How Limeleaf Divested from Big Tech and Took Ownership of Our Data

Posted on January 21, 2026 by John Luther

In early 2025, we decided to ditch Big Tech services and manage our own digital infrastructure. This post is already long enough, so if you want to know our reasons this article explains it pretty well.

After months of planning and migration, we completed the transition this week. We hope this post inspires and helps others to make the move, too.

Why We Made the Switch

These were the priorities that guided our transition:

Data Control: We wanted complete ownership and control over all our business data, from emails to documents and source code.
Privacy and Security: Big Tech's business model relies on harvesting personal data to power the addiction economy. We chose tools that respect our privacy by design.
Open Source and Open Standards: As developers who use and contribute to open-source, we wanted our infrastructure to reflect that.
Values Alignment: We wanted to support organizations that share our democratic management principles.
Cost Efficiency: We run Limeleaf very lean, so saving money wasn't our main goal, but it would be a nice bonus. What mattered most was not giving Big Tech any more of our money.

The Challenges

After doing our research, we identified a few potential challenges:

Collaboration Friction: Some of our customers and partners rely heavily on Big Tech tools like Slack and Google Workspace. We wondered if we could still work smoothly with them without having accounts on those platforms.
Feature Gaps: We were concerned that Nextcloud's document editing wouldn't match the real-time collaboration or user experience of Google Docs.
Time Investment: The initial setup and data migration could take significant time away from our client and product work.

We considered these pretty minor compared to the long-term benefits, so we felt the switch was worth it.

The Great Migration

Here are the tools we replaced and what we switched to.

Team Chat: From Slack to Mattermost

What we replaced: Slack ($9/month/user)
What we chose: Self-hosted Mattermost ($0)

This was the first switch we made, and it actually happened in mid-2024. Slack was where we did most of our communication, but we didn't like its feature bloat and data retention policies, and we were concerned about Salesforce using our data to train its LLMs ¹.

Mattermost offered an open-source option with the basic functionality we needed, allowing us to run it ourselves. Although Mattermost has a tool to import Slack history, we decided to start fresh and just keep an archive of our old Slack chats for reference. For working with customers who use Slack, we use free accounts.

We recently hit the 10,000-message limit on Mattermost's free tier, so we are planning to move our team chat to Nextcloud Talk (free and no message limit).

Video Calling: From Google Meet to Miro Talk

What we replaced: Google Meet (included in Google Workspace)
What we chose: Miro Talk ($0)

Miro Talk is a free peer-to-peer videoconferencing service that doesn't collect any personal data (it doesn't even require an account). It offers pretty much all the features that Meet has, with the added benefit of unlimited conference rooms and no call time limitations.

We considered using Nextcloud Talk for calling, but it requires an additional "high-performance server" to be set up and maintained, which we didn't want to deal with.

Email and Calendar: From Google Workspace to Fastmail

What we replaced: Google Workspace ($7/month/user)
What we chose: Fastmail ($5.25/month/user)

For email and calendar, after testing offerings from Proton Mail, Mailbox, and kDrive, we picked Fastmail. We also considered running our own mail server with a Roundcube UI, but making sure emails were delivered reliably and blocking spam was more responsibility than we wanted. Fastmail's strong spam filtering, privacy, UI quality, and reliability made the price worthwhile.

The switch was dead simple. Fastmail imported two years of emails and calendar events from Google in minutes.

Document Storage and Editing: From Google Drive to Nextcloud Files

What we replaced: Google Drive (part of Google Workspace)
What we chose: Nextcloud Files via Pikapods ($12.50/month)

This was the hardest part of our migration. We had to move years of documents, set up new ways to share files, and get used to how Nextcloud handles collaborative editing.

We decided to use Pikapods to host Nextcloud instead of running our own server, since self-hosting would have meant ongoing work to keep things current, secure, and backed up. Pikapods handles all of that for us.

Nextcloud's document and spreadsheet editing is more limited than Google Docs. Real-time collaboration isn't as smooth, and the old-fashioned interface takes some getting used to. Still, having full control over our data makes it worthwhile.

Also, we like to write our documents in Markdown on our own computers and sync them to Nextcloud Files with WebDAV, so we don't use Nextcloud's Office tools very often.

If we really need to collaborate with a customer in Google Workspace, we can use our personal Gmail accounts.

Code Hosting: From GitHub to Codeberg

What we replaced: GitHub (free tier)
What we chose: Codeberg with monthly donation ($5/month)

Codeberg aligns far more with our open-source values than GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. Codeberg is a community-led non-profit that offers Git hosting built on Forgejo. The move was technically easy for us, but we did need to update some links on our website and let a few collaborators know about the new locations.

Web Hosting: From GitHub Pages to Statichost.eu

What we replaced: GitHub Pages (free)
What we chose: Statichost.eu (free tier)

We switched our website and podcast hosting to Statichost.eu, a European provider that jibes well with our privacy and small web values. We also like supporting an independent entrepreneur. We use Zola to build the site, which Statichost.eu supports, so the move was easy.

Cost Savings

While saving money wasn't a primary goal, the financial impact is worth examining:

Before with Big Tech:

Google Workspace: $7/month/user
Slack: $9/month/user
GitHub: $0/month (free tier)
Total: $16/month/user

After with Open Source/Privacy-Focused:

Fastmail: $5.25/month/user
Nextcloud (Pikapods): $12.50/month ($3.12/user)
Mattermost: $4.50/month (the software is free, but the Racknerd server costs $55/year)
Codeberg donation: $5/month
Statichost.eu: $0/month (free tier)
Total: $10.74/month/user

Monthly savings: $5.26/month/user (about $250 annually)

It's not a huge amount, but for a small group like ours, every bit helps.

Products We Can't Replace (Yet)

Technically, these are not Big Tech products, but they rely heavily on Big Tech services to operate (Amazon AWS, Google Analytics, etc.).

Xero: We use Xero for our accounting and bookkeeping. This one really annoys us, because aside from being pretty bad software, it is expensive ($90/month). We're looking for free/open-source alternatives, but haven't found one that we're happy with. Suggestions welcome!
Gusto: We use Gusto for our payroll. It's a great product, but it's not open source and is also expensive ($68/month). Suggestions welcome on this one, too.

What We Learned

Team Buy-In: We agreed on our principles and goals before we started so we all understood why we were making the changes.
Plan, Plan, Plan: Weeks of research and coordination among the team made the transition very smooth.
Gradual Migration: Moving one service at a time allowed us to focus on each step.

Challenges

External Collaboration: As we expected, working with clients on Slack or Google Workspace requires extra coordination and maintaining free accounts on these services.
Learning Curve: Every new tool required time to learn and configure. We are very technical users, so this wasn't a big deal, but it might be in your organization.
Feature Gaps: These were minor, and luckily there is an ecosystem of third-party Nextcloud apps that we used to bridge the gaps. The two most crucial were team folders and, of course, Giphy:

What We Gained

This was about aligning our daily work with our values. We now have:

Full control over most of our data.
Enhanced privacy, knowing our data isn't being used to tune harmful algorithms or train AI models.
Support for open-source projects and privacy-focused small businesses.
Reduced dependence on monopolies that we feel undermine democracy and human rights.
Lower costs to reinvest in our business.

Want to Join the Movement?

We think the Big Tech divestment movement will gain a lot of momentum in 2026. People are tired of these companies using our money to undermine democracy and basic human decency around the world. Also, governments seem increasingly concerned about their monopolistic practices and finally doing something about it.

If you're thinking about reducing your dependence on Big Tech, here's what we recommend:

Do it for the right reasons: Discuss it within your organization so everyone is crystal clear on why you are making the change. The learning curve and minor inconveniences are easier to overcome when you're motivated by strong principles.
Research thoroughly: Spend considerable time understanding the alternatives, and test tools thoroughly before committing to one.
Plan for the transition period: You'll likely need to maintain accounts on old platforms while you migrate. Budget time and resources for the overlap.
Set realistic expectations: Open source alternatives may not have every feature or the visual polish of their Big Tech counterparts. Focus on what's truly essential for your users.
Consider hybrid approaches: You don't have to be all-or-nothing. For example, we chose Fastmail instead of self-hosting email because it makes sense for our situation.

Onward!

We are a worker co-op, and co-op principles guide everything we do. Big Tech corporations do not share these principles. They prioritize profit over people, often at the expense of user agency, economic equality, and democratic values. By supporting open-source projects and small, worker-owned, privacy-focused companies, we hope to create a more diverse and equitable tech ecosystem.

I imagine some of you are thinking, You're a tiny co-op with four members spending less than $1,000 a year with Big Tech. Why would they care what you do? That's fair. But we think if every organization, large or small, stops paying for even one Big Tech product and adopts an alterntaive, they (or the governments who are supposed to regulate them) will start paying attention. Major social movements always start small.

If you'd like to take control of your organization's data but don't know where to start, send us an email.

Appendix: Big Tech Alternatives to Consider

Server Hosting

Team Chat & Communication

Video Calling

Email

Document Storage and Collaboration

Website Hosting

Project Management

Source Code Management

Salesforce clarified Slack's AI training policy (somewhat) in April, 2025. We had already stopped using it by then and didn't reconsider our decision.