Keeping All Your Data 'On Premises'

Escape the cloud. Keep your data, well, yours. On hardware you own and control.

Earlier this year I cancelled three online subscriptions: Google, Microsoft, and Evernote. This wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise, though the numbers made the decision obvious. I was paying AU$713 a year for three services I barely used.

Microsoft had crammed Copilot into everything and charged me for the privilege, yet I opened 365 maybe twice a month. Google Workspace was worse; I’d paid for tokens I never touched. Gemini and NotebookLM are excellent but the rest of the suite sat there, unused and expensive.

Evernote was different. I actually used it. But the problem wasn’t the price alone; it was what the price represented. Every year, Bending Spoons raised it. Every year, my notes, stored in their proprietary format, on their servers, locked behind their API, became slightly more expensive to keep. I was renting access to my own thinking and the landlord kept raising the rent.

The real frustration wasn’t the money. It was the feeling of being held hostage. My notes existed in a format that only Evernote could read. If I wanted to leave, I’d have to figure out how to extract them. If Evernote shut down, or pivoted, or got acquired by someone worse the Bending Spoons, I’d have no choice but to accept it or lose 17 years of notes.

And underneath all three cancellations was something deeper: I was tired of being a datapoint in Microsoft’s and Google’s revenue streams. They give us software tools, for sure, but their real business is making us all into a product. Every search, every document, every note gets hoovered up, analysed, sold, used to train models. I was paying for the privilege of being mined. The software was the bait.

And, like good unthinking consumers, we kept paying. Every year. As the subscription went up and they crammed in more useless bloat we never asked for.

I know digital anonymity is dead. Everyone knows it. But knowing something and accepting it are different things. So I started looking for alternatives.

I’m old. I remember a time when people bought software instead of renting it. We got a floppy disk or a CD, installed it, owned it. Everything since then has been a steady march toward subscriptions and lock-in, toward companies owning the infrastructure and us bait fish owning nothing. I wasn’t going to reverse that entirely, that ship sailed long ago, but I could at least stop funding the worst offenders.

The replacements are surprisingly good. LibreOffice for Microsoft 365, free. A second-hand HP Prodesk replaced Google Drive and OneDrive. Fastmail replaced Gmail for AU$85 a year. And my Obsidian system replaced Evernote for US$30 a year (Obsidian itself is free, the email2obsidian service is the only cost).

The Evernote replacement matters most. Not because Obsidian is perfect (it’s not) but because it solves the core problem: my notes live in a format I can read and understand. Markdown is just text. Markdown works in any text editor forever. No company can lock it down. I own it, and it lives only on hardware that sits in the same room I do.

That changes everything.

P.S. I wrote a guide about my migration off Evernote and onto Obsidian, and how I replicated all Evernote’s key features on the Obsidian platform. If you’re considering the same move, the guide is here. Future guides will cover the decoupling (as much as possible) of Microsoft and Google from my tech stack.