I moved my entire business off big tech in three months. Here's what it actually took.
Image by Claudio Swartz on Unsplash showing the word ‘data’ in black and white on a screen
Three months ago my business ran on Google Workspace, an American scheduling tool, an American CRM, an American email platform and an American voice messaging app.
Today it runs on none of them. My email and files live in Switzerland. My bookings and CRM run through Germany. My client conversations are end to end encrypted. My call recordings never leave my laptop.
And I'm saving over €145 a month, which was genuinely not the point but is a very pleasant side effect.
Here's the whole thing: why I did it, what I chose, what went wrong, and what I'd tell you if you're thinking about the same.
Why bother
I'm a book coach and ghostwriter. People tell me things they haven't told anyone, they share sensitive material. Memoirs in progress. Business stories with real names still in them. First drafts of the most personal material imaginable.
All of it was flowing through infrastructure owned by companies whose entire business model is knowing things about people.
Under the US CLOUD Act, American companies can be compelled to hand over data they hold, regardless of where in the world it's stored. My client base is global. Their manuscripts sat within reach of a legal system most of them have no relationship with whatsoever.
I'd never actively chosen any of that. I'd just accepted the defaults, the way most of us do, and defaults are a quiet negotiator. You don't notice what you've given away because you never looked.
The five questions
I didn't want to swap one set of defaults for another, so every tool got the same assessment.
Who owns it? Bootstrapped, employee-owned or founder-led beats venture-funded. Companies chasing venture-scale returns end up monetising their users eventually. Companies living on customer revenue serve their customers.
Where does the data live? European or Swiss jurisdiction preferred. Not because European companies are inherently more virtuous, but because the legal framework is fundamentally different.
What's the business model? If I can't see how they make money, I'm the product.
Does it reduce friction for my clients? Ethics that make life harder for clients don't survive contact with running an actual business. Every choice had to be as easy or easier for the people booking calls with me and sharing files with me.
Can I talk to a human? This one wasn't on the original list. It earned its place during the process.
What I moved to
Email, calendar, storage, video and newsletters: kSuite by Infomaniak. Swiss, employee-owned, with majority voting rights transferred to a foundation so its independence is now legally permanent. One subscription covers email on my own domains, calendar, 1TB of storage with password-protected client sharing, unlimited-length video calls and a newsletter tool; plus the equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets. Under €2 a month, which still feels like a typo.
Booking, scheduling and CRM: meetergo. Small German company, servers in Frankfurt, GDPR by design rather than by retrofit. Clients book, pay via Stripe at the point of booking, get a video link automatically and land in my CRM without me touching anything.
Client messaging: Signal. Encrypted, run by a non-profit, and most people already have it. Plus kChat; part of the kSuite option which I’m also trialing as an option because it has better organisation within the message threads than Signal.
Recording and transcription: BB Recorder. Entirely local. Audio processed on my machine, transcription on-device, nothing touches a cloud server, no account required. I’m also exploring options available via kSuite and meetergo.
Photos: Ente. Encrypted, open source, EU servers, and sharing works for the people in my life who aren't on Apple.
Passwords: Proton Pass. Search: Ecosia. Apps: Setapp. Writing: Novlr for fiction, Ulysses for everything else.
What went wrong
Plenty, and I'd be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise.
The calendar integration between my new booking tool and my new calendar refused to connect. I lost most of an afternoon to it, tried three different tools, tested it in Apple Calendar to isolate the fault, and eventually established it was a bug on the provider's end. Two days before a product launch, which was not ideal timing.
But, and it’s a big positive but, I had a named human at meetergo working the problem within hours, and they fixed it overnight. Infomaniak's phone support also walked me through configuration when I needed it with the KSuite transition.
That's what I'd underestimated. Small companies compete on care because it's one of the few things they can offer that scale can't. After years of help articles and chatbots, I'd forgotten what actual human support felt like.
What surprised me
It got simpler, not more complicated. I assumed a values-led stack meant more tools stitched together. The opposite happened. Email, calendar, storage, video and newsletter now come from one provider. Booking, payments and CRM from another. I have fewer logins than I started with.
It got cheaper. I expected to pay a premium for principles. Instead I'm saving over €1,700 a year. Big tech isn't cheap. It just hides the cost in bundles, default subscriptions and data.
There is no perfect version. I still sometimes use Microsoft 365 because publishing runs on Word; even though I really, truly would rather not. My website is still on Squarespace, American-owned, and under review, and a bigger job than moving an inbox. I still post on LinkedIn and Instagram. I still have a Substack. I’m currently exploring what’s viable in terms of social media escape planning.
That's not failure. That's what this looks like in a real business with real constraints. The distance between total dependence and thoughtful choice is enormous, and every decision you make deliberately is one that isn't being made for you.
If you're considering it
You don't need a tech team. You don't need a big budget. You absolutely don't need to do it all at once. I did this in focused sessions over three months, with client work running throughout, a product launch in the middle and family health matters to attend to.
Start with one question: where does your most sensitive client data live right now?
For me the answer was uncomfortable enough to take action.
The alternatives are more mature than most people realise, they're affordable, and the people behind them will actually talk to you. What Europe has quietly built while everyone was looking elsewhere is a genuine working alternative.
The hardest part isn't technical. It's deciding the defaults deserve questioning and being prepared to do it.
Want help with your own?
Since making the move I've had a steady stream of questions from other business owners who want to do the same but don't know where to start.
So I've opened a small number of Sovereign Stack consultations. Ninety minutes, one to one, where we map your current tools, work out where your client data actually lives, and build a migration plan that fits your business and your pace. You'll leave with a prioritised plan, a recording of the session and a clear first step.
The tools, with links
Some of the links below are referral links, which means I may receive a small credit if you sign up. It costs you nothing extra. I only include referral links for tools I genuinely use and pay for myself, and every tool listed here was chosen on merit before any referral scheme entered the picture.
• kSuite by Infomaniak — email, calendar, storage, video, newsletter [link]
• meetergo — booking, scheduling, CRM [link]
• Signal — encrypted messaging [link]
• BB Recorder — local recording and transcription [link]
• Ente — encrypted photos [link] (use code EVEQ42)
• Proton — password manager and encrypted email [link]
• Ecosia — search [link]
• Novlr — fiction writing [link]
• Setapp — app resources [link]
