Own Your Tech

If you didn't build it and you can't replace it, you don't own your business.

Vendor Lock-in

100%

Your Data

Permission Needed

How many tools could shut down your business with a pricing change?

How much of your customer data lives on someone else's server?

How many API keys stand between you and a total outage?

Every SaaS subscription is a bet that the company behind it won't change the price, kill the feature, or lock you out. Most people don't think about this until the email arrives: “We're updating our pricing.” By then you're trapped. Your data is in their format. Your workflows are built on their API. Your team knows their UI, not the alternative.

I've been on both sides. I've built SaaS products and I've been locked into them. The math is simple: if you can't export it, migrate it, or replace it in a weekend — you don't own it. It owns you.

This is where I write about what I self-host, what I don't, and the real cost of each decision. Not ideology. Math.

Essays

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We Are No Longer Building a Canadian Legal AI Model

Yesterday I published the post-mortem: we asked flash-1-mini ten questions any Canadian lawyer would consider basic, and it invented seven citations. That post was about what broke. This one is about what it changed. Because two weeks ago I was telling people we were building a Canadian legal AI model - and today we decided we're not. I want to walk through why, because the answer changed how I think about what "building AI" actually means. The original scope The original scope made sense

Jun 10, 2026·6 min read

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We Asked Our 4B Legal AI 10 Questions. It Invented 7 Cases.

An honest post-mortem on our own model — and what anyone building or buying AI should take from it.

Jun 10, 2026·8 min read

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Open Weights, Closed System

Google shipped local AI on the Mac this week. The weights are Apache 2.0. The experience is a walled garden. That's not a contradiction. That's the playbook.

Jun 7, 2026·5 min read

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Why CBLRE Matters More Than the Model

Yesterday we released CBLRE — the Canadian Bilingual Legal and Regulatory Evaluation. The day before, we released flash-1-mini, a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI model. Most of the launch coverage has focused on the model. That's the wrong artifact to focus on. The model is the proof. CBLRE is the moat. Here's why. The gap nobody had filled Before yesterday, no standard public benchmark existed for Canadian bilingual legal AI evaluation. That sentence is bigger than it so

Jun 3, 2026·5 min read

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Closed Orchestrators Will Commoditize. Open Ones Will Compound.

Two AI infrastructure announcements landed in the same week. Ours was a model. We released flash-1-mini — a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI — under Apache 2.0, alongside an open benchmark (CBLRE), an open training corpus, and the methodology behind both. The model runs on a MacBook. It runs on a Raspberry Pi. The weights are downloadable. You own the file. Perplexity's was an orchestrator. At Intel's Computex keynote in Taipei, CEO Aravind Srinivas demonstrated what the com

Jun 3, 2026·5 min read

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Your Monthly Invoice

A typical SaaS stack. Recognize any of these?

Monthly Statement

Your SaaS Dependencies

Due: Every month, forever

AI API (GPT/Claude)

Local LLM

$200/mo

Analytics Platform

Plausible (self-hosted)

$50/mo

Email Marketing

Listmonk + SMTP

$99/mo

$5/mo

CMS / Website Builder

Next.js + MDX

$79/mo

Cloud Hosting (per app)

VPS / own hardware

$120/mo

$20/mo

Project Management

Plane (self-hosted)

$30/mo

File Storage

MinIO / local NAS

$25/mo

Monitoring & Logs

Grafana + Loki

$45/mo

You're paying

$648/mo

You could pay

$25/mo

That's $7,476/year back in your pocket. Over 5 years: $37,380.

Real numbers from a real stack migration. Your costs will vary.

The Weekend Test

For every tool you depend on, ask one question:

“If this disappeared tomorrow, could I replace it by Monday?”

Your AI provider raises prices 5x

Run Llama/Mistral locally in an afternoon

Your analytics platform gets acquired and sunsets

Plausible deploys in 10 minutes

Your email platform suspends your account

Can you export your list? Do you own your sending domain?

Your CMS company pivots and kills your plan

Markdown files + Git = forever portable

Your cloud provider has a 48-hour outage

Is your data in one region? One provider? One account?

Your payment processor freezes your funds

Do you have a backup processor already connected?

Your project management tool shuts down

Export to CSV, spin up an alternative, keep moving

Your domain registrar locks your domain

Do you control the DNS? Is the registrar transfer-friendly?

Every is a single point of failure. Start there.

What I Actually Run

George's real infrastructure. Not theoretical — in production right now.

george@sovereign ~ / infrastructure

$ status --all

AI (Local LLMs)RUNNING

Llama 3, Mistral, CodeLlama on Mac Studio

~$200/mo vs API

WebsiteRUNNING

Next.js on Cloud Run, self-managed

~$79/mo vs Webflow

Blog & CMSRUNNING

Ghost (self-hosted) + MDX

~$50/mo vs managed Ghost

EmailRUNNING

SendGrid SMTP, own domain, exportable list

~$80/mo vs Mailchimp

AnalyticsRUNNING

Plausible CE, self-hosted

~$50/mo vs GA360

DatabaseRUNNING

PostgreSQL on managed instance, daily backups

Full data ownership

Code & CI/CDRUNNING

GitHub + GitHub Actions

Portable, git-based

File StorageRUNNING

GCS buckets, own encryption keys

~$25/mo vs Dropbox Business

$ uptime

All systems operational. 0 vendor dependencies critical path.

This isn't about being anti-SaaS. It's about choosing which dependencies are worth it — and owning the ones that aren't.

Part of the Same Thesis

Tech sovereignty is one layer. These are the others.

Sovereign

Sovereignty over your life. Income, location, lifestyle — remove every dependency someone else controls.

AI Displacement Series

7 chapters on what AI is actually displacing and the 5 layers it can't touch.

Start reading

Get Essays on Owning Your Stack

Self-hosting, AI infrastructure, and the real cost of every tool decision. No hype. Just math.

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