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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Canada Is Renting Its Sovereignty

In the last piece I wrote about the anchor: Canada designated Cohere as its national champion at the foundation model layer — $240 million, a 24-year term, an MOU that called the company "the only sovereign, cloud-agnostic large language model operating in Canada," and a fund Cohere itself proposed. That designation is settled for a generation. This piece is the opposite kind of writing. The last one was analysis of public records, and I tried to stay out of it. This one carries a point of

May 23, 2026·8 min read

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Sovereignty Is Not About Ownership

A vice-president at a Canadian university called me last month. Her president had told her the institution needed to be on sovereign AI within the year. The provincial government had announced a funding program. Other universities were already applying. She wanted to know what she should be evaluating. I asked her what sovereign meant in this context. She paused for a long time. Then she said, "I think it means the data stays in Canada." I asked what about it staying in Canada specifically

May 14, 2026·6 min read

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I Almost Told a Lawyer to Build His Own AI

A lawyer friend — call him Mark — called me this week. He and another friend had spent the weekend trying to run an 8 billion parameter language model on a 16 gigabyte laptop. Mark thought he was going to show his friend something impressive. The output was gibberish. Incoherent strings of text that no junior associate would have signed off on. He'd come to me because he wanted to know what hardware to buy next. On the call, I didn't know. What I did know was NVIDIA's software stack. I'd

May 14, 2026·6 min read

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Fine-tuning your own AI doesn't cost $35,000. It cost us about $50.

Two A100 graphics cards. Spinning quietly in a Google datacenter. Five hours of training. About $50 in compute. That's what it cost us to fine-tune our own 4-billion-parameter AI model this week. The base model went from 30% accuracy on the tasks we care about to 98%. Read any article on fine-tuning costs and you'll see numbers between $5,000 and $35,000. One blog called it a 'CFO conversation.' Another listed 'hidden expenses' that could double your initial estimate. A third quoted team

May 12, 2026·5 min read

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Your ChatGPT and Claude Conversations Are Court Evidence

Greg Brockman's journal became Exhibit 161 this week. The next chapter writes itself. Someone's ChatGPT history becomes Exhibit 162. That sentence sounds like speculation. It isn't. The infrastructure is already in place. The court orders are already in place. The only thing missing is a famous enough defendant for the headline to break the way Brockman's did. The court order most people haven't read In May 2025, Magistr

May 9, 2026·6 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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