Imagine you’re a new nonprofit, a small company, or a medium-sized community initiative. You’ve just launched your dream project—a platform to support a cause you’re passionate about. Like most teams starting from scratch, you need a reliable place to host your files, a variety of calendars to manage personal and team schedules, and a website (perhaps on WordPress or Ghost) to share your progress with the world. With remote work being the norm in many cases, you also need tools for collaboration—weekly video calls, project boards, and team chats.

You’ve been also exposed to the marketing machine of big tech corporations. A lot! Maybe your university gave you free tools from Google, Microsoft, or AWS through multi-million-dollar contracts that they have signed with your university. Perhaps you’re already on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok promoting your amazing project. The big names—Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Zoom—seem like intuitive choices. After all, your colleagues are likely familiar with them and don’t want to spend time learning a new user interface.

Before long, you’ve set up Google Drive for file sharing, Trello for project management, Zoom for meetings, and even an email address with your domain name thanks to Google’s NGO discounts. You’ve ticked “infrastructure setup” off your to-do list nd now want to focus on what matters: implementing your ideas and not thing of digital infrastructure. Easy, right? Maybe you’ve even launched a Substack or Medium blog to attract subscribers so things look great.

For a while, it works. These platforms offer “freemium” plans that seem perfect for small teams. You’re running lean, focusing on your goals, and everything feels seamless. Until it doesn’t a couple years down the line.

After a while, cracks start to show. GAFAM corporations announce they’re changing the free goodies like storage for nonprofits and in some other cases start adding limitations on the number of messages you can exchange - we’ve talked about the approach from Slack here here. Your Gmail storage fills up and asks you to pay per user, Trello demands payment to add three more team members, and Zoom’s free tier no longer meets your needs. On top of it, these big tech corporations are known to ‘kill’ lots of these services. Here is the list and it is loooong https://killedbygoogle.com/. Some of these scenarios are not hypothetical— Some of Google’s and other big tech corps decisions are real, and similar changes are happening across platforms or services like Grammarly.) You are their friend until you are locked in and need to pay to add more shareholder value.

The freemium model—popularized by proprietary SaaS companies like Mailchimp—was designed to hook small teams like yours with free or cheap tiers, only to escalate costs as they grow. Initially, it feels like a win. But these offerings aren’t altruistic; they’re customer acquisition strategies. Once you’re embedded in their ecosystem, moving elsewhere becomes an uphill battle.

Vendor lock-in refers to the practices that make it difficult for users to leave a service provider. These can include:

• Proprietary file formats: Exporting your data becomes a nightmare so you can’t use them on your new setup.software.
• Data limits: Exceeding your plan means escalating costs. AWS is a great example of this.
• Complex migrations: Moving to a new provider requires technical expertise and time you don’t have.

Big tech companies rely on lock-in because they know you’ll pay the price after you move all your infrastructure and data there—literally and figuratively—rather than migrate to a new ecosystem. And as these corporations prioritize shareholder value, their pricing models evolve to squeeze more out of their users.

Data Sovereignty FTW

So, what’s the solution? In an ideal world, you’d self-host your tools from day one. Self-hosting is the ultimate path to data sovereignty. It ensures you’re in full control of your data, software, server hardware and overall digital infrastructure. But let’s be honest—self-hosting isn’t for everyone. It requires:

1. Technical expertise: Setting up servers, deploying software, and managing updates.
2. Time investment: Routine backups, troubleshooting, and maintaining infrastructure.
3. A long-term commitment: Ensuring everything runs smoothly for your team even when you are on vacation.

For small teams with limited resources, this can be challenging. While self-hosting is ideal, it’s often impractical when you’re juggling other responsibilities. On top of it, ‘free’, even though temporarily, seems better than paying for the services the old fashion way.

A Middle Ground: Value-Alligned Managed Hosting

That’s where value-aligned hosting providers, like us, come in. We combine the ease of managed hosting with the principles of open-source technology and data sovereignty. Here’s what makes small by design teams like ourselves (and lots of others) different:

• No vendor lock-in: Your data is yours. If you ever want to leave, we’ll help you migrate to another provider or even self-host if that’s your goal.
• Transparency: We use open-source software, so you’re not tied to proprietary tools.
• Community and solidarity over shareholders: We really care about your infrastructure, not growing shareholder value into billions.

And we’re not alone. There are incredible teams out there who share these values—like CHATONS and others in the open-source hosting movement. These organizations operate like a neighborhood shop, not a corporate supermarket.

Before you commit to big tech platforms, take a moment to think long-term. Cheap and easy solutions might work today, but they often come at the cost of control, flexibility, and, eventually, your budget and your infrastructure sovereignty.

By choosing ethical hosting providers, you’re not just protecting your data—you’re supporting a movement that prioritizes people over profits. It’s about building a future where technology empowers, rather than exploits, small teams, nonprofits, and community initiatives.

The choice is yours. Make it an informed one.