Query: What would it take to leave Google entirely?¶
A worked example of using this wiki to answer a real sovereignty question — the kind a student might ask in class.
The Google services and their owned replacements¶
| Google service | Self-hosted replacement | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Photos | immich | Closest 1:1 UX, phone auto-backup, ML search |
| Google Drive / Docs | nextcloud | Files + office suite (via Collabora/OnlyOffice) |
| Google Calendar / Contacts | nextcloud | CalDAV/CardDAV built in |
| Google Cloud (hosting) | stack-sovereignty-box | One VPS with docker-compose |
| Google's SSL / networking | caddy + tailscale | Public HTTPS + private mesh |
| Gemini / cloud AI | ollama (partial) | Local models for fit workloads; not a full frontier swap |
Rough economics¶
Bundling the paid tiers above (Photos + Workspace) runs ~$20–25/mo per user. Owned on the stack-sovereignty-box, the marginal cost is disk + the flat VPS bill. See self-hosting-cost-savings for the full swap math (~5.5× cheaper at business scale).
Honest caveats¶
- Migration effort is real — exporting and re-importing years of data takes time.
- You become the admin — but on this box, agents (hermes + claude-code) do most of that work, and backups are automated.
- Local AI ≠ frontier AI — ollama handles many tasks but won't match hosted Claude/GPT.
Verdict¶
Leaving Google is very feasible for files, photos, calendar, and hosting today with mature tools, and partial for AI. The wiki's self-hosting-cost-savings and per-tool entity pages give a student a concrete, costed migration path.