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De-Googling

January 16, 2026

Since early last year, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on the big US tech companies, and US companies in general. Following Tim Bray, I’ve been thinking of this as de-Googling.

I don’t really want to get into the reasons, except to say that I’m under no illusion that my support (or lack of it) makes any difference to those companies. For me, it’s much more about reducing risk1, and about supporting smaller companies whose interests are more aligned with mine.

Anyways! I wanted write about my progress here, in case it’s useful to anyone else who’s also considering this.

(For a more in-depth discussion of the various alternatives, I found European Alternatives and Getting off US tech: a guide to be quite helpful.)

Web hosting: Hetzner 🇩🇪 + Bunny 🇸🇮

This was a pretty easy one. My web site has been hosted on Dreamhost for 20-odd years, and a few years back I started using Cloudflare as a CDN and for SSL termination.

I now have a VPS with Hetzner, and am using Bunny as my replacement for Cloudflare. I’m extremely happy with both:

  • The Hetzner VPS gives me a lot more flexibility than I had on my Dreamhost shared hosting plan, and it costs about the same. It’s also cool that my VPS is just down the road in Nuremberg.
  • Bunny is a drop-in replacement for most of what Cloudflare can do. Their web UI is also much more pleasant to use than Cloudflare’s, and their custom support is excellent. I pay them $1/mo (the minimum charge).

Mail & calendar: Fastmail 🇦🇺 + iOS Calendar

I’ve also been using Gmail and Google Calendar for almost 20 years — since shortly after they announced Google Apps for Your Domain.

This was one of the most difficult decisions. I evaluated Soverin and mailbox.org, but they both have pretty rudimentary web UIs. Also, I have a huge volume of mail (20 years worth) and use search *a lot*, and I couldn’t figure out a setup that could really replace Gmail for me.

I considered Proton, but since it’s end-to-end encrypted, I assumed that search performance would also be a problem.

I ended up choosing Fastmail. Although they’re an Australian company, their servers are located in the US. Since privacy is not my main concern here, I considered it to be an acceptable tradeoff.

Migrating my email to Fastmail was really easy (they have a migration assistant) and I’m perfectly happy with their web client and iOS app. There was really nothing that I missed from Gmail.

I did have a few issues migrating my calendar, mostly related to notifications from other Google Calendar users. The problem was two-fold:

  1. Fastmail only did a one-time import of all the calendar events.
  2. Since I still had a Google Workspace account, any changes from other Google users would directly update the calendar event, rather than being sent by email.

It took me a while to debug this, but I eventually realized I could disable Calendar in my Google Workspace. Everything has been working fine since then.

On my laptop, I use the Fastmail’s web UI for my calendar, but on my phone, I’m using the built-in iOS calendar. I used a configuration profile to do this.

For a single user, Fastmail costs €5/mo.

Video calls: Whereby 🇳🇴

After I moved off Gmail and Google Calendar, I need to find a replacement Google Meet. This was surprisingly difficult; I find a lot of video chat apps (e.g. Discord, Cal.com) to be significantly worse than Meet.

Finally I tried Whereby and have had nothing but positive experiences. I’m currently paying for their Pro account (US$7.50/mo).

Web browser: Vivaldi 🇳🇴

Not much to say here. I got tired of Chrome’s deceptive messaging about ad privacy and about how careful I had to be to stay signed-out.

Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser, and after tweaking a few settings, it’s basically a like-for-like replacement. I’ve been happily using it for 6 months now.

File sync: Self-hosted

I used to have all my important digital records in Dropbox. Early last year, I replaced it with a self-hosted setup:

Maps: Organic Maps + Apple Maps

I’ve been using Apple Maps for navigation for a few years now; I find the UI to be nicer, and for some reason, Apple seems to be better at knowing about road closures in Germany.

For other things that I used to use Google Maps for (e.g. looking up opening hours of stores), I find Organic Maps to be surprisingly good. I’m not sure I’ll be able to completely remove Google Maps from my phone though.

Office: 🤷

The biggest gap for me so far is that I haven’t found a good replacement for Google Docs and Google Sheets. Luckily, my needs aren’t that big; I’ve been getting by with LibreOffice Calc for spreadsheets, and Obsidian for most of the other stuff.

What’s next?

To address the elephant in the room: yes, I’m still using iOS and macOS. I did pick up a Nothing phone last year, and at some point I’d like to try installing one of the deGoogled Android distros on it. I may also pick up a cheap desktop machine and try running Linux for a while, let’s see.

I also haven’t tackled photos yet. I’m still paying Apple for iCloud photo storage, and also using Google Photos. I’ve heard good things about Immich but haven’t tried it out yet.

💬 Questions? Send me an email or respond on Bluesky or Mastodon.