For a long time, the narrative has been that if you want privacy and data sovereignty, you have to sacrifice usability. But after settling into this new stack, I’ve realized that isn’t true anymore. In fact, most of these tools aren’t just more private; they are significantly better than the US-based giants I left behind.

Here is a breakdown of the tools I’m using, the money I’m saving, and the few hurdles I’m still trying to jump over.

by the way, this post is for personal setups not for companies. Yet, I think most tools can be used for teams and companies too.

The biggest impact on this migration has come from Proton. They have matured from a simple encrypted email provider into a (almost) full-suite productivity powerhouse.

My subscription now covers:

• Mail & Calendar: Encrypted and clean.

• Drive: Secure cloud storage, having docs for a while, and now also tables.

• Proton Pass: A solid password manager with 2FA integration.

• VPN: Fast and reliable.

• Standard Notes: My go-to for note-taking, now under the Proton umbrella.

• Lumo AI: A privacy-first GenAI, I’m not yet frequently using it, but we will talk about it later.

Everything is integrated and the user experience is superb. I’m also eagerly awaiting the release of Proton Meet to complete the suite.

This entire setup replaces for me my Google Drive and Gmail ecosystem. Plus NordVPN, Notion, 1Password and Authenticator.

Curious? I will drop you my referral link here.

AI is the hardest thing to decouple from Big Tech, but improvements are happening fast here, too.

For privacy-first GenAI tasks within my workflow, I’m using Lumo AI. It’s great for quick, private queries.

However, sometimes you need raw power. For that, I started using Mammouth. I use this less for privacy reasons and more for the sheer value and flexibility. Getting access to every major AI model (including image generation) for just €10 is incredible value.

My default for Mammouth looks like this. You can sort them in your favourite order; whatever is leftmost is your default one.

The two models I use most are Mistral Medium 3.1 and Flux 2 Pro or Fast. For simple coding tasks, I also use Mistral, but when playing around with a larger codebase, I have to admit I’m using Claude Code.

For research, Mistral does its job. But if it becomes complex, I often find Gemini's results to be the best.

At last, Flux for images is fantastic. Yet, in my opinion, it comes with a major downside: You have to give a lot of good instructions. Where a Nano Banana seems more creative, even from short, simple inputs, Flux needs precise orders.

• Browser: I moved to Vivaldi Technologies. It’s highly customizable and respects user data.

• Search: My default is Ecosia. It works well, and planting trees while searching adds a nice layer of purpose to mindless scrolling. Yet, every now and then I have to use Google :/

• Translation: I’ve been using DeepL forever. In my opinion, it is still miles ahead of Google Translate in terms of nuance and quality.

• Spell Check: … Haven’t found a good alternative, so I stay with Grammarly. Hoping for them to return to Europe with their Superhuman Platform.

For my website and domains, I moved everything to Scaleway.

If you are technical, you will appreciate this switch. It is lean, simple, and provides everything you need as a cloud provider without the bloat of AWS or Azure. Plus, it’s cheaper.

Canva… what shall I say.

Thanks to the initial discussion I had on LinkedIn (original post), I found Superlist, to which I transitioned from Todoist. I also had a mini stop at MeisterTask, but that was a complete waste of time.

MeisterTaks feels like a kindergarten playground, too much colorful design and too little actual functionality. It is 100% not user-intuitive for any workflow.

So, I’m now on Superlist, and very happy with it.

We often assume that “boutique” privacy tools cost a premium. Surprisingly, my migration proved the opposite. Initially, I wrote only about a small saving, but I missed the costs of Notion, Todoist, 1 Password, Claude and Canva as I focused on the “Office” suite.

My Old Stack cost ca. 83€ per month

My New EU Stack cost ca. 39€ per month

I’m saving over 528 € a year while owning most of my data.

I want to be transparent: you cannot escape everything, and some things are just harder to use.

1. The “Guilty Pleasure”: As a techie, I have too much fun playing with Claude Code. It’s a luxury I treat myself to, so I frequently turn the subscription on. Yet, if you don’t have that use case → Mistral, Lumo

2. The Social Web: You simply can’t get around LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Medium, Substack and so on if you want to stay connected.

3. Convenience: I miss a good Google SSO. It is everywhere, and losing that “one-click login” friction does make life slightly more annoying. I migrated every Login to Proton Pass using MFA and Passkey wherever possible.

4. Office Suite: I am struggling to get used to LibreOffice and Collabora Online. They feel similar to MS Office, but “not quite.” Since I don’t create documents or spreadsheets every day for personal use, the learning curve feels steeper than it should. Screw that → Proton Docs and Sheets are doing it. Worst case for slides, I’m going for Canva, I’m paying for it anyhow.

5. 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.

I also found a couple of positive side effects. The Proton platform itself has everything you need for your day-to-day life.

In addition, I migrated to a Duo plan with my wife. Together we have 2TB on storage for Mails, Files etc. Before we had 30GB on Gmail, which cost a little more.

Proton Pass creates anonymous email addresses in case you don’t want to use your real email address. This plays entirely on Proton's privacy aspect.

Superlist is free for the same features Todoist provided me for a little subscription.

Lastly, I’m always fighting with note-taking. I tested everything and started building something complex on Notion. I’m glad that I could delete it and just use Standard Notes from Proton. In simple terms, it is like notes from Apple, yet E2E encrypted and you can back them up offline. However, most helpful for me is that I finally found a way to work effectively with notes, keep it clean, lean and functional.

With Proton, Scaleway, Mammouth, Vivaldi, Superlist and DeepL, I have built a useful toolset that, in my opinion, surpasses what I used before.

The apps are cleaner, the UI is often more user-friendly, and the migration was surprisingly simple. Best of all, I can do more with my tech stack for less money.

If you’ve been on the fence about migrating to EU-hosted solutions, take the leap. It’s worth it.