We are moving off the cloud

Ever since DHH decided to move Basecamp off the cloud, something shifted in our company.

Even though I'm on the opposite side of DHH's views on a lot of (especially political) topics, I need to give him credit: being dependent on a vendor for stuff where dependency is unnecessary or financially viable is not a good idea.

Especially in times like right now, where industries are under extreme pressure, it's important to stay financially lean, with minimal dependencies on services which cost monthly and push your burn rate through the roof.

Okay, but what does this mean for „us"? The agencies, production companies, and for our company? Basecamp and SaaS platforms are a different beast to tackle, but the result is the same and an issue I've been seeing everywhere.

Passwords stored in Google Sheets „because we don't want to spend a monthly fee on another service".

Login sharing, because „does our intern of four weeks really need their own access to Google Drive?".

Knowledge bases in 600 PDF files (I've seen this at a company of 2,000 people), because a knowledge management tool is too expensive.

This results in people using the wrong tools for the wrong job. You CAN push a screw into wood with a hammer, but the result will be unsatisfying for all people involved and it will look ugly as hell.

We've been working on a solution to this over the last few months.

Piece by piece, we are moving our infrastructure off the cloud, and onto our own servers (yes, real physical servers).

Thanks to open source software, Docker, and Linux, we are slowly but surely getting our own data back, without user caps and monthly fees.

All with 99.9% uptime, 321 backups, secure server hardening, and all the fancy stuff.

Google Drive → Nextcloud

Toggl Time Tracking → Solidtime

PDF Documentation on Google Drive → Outline

Later.com Posting planning → Postiz

And many more to come.

Anybody doing the same?