It started with Dropbox. I have been a customer for a couple of years, paying their highest individual tier price because I needed two things: reliable syncing and lots of storage. This should have been a win-win situation. Dropbox was offering a product that fit my needs and I was willing to pay the price they asked.
But then at some point, I started getting increasingly obnoxious upsell messages whenever I was using the Dropbox website. It started with a small but persistent button in the toolbar asking me to upgrade. Then the button became visually louder and started showing up in bright colors made to draw attention. And finally, I started getting pop-ups every single day to upgrade to the team plan. Here’s a screenshot.
Here’s the thing: I don’t have a team. I didn’t even share a lot of files with others. Why would I ever want to upgrade to a plan that clearly isn’t for me? The most infuriating thing was that these popups kept coming. At some point I even tried reaching out to Dropbox only to be met with a response along the lines of “Oh, that shouldn’t happen! If it happens again, please tell us!” Well, it just did happen. And I just told you.
So here I was, a customer that was seemingly not good enough for Dropbox. And it didn’t stop with Dropbox either. I had a paid Google Workspace plan both for myself and PUSH, and they decided to start giving me helpful reminders that higher-tiered plans exist every other time I used one of their tools as well. Notion wouldn’t shut up about Notion AI.
There is the saying that when you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. But I was paying for all of those products and still I couldn’t expect the basic courtesy to use their products as a paid customer without being bombarded with ads for more profitable (for them) plans. I didn’t have the words at the time, but it was the second tier of enshittification, where businesses don’t just turn on their users, but also on their business customers in the pursuit of increased shareholder value.
Where I am today
All of this transpired roughly 2 years ago and it set me on the path that I am still on today: one where I avoid VC-funded tech companies as much as I can, make sure that I have a greater degree of control over the tech that I actually rely on.
Here are some of the most impactful changes I have made. Note that these are for my one-person business as well as my personal use. I still use some of these tools in other businesses with more stakeholders, but I’m working on reducing my reliance.
Dropbox → Self-hosted Nextcloud
Late last year, I bought a refurbished mini PC and turned it into a home server. It cost me €300 and some time to set it up, but it has been extremely reliable since then. Before investing in my own server, I used the StorageShare product from Hetzner, which hosts everything for you (at a much cheaper price than what Dropbox et. al. offer)
Google Workspace → Fastmail
If you want your own domain for email (which you absolutely should want), then Fastmail is a cheaper option than Google Workspace. It doesn’t come with an office suite or significant cloud storage, but I already have that covered with Nextcloud anyway.
Notion → Nothing
Yes, nothing. Upon examination, I wasn’t really using Notion for anything super useful. I had built a few databases and had taken notes there, but it didn’t go beyond that. So I moved the notes into Obsidian, turned some databases into notes, and simply deleted the rest.
What started as being annoyed with a popup in Dropbox turned into a significant change (and to me: massive improvement) in the technology I interact with every day. Besides greater peace of mind, this change has also felt empowering. It showed me that it’s not impossible to switch away from “ubiquitous” tech products. There are a lot more changes I have made to my tech choices over the past year or two, but that’s for another time.