How many subscriptions does your business run on, and who owns them?
One platform instead of a dozen subscriptions: mail, notes, passwords, project tracking, automation and your own applications, on servers you rent or own, run as a single system.
The problem
Cloud services solved one problem, nobody had to run servers, and created another: nobody knows where the data is, what it costs each month, or what happens when a provider changes its terms. Teams accumulate a dozen subscriptions, each holding a piece of the business, and the bill is only the visible part. The invisible part is that every account belongs to whoever signed up for it, and that leaving becomes harder every year.
How we approach it
We start with an inventory: what runs where, what it costs, what data it holds, and what would break if it disappeared. Then we build a self-hosted platform sized for the actual load, usually one or two well-specified machines, with a reverse proxy, a deployment pipeline, mail, monitoring, and backups that are tested by restoring them. Open-source applications replace the subscriptions one by one, behind one login, on one system. Access is by keys and roles, not shared passwords. Where a hosted service genuinely earns its place, it stays. The point is that the choice is deliberate.
Worked example
The platform we run ourselves
Rua Systems runs on exactly this model. Two rented servers in a European data centre carry the whole company: one runs the mail system, so every mailbox, alias and list on our domains is ours, and the other runs a deployment platform that hosts every application we use. Documentation lives in Docmost, quick synced notes in Joplin, projects in Plane, credentials in Bitwarden, shared snippets in PrivateBin, and automations in n8n, with room for whatever comes next. There is no subscription to cancel and no account that belongs to someone else. The next step is a server in our own office, running Proxmox, that takes the same stack onto hardware we own outright.
What you get
- An inventory of every service, its data, its cost, and its exit path
- One self-hosted platform with deployment pipeline, mail, monitoring, and tested backups
- Open-source replacements for your subscriptions, behind one login, with access by role
- Operating documentation and a maintenance plan you can follow or hand to us