[dmje]

In my world (running a small digital agency), I've realised that even if I do all the things to reduce my data footprint (for instance, migrate all my docs to NextCloud, self host email, etc), it actually all breaks almost instantly - all it takes is a client to share a doc or folder with me where they use GDocs / Dropbox / whatever, and I'm effectively straight back in it.

My basic strategy is one of slight defeatism, I have to admit. I am 100% in to Google for their (really quite excellent) tools in Google Workspace: nothing is as good as GDocs, nothing is as good as Gmail, nothing is as good as Google Meet; but I do things to ensure I'm not utterly f**d if the Random Google AI Best happens to decide I'm some sort of unspecified menace. So for instance - I use Google Docs but only with .docx / .xlsx files rather than native .gdoc .gsheet files. I back this up automatically to my self-hosted NAS. I do this on a domain which I own, so can step away if things do happen to go south, or costs double or whatever.

Then I use kagi.com for search, and have a piHole / ublock / Brave to minimise footprint from a tracking POV.

I know, it's all probably moot given I just open up my inbox to Google, but I've tried and failed to find a provider that is even close to being the same balance of low price + utility. I got excited about Fastmail but turned out it was a combination of not very good AND really expensive once I factored in having several accounts on the same domain. I had a horrific experience with iCloud+ (they have a weird YEAR long account blocking issue thing that I won't go into now). M$ was awful and required me to send everything through GoDaddy's DNS. All the others were just underwhelming or expensive or both. So - sadly - I'm back in the G stable where I'll stay for the time being... :-)