> 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.

I Spend 0. I don't understand why anyone would need most of these services.

I’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

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.

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.

They moved from platform A to platform B.