A Practical Guide To De-Enshittification

When we started Brightwild Ventures, we decided that if we were serious about preventing enshittification in areas like clean energy, we also needed to walk the walk in the systems we use ourselves. Small choices about everyday tools can either reinforce extractive systems or help build alternatives. The tools you choose today quietly shape who holds power tomorrow and reversing that shift becomes harder with every year of lock-in.

Our attempt to choose a different path turned out to be an interesting journey. We discovered there are more alternatives than we’d assumed, and often they are simply better. We wanted to share what we learned in case it’s useful to others.

This is still a work in progress, and some choices will no doubt change as we learn more. But if you want to push back against enshittification, the best time to start is now.

Email & Calendar

Our default assumption for email (and many other services) was Google Workspace, largely because we’d used it before. But it’s well known that Google collects a vast amount of personal data and has long prioritised its own interests over those of users. We ended up choosing  Fastmail (£4.50 per user/month). It was easy to set up and has a clear business model: you pay a subscription, and they don’t harvest data or show ads.

We also considered Proton. Full encryption wasn’t a priority for us (though it will be for some), and Fastmail’s support for standards like IMAP and CalDAV was helpful.

Chat

As we don’t get to meet in person very often, we wanted an easy way to stay in touch. We started using WhatsApp, but although Meta cannot read the contents of your message, they can still track who you sent a message to, when you sent it, where you were etc. So we have moved to Signal (free), which is an independent non-profit, does not have ads or tracking, and has all the features we needed (video calls, desktop app etc). We are looking at federated alternatives.

Search

Many of us have used Google Search for so long that we barely question it, even as quality has declined through poor results, heavy advertising, and dubious AI answers — alongside extensive tracking. I was very pleased to discover Kagi  ($10 per user/month), which we now use instead.

I’ve tried alternatives in the past (DuckDuckGo, Ecosia), but often found them harder to use. Kagi’s results are as good as, or better than, Google’s, with no ads to scroll past. It genuinely feels like a breath of fresh air. Because you’re the customer, not the product, the service is optimised to show what you want, not what generates ad revenue. It also offers tools to hide low-quality sites and doesn’t sell your search history.

Web Browser

We use Firefox (free) rather than Chrome. As a non-profit, Mozilla’s commitment to open software and standards aligns well with our values. As with other Google products, Firefox reduces the conflict between serving users and exploiting them. It also has strong extension support, including ad blockers and multi-account containers. Overall, it’s been an improvement.

Keeping Notes

We wanted something like Notion for shared notes and documentation. We’re currently using Outline ($10/month for up to 10 users). It doesn’t have the full feature set or ecosystem of Notion, but it’s clean, fast, and covers what we need so far. It’s open source and can be self-hosted if we choose, which reduces lock-in and the risk of rising prices for diminishing features.

AppFlowy is also promising, but lacked some features we needed, such as page history.

Office Suite

Shared document editing is now essential. This is one area where Google still feels like the smoothest option, but we opted for ONLYOFFICE using their DocSpace hosting service ($20 per admin/month). It’s open source (AGPL v3), uses standard formats compatible with Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, and can be self-hosted in future.

It feels closer to traditional office software than Google Docs, which may be an advantage for some teams. Proton also offers shared documents and has recently added spreadsheets.

Database

We needed a spreadsheet-database hybrid similar to Airtable to track ventures and other information. We’re currently using NocoDB (free for up to three editors). It’s open source, can be self-hosted, and sits on top of a standard SQL database, giving us more flexibility long-term. So far, we’ve found it well built and easy to use.

Generative AI

We’re very conscious that generative AI raises broader issues beyond concentration of control and transparency. At the same time, we’re exploring how careful automation can help us scale impact with limited resources.

We started with ChatGPT but have moved to Anthropic Claude (£15 per user/month), at least for now. Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, which provides some governance oversight, and has a clearer framework for aligning outputs with stated values.

In future, we may look at Mistral (open source, EU-based) or self-hosting models like LLaMA. Longer-term, we’re interested in the emergence of frugal AI: targeted, efficient models designed for specific tasks rather than maximal scale.

Video Calls

Once we moved to Fastmail for calendars, we needed a solution for video calls. We are currently using Jitsi (free), and have been impressed with its quality and easy of use. It is open source, and you create a meeting just by making a URL, no accounts needed.  

Conclusion

Overall, it was surprisingly rewarding to realise that many incumbent tools haven’t improved much — and some have clearly become worse — while better alternatives are available. Switching costs were also lower than expected. We moved across quickly, with no real disruption.

Our total monthly spend on these tools is around $125 (~£90). That’s probably too much for an individual, but for an organisation it’s a worthwhile investment, not just to avoid enshittification. As Jenny Blake puts it (quoted by Cal Newport in Slow Productivity), one step toward “going pro” is paying for tools that work well, rather than “squeezing everything I could out of freemium editions.”

I’ve also made changes in my personal setup — using a different search engine and moving email to my own domain rather than relying on @gmail.com.

For further ideas, purchasewithpurpose.io is also a useful resource.