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I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

329 points by alexcos

by littlecranky67

6 subcomments

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.

by kavouras

7 subcomments

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.

by nocchedure

6 subcomments

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

by cdmckay

6 subcomments

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.

by AuthAuth

4 subcomments

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.

by slackr

1 subcomments

Grammarly alternative: LanguageTool. Used by EU institutions

by hackerInnen

1 subcomments

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.
- [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report

by deaux

0 subcomment

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".

by tormeh

3 subcomments

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.

by zie

1 subcomments

Vivaldi doesn't block ads as well as uBlock Origin, so I'll stick with uBlock Origin which means Firefox and friends anymore.

by bradley13

2 subcomments

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.

by RamblingCTO

0 subcomment

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.

by patresh

0 subcomment

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.

by wiether

0 subcomment

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.

by graemep

3 subcomments

It is not an EU based stack. Proton is Swiss and Switzerland is not in the EU.

by Foorack

2 subcomments

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.

by dethos

0 subcomment

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).

by oriettaxx

0 subcomment

I would remove grammarly (due to privacy)

by PeterStuer

1 subcomments

Does 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.

by wizzwizz4

8 subcomments

> 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?

by simianparrot

0 subcomment

50% expenditure saving sounds good, but how many more hours per month are you now spending making it all work?

by ape4

2 subcomments

They moved from platform A to platform B.

by drob518

4 subcomments

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.

by wtcactus

2 subcomments

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.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...

by mgaunard

2 subcomments

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