Last updated on October 2nd, 2025 at 03:27 pm
Why I Went Google‑Free
Google has quietly become the operating system of our daily lives. Every search query, calendar invite, photo backup and map route is fed into its vast machine, and in return we get convenience at a cost: our attention, our data and, sometimes, our peace of mind. I’d read plenty of guides about deGoogling your life, but there’s a big difference between reading a privacy manifesto and actually cutting the cord.
One rainy afternoon in early January I resolved to find out what would happen if I removed Google from my workflow entirely for a month. I wanted to see whether my productivity would crater, which replacements would fail, and whether any alternatives would be good enough to stick around when the experiment was over.
The rules were simple:
There will be no Google Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Drive, Docs, or Chrome.
I could use whatever alternatives I could find, from open‑source projects to paid subscription services. The challenge wasn’t ideological so much as curious; I wondered how much of my digital muscle memory was tied to a single company and whether I could loosen Google’s grip without feeling like I’d moved back to 2005. As it turns out, ripping out a tech giant by the roots is equal parts frustrating, liberating and unexpectedly enlightening.
The Search for Search: DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Kagi and Beyond
My default start page has been google.com for nearly twenty years, so changing my search engine felt like the digital equivalent of switching writing hands.
I installed DuckDuckGo as my default in Firefox, lured by its promise of privacy and the absence of filter bubbles.
The results are impartial by design, which sometimes meant scrolling a little further to find what I needed.
That minor inconvenience was offset by the relief of knowing that the engine wasn’t hoarding my search history or building a shadow profile to sell to advertisers.
For more in‑depth research I tried Startpage, a Netherlands‑based service that pipes Google results through a privacy shield.
It uses Google’s index but strips away tracking cookies and logs; a small mask icon next to each result opens the page via a proxy, hiding your IP address.
The effect is uncanny: you get Google‑quality results without the stalking. Pages sometimes load slower through the proxy, but for sensitive topics it felt worth the trade‑off.
Curiosity led me to try Kagi, a subscription search engine that charges about ten euros a month in exchange for ad‑free results, the ability to block or promote specific sites and a built‑in summarizer. Paying for search felt strange at first, but it may have spoiled me.
The quality of results on Kagi was consistently high, and its Quick Answerssummarization saved me from wading through countless SEO‑optimized posts. I also tested Brave Search, which has its own index and an interface reminiscent of Google circa 2012. The service prides itself on independence from Big Tech and doesn’t collect personal data. Brave Search was fast, but its index occasionally surfaced less relevant results compared with Startpage or Kagi.
By the end of the month the surprise winner for everyday queries was DuckDuckGo. It’s quick, doesn’t track you, and serves up sensible results without filter bubbles.
For deep dives I alternated between Startpage and Kagi. Paying for Kagi felt justified when research efficiency mattered, while Startpage offered the comfort of Google’s vast index without Google’s watchful eye. The classic search giant faded into the background surprisingly easily.
Inbox Zero, Minus Gmail: Proton Mail, Tuta Mail and Friends
My Gmail archive goes back to the early 2000s. Migrating away from an account that holds two decades of correspondence is daunting. For the challenge I set up accounts on three alternatives: Proton Mail, Tuta Mail(formerly Tutanota) and Posteo. Each service emphasises privacy and encryption, and none of them scan your emails for advertising keywords.
Proton Mail quickly became my main inbox.
It stores email in Switzerland and offers end‑to‑end encryption between Proton users.
The web interface is polished, there’s a free tier with 1GB storage, and paid plans bundle Proton Calendar, Proton Drive and even a VPN.
The integrated calendar and drive helped replace Google’s equivalents, and I appreciated features like encrypted contacts and two‑factor authentication baked into the platform.
The downside was occasional latency when sending large attachments, and Proton’s spam filter is less forgiving than Gmail’s; I had to manually whitelist a few newsletters.
Tuta Mail charmed me with its simplicity.
It provides encrypted email between Tuta users and offers an encrypted calendar, but the killer feature is its absence of tracking scripts or cookies.
A free plan gives you 1GB of storage; premium plans add custom domains and additional aliases for a few euros a month.
The web interface feels minimal compared to Gmail, which I eventually found refreshing rather than limiting.
I did miss built‑in integration with other apps – there’s no native chat or file sharing – but as a pure email service it did the job well.
Posteo, based in Germany, offers privacy without end‑to‑end encryption by default but stands out for its eco‑friendly ethos and low price: one euro per month.
It strips IP addresses from outgoing emails and runs its infrastructure on renewable energy.
The service doesn’t keep logs, supports multiple domains and includes notes and calendar features. I used Posteo as a secondary inbox for newsletters and automated messages. Its web interface is basic, but setup in Thunderbird was a breeze.
After 30 days I kept Proton Mail as my primary account. The combination of privacy, integrated calendar and storage, and a mature user interface made it feel like a true Gmail competitor.
Tuta Mail remained as a backup for communications where anonymity matters. The process of updating account credentials across dozens of services was tedious; password managers became essential. But once the migration pain passed, the sense of autonomy outweighed the inconvenience.
Navigating Without Google Maps: Apple Maps, OsmAnd and HERE WeGo
Life without Google Maps was the part of the experiment I feared most. I travel frequently and rely on real‑time traffic, public transport schedules and accurate points of interest.
My initial swap was to Apple Maps.
Apple has made privacy a central selling point, and its maps app has improved dramatically.
It doesn’t associate your searches with your Apple ID rather, it uses random identifiers and discards location queries after a short time. In city centres Apple Maps was excellent, offering detailed 3D buildings and transit directions.
The biggest gripe was that the app is limited to Apple devices; I couldn’t run it on my Linux laptop.
For cross‑platform navigation I installed OsmAnd, a free and open‑source app based on OpenStreetMap data. The app allows you to download entire regions for offline use – lifesaving when roaming overseas or traveling through areas with poor signal.
The interface is dense with settings; you can customise the display, choose between car, bicycle or pedestrian modes and even download contour lines for hiking.
OsmAnd’s routing was occasionally less sophisticated than Google’s, particularly with live traffic, but it never spied on me and worked completely offline. I paired it with the paid plugin OsmAnd Live to get more frequent updates to map data.
Another pleasant surprise was HERE WeGo, formerly Nokia Maps.
It provides offline maps for entire countries and offers public transit information in many cities.
HERE WE GO doesn’t tie your searches to a personal profile; you can download maps by region and plan routes without logging in.
The app shone on road trips, recalculating routes quickly and offering speed limit warnings, but its public transportation data was limited compared to Google or Apple in smaller towns.
Over the month, I missed Google’s unmatched points of interest and street‑level imagery. No other free service had as comprehensive a database of businesses and photos. However, OsmAnd and HERE kept me from getting lost, and Apple Maps handled urban navigation gracefully.
When privacy mattered, using DuckDuckGo’s map mode (which uses Apple Maps data but anonymises your IP address) felt like a clever hack; you get high‑quality map results without giving your location to Google or Apple.
After thirty days, I decided to keep OsmAnd installed for offline trips and to continue defaulting to Apple Maps on my phone.
The slight trade‑offs in convenience seemed fair compensation for decoupling from Google’s constant location tracking.
Documenting a Life Without Docs: Microsoft 365, OnlyOffice and Nextcloud
Google Docs and Drive have become indispensable for many people because they combine real‑time collaboration with cloud storage.
Removing them created a productivity vacuum. I looked at three categories of replacements: big‑brand suites, open‑source alternatives and self‑hosted solutions.
Microsoft 365 was the obvious commercial alternative.
Word and Excel are still industry standards, and the web versions work in any browser.
Microsoft’s cloud syncing via OneDrive felt snappy, and the commenting and track‑changes features rival those in Google Docs.
Importantly, Microsoft doesn’t scan your documents to target ads, though it does collect telemetry data unless you opt out. Collaborating with others required them to have a Microsoft account; not all my colleagues do, so I reserved this suite for solo work and documents I’d eventually convert to other formats.
OnlyOffice and Collabora were my open‑source experiments.
Both offer browser‑based document editing and support the Microsoft Office formats.
OnlyOffice’s interface looks eerily like a blend of Google Docs and Office 365.
It runs locally or in the cloud, meaning you can install it on a server you control (I deployed it on a small DigitalOcean droplet).
Collaboration worked as long as everyone used the same server, and performance was solid. Collabora, built on LibreOffice, was slower but fully open source and can integrate with Nextcloud.
Speaking of which,
Nextcloud emerged as the unexpected hero.
It’s a self‑hosted file sync and collaboration platform that you can run on your own hardware or a rented virtual private server.
Once set up, Nextcloud offered file storage, calendar and contact syncing, chat (via the Talk app) and the ability to integrate OnlyOffice or Collabora for document editing. I invested a weekend in configuring a Nextcloud instance with 100GB of storage on a VPS and pointed my phone and laptop to it via WebDAV.
Everything stayed within my control, and there were no hidden data harvesting scripts.
The trade‑off was that I had to manage updates and backups myself, something Google handles automatically. But for someone comfortable with a bit of DevOps, Nextcloud delivered the ultimate antidote to the cloud giant.
By the end of the experiment I settled on a hybrid workflow: I kept a paid Microsoft 365 subscription for compatibility with clients and maintained a Nextcloud server for my personal files and collaborative notes. OnlyOffice became my default editor inside Nextcloud.
I didn’t miss Google Docs’ suggestion feature as much as I expected, and the feeling of owning my data was tangible.
Calendar, Video and Other Tools: Zoom, Jitsi and the Myth of One Ecosystem
Replacing Gmail and Google Docs led naturally to reconsidering other tools. I switched from Google Calendar to Proton Calendar and the calendar built into Tuta Mail. Both offered basic scheduling, event sharing and notifications, and integrated nicely with my email accounts. I used the open‑source Etar app on Android, which syncs with CalDAV servers like Nextcloud. The main inconvenience was coordinating events with colleagues still using Google Calendar; sending .ics files back and forth required a few extra clicks.
For video meetings I alternated between Zoom and Jitsi Meet. Jitsi is a free, open‑source video conference platform that runs in the browser and doesn’t require an account. You can self‑host it or use the public instance at meet.jit.si, which doesn’t store meeting data. In terms of quality and features, Zoom still provides smoother video and better screen sharing, but Jitsi held its own for quick, private calls. I had to coax a few clients into using something outside of Google Meet, but most were amenable when they learned no sign‑in was required.
YouTube was the one Google service I couldn’t completely avoid for professional reasons. Watching tutorials and uploading content for clients is part of my job.
There are alternative video platforms like Vimeo and PeerTube (a federated, open‑source solution), but the audience and content library aren’t comparable.
During the 30 days I used Invidious and Piped.video – privacy‑respecting front‑ends for YouTube – to watch videos without Google tracking my viewing history. These sites proxy YouTube content and strip away the trackers. They worked flawlessly for consumption, but they don’t support uploading or logging in. In the end, I reduced my YouTube usage and planned to explore PeerTube more, but I acknowledged that completely severing that particular tie may not yet be realistic.
Productivity Trade‑Offs and Unplanned Benefits
Living without Google forced me to slow down and examine my habits. Some trade‑offs were obvious: search results occasionally required more scrolling or an extra query; switching email providers meant manually updating dozens of logins; using Apple Maps or OsmAnd lacked the granular business data or real‑time congestion predictions of Google Maps; and hosting my own cloud required a time investment in maintenance. Yet these friction points revealed how often convenience masquerades as necessity.
There were unexpected gains too. Without Google’s infinite scroll, I found myself less prone to rabbit holes of irrelevant content. DuckDuckGo’s unpersonalized results encouraged me to refine my search terms and rely on actual critical thinking over algorithmic curation. Using privacy‑focused email freed me from targeted ads creeping into my inbox.
The combination of Nextcloud, OnlyOffice and Proton Mail created a cohesive, modular workspace that felt more intentional than Google’s sprawling suite.
Perhaps the biggest shift was psychological. Knowing that my location, documents and communications weren’t being harvested for targeted marketing made my relationship with technology feel less transactional and more empowering. I regained a sense of ownership over my data. I also diversified my toolkit: instead of one monolithic provider, I had multiple specialised services that each excelled at their tasks.
The Surprising Keepers
When the 30 days ended, I faced the choice of reverting to Google or sticking with my new setup. I expected to come running back to the convenience of a single login and the seemingly effortless integration of Google’s ecosystem. Instead, I kept almost all of the alternatives I’d adopted. Proton Mail replaced Gmail outright. DuckDuckGo remained my default search engine, with Startpage in the bookmarks bar for particularly tricky queries. I subscribed to Kagi for research projects where speed and quality matter. Apple Maps became my go‑to navigator, supplemented by OsmAnd for offline travel. Nextcloud turned into a digital home base for my files and collaborative documents. OnlyOffice and Microsoft 365 co‑existed gracefully, each serving different needs.
The only Google products that crept back were YouTube for publishing and a rarely used Google Voice number. Even then, I accessed YouTube through privacy‑friendly front‑ends whenever possible. The experiment taught me that dependence on a single provider is as much a habit as it is a necessity. By intentionally disrupting that habit, I discovered a more diverse and resilient digital ecosystem. The trade‑off between convenience and privacy isn’t binary; it’s a spectrum, and there are satisfying middle grounds where functionality meets respect for your autonomy.
Anyone who wants to Live Google Free Can Try These Platforms
For anyone curious about breaking free of Big Tech, I don’t necessarily recommend quitting cold turkey for a month. But try swapping out one Google service at a time. Install DuckDuckGo and see if you miss Google Search. Sign up for a Proton Mail account and forward your old emails. Download an offline maps app before your next trip. You may find, as I did, that the alternatives aren’t just good enough – they might actually be better in ways you didn’t anticipate.
