I'm Done With US Big Tech (Here's What I Use Instead)

0:00For the better part of two years, the EU has been talking about getting rid of big US tech. And I kind of get it. A US court ordered every chat GPT conversation to be kept, [music] even the ones people deleted. This summer, the US government made Anthropic switch off its best model for every foreign national. And OpenAI is burning billions every quarter in what looks like a bubble. For the longest time, I've had a

0:29strange relationship with big US tech. On the one hand, they're leading the game and make some of the best products in the world. On the other hand, they lock you in, keep changing the rules, and decide what you're allowed to do with the tools you pay for. And the matter of fact is, if you want to be a sovereign founder, you need to depend less on big companies altogether,

0:51especially [music] the US ones. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the seven replacements we've made, from a switch you can make this afternoon, all the way over to the servers that power your company. Let's start with email. Almost everyone uses Gmail, and for years, so did we. Google Workspace for email, calendars, and for all our shared files. But Google is an advertising company. Their whole business is built on knowing as much about you as possible. And I just don't want my company's inbox, my calendar, and all of our documents stored with them anymore. So, we moved to Proton, which is exactly where the chief

1:33prosecutor of the International Criminal Court moved his email when Microsoft shut him out. Proton is a Swiss company, and you get the same basic suite: mail, calendar, and drive, all end-to-end encrypted. And living in Switzerland myself, I like that a lot. What surprised me was how little work it was. Proton has a tool called Easy Switch. You connect your Google Workspace, pick what you want to bring, and it moves your emails,

2:00contacts, and calendars over for you. Your team can even keep working in both while you move. Of all seven switches, this is the easiest by far. Number two is my operating system. I've never owned an Apple product, and I've never really liked them. Historically, I've always been using Linux, but for the past few years, I was on Windows. And honestly, I stayed for

2:24one reason. Adobe. Premiere Pro and After Effects don't run on Linux. So, as long as I edited with Adobe, I was stuck. But, a few months ago, I found Omachi, and I knew it was time to switch back. Omachi is a Linux setup built on Arch and the Hyprland tiling window manager made by DHH, the creator of Ruby on

2:47Rails, and a fellow Dane. It's so good. The installation took around 5 minutes. Everything is built around the key- board. Apps tile themselves. I jump between workspaces without touching the mouse, and the whole thing is ridiculously fast. It's the first time I've installed a new operating system and immediately felt more productive. And the AI is built right into it, so I can ask an agent to change my shortcuts or window rules, and it just reconfigures the system for me. And guess what? Omachi doesn't come with spyware running in the background 24/7

3:23and sending data back to Microsoft. Replacing Windows took another big US tech company off my computer. That feels pretty damn good. Which brings me to number three, replacing Adobe. It's the software company we all love to hate, but for decades, their suite of software has been incredibly hard to replace. I edited in Premiere and After Effects for more than 4 years, and for some reason, I always thought of DaVinci Resolve as the good enough option for people who didn't want to pay for the

3:54real thing. Adobe was the professional suite and Resolve was the cheap alternative. I was so wrong. I finally made the switch because I wanted back on Linux. So, I thought of it as a trade-off, but Resolve was a much better experience pretty much across the board. Especially for the kind of edits we do. And the studio version is a one-time license for around $300. No subscription and

4:20definitely no early cancellation fee. It's made by Blackmagic Design, an Australian company, and it runs on Linux. I had to fight a little to get it working on Omachi, but I had codecs open in the terminal and a few round trips later it was running. Today, our whole video pipeline runs on Resolve. You can script and control Resolve directly, so our editing agent cuts the recording, places the motion graphics, and assembles the edit. Then, I spend around

4:4730 minutes on a final polish. That's it. Number four is how my team talks. For years, we ran the team on Slack. Channels for everything. Notifications all day. Another subscription for every person we added. Today, the whole team is in Telegram. And by the whole team, I mean the AI agents, too. They're in the same groups as the humans. I can mention an agent in a group just like I'd mention a colleague and it picks up the work. A lot of my days start with a walk here in the Swiss mountains and a long voice note to one of my agents. And when something actually needs me, an audit

5:25churn spike, or a difficult support case, the agents reach out to me in Telegram, too. The long-running agent work has its own system now, but the conversations all happen in Telegram. What surprised me is how much better Telegram is for this. The bot API is free, agents can join groups like anyone else, and both Open Claw and Hermes

5:46support it out of the box. Telegram is run out of Dubai, not the US, and it's just a really fast, really nice messaging app. Number five, leaving Windows doesn't actually get you away from Microsoft. Microsoft owns GitHub. We had all of our code on GitHub for years, and it had become awful to work with, slow, bloated, and down all the time. So, we moved everything to Forgejo. It's open-source, self-hosted Git repositories, issues, pull requests, and CI pipelines, all running on our own servers. The project is run by a non-profit in Germany, so there's no company behind it that can suddenly change the deal on you. And the big

6:32surprise was the speed. When we push a commit, the pipeline builds the container, and the new version is fully rolled out in about 30 seconds. We're also merging our products into big mono repos, so the agents can see the whole code base at once. They open issues and pull requests in Forgejo exactly like they would on GitHub. I have to open GitHub every once in a while, cuz we also open-source some of our stuff, and man, I don't know how I've been putting up with this for so long. Slow and just a super terrible user experience. I hate it. I'd love to go back in time and slap

7:07myself for not doing this sooner. Number six is the switch we haven't entirely finished. We still use Open AI and Anthropic. GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 still do a lot of our heaviest work, and they're incredible models, but after this summer, I don't want my company to depend on a model the US government can switch off. More and more of our work is moving to open weight models we run ourselves. Crane 3.8 already handles lightweight coding tasks, script writing, even video editing for us, and we're fine-tuning small specialist versions of it for the exact jobs in our company. So, they can take over one job at a time. And it doesn't matter to me

7:49who trained the base model. Or, yes, it does matter a little, but the matter of fact is, once the weights are on our hardware, it's our model. Nobody can cut our usage, make it dumber overnight, or refuse to do the work we assign it. I'm making a full video on how we're doing this, so I won't go into the details here, but step-by-step, the intelligence our company runs on is becoming

8:12something we own. And number seven is the big one. The servers. For years, all of our products ran on AWS. DynamoDB, Lambda, Fargate, all the classics. Yes, the same DynamoDB that took a huge chunk of the internet down last October. Very expensive and very locked in. At one point, we were paying AWS close to $8,000 a month. Today, our entire company runs on rented bare-metal servers at Hetzner, German hosting company. Three servers run four SaaS products for more than 50,000 users. The apps, the databases, the background jobs, the monitoring, all of it. And the bill is around $300 a month. Everyone

8:58told me it would be unstable. It's been the opposite. Our uptime is close to 100% and we're never blocked from shipping because some managed service is down. The other day, we had about 15 seconds of downtime. An AI agent caught the alarm, fixed it, and sent me the report on Telegram. I read it when I woke up and not a single user

9:19noticed. And Hetzner gives me electricity, networking, and a box. That's it. The software, the configuration, and the data are ours. If they ever become a terrible provider, we move everything somewhere else. Every one of these switches was easier than I expected and a big reason is AI. Linux, self-hosting, moving an entire company's infrastructure. A few years ago, that kind of work needed specialists. Now, my agents help me with

9:49it every day. And together, these seven switches means that no single US company gets to decide how my business runs. They don't get to decide what it costs, what the rules are, or what my tools are willing to do for me. So, start with your email. Move it off Google this week. Then pick the next switch. And if you want to see what my Omachi setup and my customer Gentoo

10:13OS looks like, watch this video next.