For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about how to get out of the tech dependency of big tech. I do not like all the data they own about me, and I want to make attempts at trying to get out of their grips.

I had tried for a long time to DeGoogle my life. Being a bit too curious about technology, I took a maximalist approach by trying to setup my own VPN (my own private server), and install all the services that I need to get off of Google.

This took literally a year of tinkering, stopping, halting, and learning about tech to make work.

Looking back on it, it was a complete waste of time. I want to share instead with you something that gets you 80% of the way there and off the biggest Google services from your life.

My total cost of this service? $20/year!

Here’s what I did. And what didn’t work.

Setting up a VPS on Hetzner (or Vultr, or a million other places). Installing Docker. Installing Coolify. Installing services one by one through these services.

Spending hours configuring each and every service. Missing some unknown variable and then it not working.

Not getting backups done correctly.

This whole thing was seriously a nightmare. While I learned a lot about Linux, Docker, Coolify and other PaaS options, I spent most of my time on ChatGPT (a service I’ve since cancelled…more on that in a future post) figuring out how to tinker things and make it work.

I understand that many people get a lot of joy from doing this. I know I do. But it isn’t my core work and I need other things to play with. So I chose something simpler to keep going instead.

I’m a huge fan of Proton, and I think I could’ve just used Proton instead of everything I am going to share with you below. But I think I’m just cheap and do tend to enjoy a bit of technical fun to make the below stack work.

I’ve been a long time user of Firefox. Combine Firefox with uBlock Origin and you’ve got pretty much the perfect browser.

You can import all of your bookmarks from Chrome or Edge.

Firefox works beautifully on mobile as well. It saves passwords as well, although I use something else for passwords.

I used to pay for a version of Bitwarden. Now I just run everything on Keepass XC. If Keepass is too technical for you, just get Bitwarden. The free tier is fairly sufficient and what I used for a while.

Keepass XC is a solid option because it runs locally on your computer. Nothing is on the cloud.

I use Syncthing however to keep multiple copies of my passwords running in multiple places. It also syncs with my phone and I can use my password manager there as well.

I now run 2FA with everything and I’m also increasingly using passkeys as well.

Passkeys are the gold standard in authentication of course and most major websites now offer passkey authentication as seen here.

I honestly tried to install and make Immich work on my VPS. I used Google Takeout to export all of my photos/videos since 2006. It turns out there was roughly 7 Gb of data. I know others might have more, but I have been much more selective of what photos I want to take.

In fact, a piece of data hygiene that I follow is to go through my photos each day and delete all extraneous photos at the end of the day in my gallery.

Immich was an excellent tool, but it took a while to figure out things like metadata handling when it didn’t seamlessly import in all the Google photos that I had exported.

Until I discovered Ente. I like the team, I like the product, and I loved how seamlessly it imported in all of my export files from Google. Seriously a solid experience.

Once I got my photos on Ente, I deleted all of my data on Google and that pesky sign that kept telling me to upgrade my data went away.

Ente now runs on my phone and auto backs up photos that I want to backup from my gallery. Their free tier gives me 10 Gb, which should be lots of space for me.

PurelyMail does just 1 thing and it does it well. It does email. No other fancy things. And it does it for just $10/year. I own multiple domains and I wanted one service that I could use for all of it.

Most services charge different fees for each additional domain/email address. PurelyMail consolidated all of that in one place.

I was able to create an account, connect my gmail account, and it was able to import everything from Gmail pretty easily.

I then setup mail forwarding in my gmail and I have it forwarding all future emails directly to my PurelyMail account and archiving/deleting on Google.

I now run my entire inbox from PurelyMail.

On my phone, I use the FairMail app which I am very satisfied with and I have it connected to my Purelymail account.

The cool thing about PurelyMail is that it comes with a DAV server so I can import all of my contacts, calendar and tasks on it as well.

PurelyMail gives you details on how to link up CardDAV (the service that lets you sync contacts), and CalDAV (the service that lets you sync calendars and tasks). All of this sits on PurelyMail.

So on my phone, I got DAVx5 (free), which lets my connect to this DAV server on PurelyMail.

I then exported all of my contacts from Google and imported it into Fossify Contacts instead with sync on the PurelyMail CardDAV server.

It sounds technical, but it is literally just 3 things:

Btw: FOSS = Free Open Source Software. Thus, Foss-ify!

After that, it was just a matter of deleting Google Contacts from my phone and turning of sync.

It’s wild how much data Google had about all of my contacts just from that!!!

Your DAVx5 bridge will also show you the CalDAV service you can connect with on your PurelyMail server. That means you can now sync up your calendar and your tasks as well.

What tools did I use for the tasks tool and the calendar?

Again, all you have to do is to connect these services to your PurelyMail server using a bridge (DAVx5).

All this means that if you make any changes on your phone, it all flows through to the cloud.

I thought I would have a lot of data on Google Drive. Turns out I only have a few hundred Mbs.

At first, as usual, I had tried to install Nextcloud on my own VPS. But it was really tedious.

This time however, I turned to Nextcloud on tab.digital. They give a generous 8 Gb of space, which has been enough for me.

Nextcloud is excellent to be honest, and it honestly could have been the one stop shop to replace Google almost completely for me. Because it can connect to your email address (including the PurelyMail inbox above), Contacts, Calendar, Drive and more.

But I had a hard time configuring all of that.

I instead choose to use Nextcloud just as an alternative to Google Drive.

Backblaze costs me $1/month to backup around 200 Gb of data I have across everything I do digitally. It has a bit of a learning curve to understand how to backup, but it is a tool well worth learning for the low cost it uses.

I also backup things on a physical hard-drive and keep a redundant copy.

And just like that, I got rid of the main things I used on Google everyday.

I am still slowly working my way through all the main services which uses my gmail address and updating my email address to the one I’ve got running on PurelyMail. But the auto-forward is helpful.

Total cost:

$10/year for PurelyMail which replaces Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Tasks.

$0 for Firefox with uBlock Origin

$0 for Nextcloud with Tab.Digital

$0 for Keepass XC

$0 for Syncthing to keep things synced up across my phone and computer (and another place which I’ll get into eventually)

$10/year – a domain name to connect my digital identity with.

$10/year – Backblaze for backups

Total cost for me right now: $30/year.

Proton on the other hand would cost me $120/year. Roughly 4x more!

I think after tinkering in 2026 and enjoying the process, I may migrate over to Proton fully for 2027, but for the time being, I’ve having too much fun with this stack above.

This might vary. There was still some learning required to make the above work. But if you have some technical fluency, it isn’t hard to get the above done fairly quickly. I think a dedicated 3-6 in one day can get almost all of the above done pretty quickly.

3-6 hours is a small price to pay to DeGoogle your life.

I want to find a better option to Google Messages. I find it very convenient to read messages on my phone and on my computer if I’m away from my phone.

I’m not sure what’s the best solution here other than Phone Link on Windows, which is not a very enjoyable experience.

I also want to get better without using Google Maps. I am currently trying out OsmAnd. Honestly, it’s pretty decent but the interface is a huge change for me to get used to.

But all in all, the above has been very satisfying for me to go through.

This is the missing link for some of the above things. I want to bring my wife into the fold, and some of these tools are a bit too technical for her, especially as an Apple iPhone and Macbook user. But I got much further ahead in 1 month than I was able to get ahead in years before. So I’ll take this as a win.