> 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/), 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?
For 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.
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
You can get all the domain stuff for less than 1 € from any competent hoster, e.g. netcup. For cloud drive, if you really want to put your own files on someone else's server, there are tons of cheaper options, e.g. 2 TB for 10 €/month from strato.
Gemini is of course something that no one needs.
I 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.
We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.
I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
With proton, at least, you can just use your own domain and if they ever get bad, you just point the MX record to some other service, or self host, and pretty much have it taken care of.
I 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.
I 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.
this is a soft case of "you're using it wrong/didn't read what proton mail is" they physically cannot offer you this functionality even if they really wanted to. Although you can enable message body search and it has to be indexed on your client (which takes a long time and is a pretty bad UX - but there is no alternative).
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Yes, 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.
LanguageTool 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.
What'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.
Just 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.
I'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.
Okay 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.
As 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
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.
Am 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.
I 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).
Does 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.
Kudos. 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".
46 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadThis is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (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?
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
Edit: s/mining/migrating
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
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.
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
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.
It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
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-inves...
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.
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-detenti...
But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.