right. Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it. You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do. Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
- slackr 9mo agoGrammarly alternative: LanguageTool. Used by EU institutions
- zorked 9mo agoAnd it works great for my languages. I really like it.
- mritzmann 9mo agoLanguageTool also belongs to an American company, because it was acquired by Learneo in 2023. You can also see this on the LanugaTool website. If you click on Imprint, you will see a German company, but if you go to the terms and conditions, it suddenly becomes an American company.
- danielscrubs 9mo agoJust tried it. Kind of awful for swedish, try “dem slår de”.
- PeterStuer 9mo agoDoes Proton have transactional email already? Back when I was looking it did not seem to have it and I went with Zoho (not EU, I know) instead.
- tormeh 9mo agoWhat's this person's phone OS? This seems somewhat overlooked here. To me, the mobile OS is the centerpiece of any ecosystem. That leaves only two options.
- saubeidl 9mo agoStrictly speaking, that's not quite true. There's non big-tech Android distros like Graphene and /e/.
- Gander5739 9mo agoThose are both AOSP-based.
- 7moritz7 9mo agoHarmonyOS Next (Huawei) is independent from Android. So that leaves three options, even if Harmony is mostly China focussed. They have tons of users there.
- tapete1 9mo agoTo me, it is the most unimportant one. I don't even read email on my phone. The screen is way too small to do anything useful.
- littlecranky67 9mo agoJust migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience. M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details. When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created. For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
- waihtis 9mo agoMSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly. Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point. This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff. Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it. This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
- graemep 9mo agoIt is not an EU based stack. Proton is Swiss and Switzerland is not in the EU.
- coldtea 9mo agoClose enough
- graemep 9mo agoIts close, but its not the EU. Would you describe using British services as an "all-EU stack? I am not saying its a bad thing. It may well be better than the EU (I do not know the current state of Swiss law).
- coldtea 9mo ago>*Would you describe using British services as an "all-EU stack"? No, but I'd call the UK "England" without a second thought...
- ErneX 9mo agoThe title is “an almost All-EU Stack”
- graemep 9mo agoThe most important part of it is Proton. the article says: "The biggest impact on this migration has come from Proton".
- littlecranky67 9mo agoWhich was actually for me a pro argument of picking Proton. The EU has a growing need to monitor and spy on its citizens (see chat control madness). Switzerland is not perfect regarding online privacy, but even if Proton was hosted somewhere else, remember that they do encrypt (mostly) everything.
- 9mo ago
- RamblingCTO 9mo agoI'd love to switch my SaaS stack to europe. But loops, resend, cloudflare, supabase, stripe/polar are kinda baked in my SaaS starterkit and it's easy to spin up a new idea and test traction. So if anyone has alternatives, I'm all ears.
- hackerInnen 9mo agoOkay looks like proton does a lot nowadays. But if someone wants a nice email provider that just works I can't stop to recommend posteo. A german email provider. 1€/month and they are just great. Been using them for 15 years now or something like that and I never had any problems. At least I can't remember any. They also always give out a transparency report[1] and apparently can't hand out much data to governments, because the data is just encrypted and they can't access it. The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains. - [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report
- dewey 9mo agoNot being able to use your domain is a pretty massive downside. The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.
- hackerInnen 9mo agoTrue and nowadays I would take that into consideration too. But I was young when I created that account (I think it was around some leak scandal or whatever that made me move from hotmail to posteo). But it turned out to be a nice decision. For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that
- morgan814 9mo agoYou can always use AnonAddy, SimpleLogin, or similar to receive emails at your domain then forward them to Posteo.
- wiether 9mo agoAs a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist. According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features. So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
- Foorack 9mo agoAm I the only one who doesn't care about E2E encryption, and just want an EU alternative? I DON'T WANT my chats to be "full E2E encrypted" with a 6-digit pin, only for me to loose them when I get a new phone. I DON'T WANT having to use a special gateway instead of normal IMAP to access my Proton mail. It really feels like server-side encryption is being forced down my throat and I don't consent. FB Messenger, X Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc... NO. Just LET ME CHAT. This is why me and my friend groups are staying on Discord. Becuase it "just works". I would like to see more EU companies which aggressively focus on being a just-as-good alternative to US tech companies, but HQ'd in EU for european strategic security, and without throwing usability under the bus.
- davzie 9mo agoTry Migadu. It’s great.
- mritzmann 9mo agoI find their pricing model strange. I can completely understand why they would want to limit outgoing emails per day. But limiting incoming emails per day feels strange, even if the limit seems reasonable.
- Foorack 9mo agoThere are 2.5 BILLION Gmail accounts. If people cared about privacy they would have switched to it, irrespective of where it is hosted. We need to focus on making competitive services which are easy-to-use.
- dethos 9mo agoI started the same process some time ago. I've made different choices but with the same goal. I'm moving slowly because this kind of migration is never easy, but I fully intend to move >90% of my stuff to European providers (and 100% of the critical parts).
- patresh 9mo agoDoes anyone have experience with longer DeepResearch tasks with Mammouth? How does it compare to using Gemini's / ChatGPT's DeepResearch or GPTResearcher + API-based alternatives? For standard questions I feel like it doesn't matter too much what you use. When it comes to multi-step searching + reasoning flows like look for alternatives, fetch pricing, feature lists, compare etc, the differences are larger because of the engineering glue and prompting around the pure LLM inference which makes the tools more or less powerful.
- deaux 9mo agoKudos. We're finding it hard to migrate away from Google Sheets in particular due to all the plugins and integrations around them. For the other things you listed we also don't rely on Big Tech. Not keen on Proton though, they seem dodgy and IMO the number one candidate for being the next Crypto AG. Besidea that, it's still "all your eggs in one basket".
- vinni2 9mo agoWhat about OS that’s hard to migrate to a EU produced OS.