Replace a service

What each migration actually costs, what you give up, how to export your data before you cancel, and the honest cases where staying put is the right answer.

20 articlesLast reviewed 8 September 2026

Media

Replace Audible

Progress sync and series handling beat the commercial app. The DRM question is the part you have to settle first.

Audiobookshelf Local AI

Replace ChatGPT: run a chat model on your own hardware

A local model is not a frontier model. Here is the capability gap in numbers, then the case for running one anyway.

Ollama, Open WebUI, LocalAI Files

Replace Dropbox

How to pull a whole Dropbox account out with rclone, and why Syncthing is sync rather than backup.

Syncthing, Seafile, Nextcloud Knowledge

Replace Evernote

ENEX moves your notes. It does not move Evernote's OCR, and search results still point at archived repos.

Trilium Notes, BookStack, HedgeDoc Feeds

Replace Feedly

OPML moves your feeds and nothing else. Which self-hosted reader to run, and what you lose.

FreshRSS, Miniflux Developer

Replace GitHub

A self-hosted forge replaces GitHub's git hosting completely and its network not at all.

Forgejo, Gitea Email

Replace Gmail

The one migration on this site we mostly recommend against. Read the failure mode before you buy a VPS.

mailcow: dockerized, Stalwart Files

Replace Google Drive

Docs convert lossily, Takeout skips Shared with me, and rclone moves about two files a second. Plan accordingly.

Nextcloud, Seafile, File Browser Photos

Replace Google Photos

Takeout's split archives and JSON sidecars, the hours and terabytes involved, and the test to run before you cancel Google One.

Immich, PhotoPrism, Nextcloud Private search

Replace Google Search with your own metasearch

SearXNG has no crawler. It asks the same engines you already use, and they can tell it is a server.

SearXNG Identity

Replace LastPass or 1Password

Why Bitwarden's free tier is the right answer for most people, and what Vaultwarden actually asks of you.

Vaultwarden Productivity

Replace Mint or YNAB

Envelope budgeting and double-entry accounting are different products. Pick the wrong one and you quit within a month.

Actual Budget, Firefly III Knowledge

Replace Notion

The export looks complete and is not. What survives leaving Notion, and which wiki to land on.

Outline, Docmost, BookStack Media

Replace Plex

Plex has no export button. Here is how to get watch history and playlists out before you cancel the Pass.

Jellyfin, Emby Feeds

Replace Pocket

Pocket is gone and the export window closed. Read-later, bookmarking and page archival are three different tools.

wallabag, Karakeep, linkding Cameras

Replace Ring or Nest cameras with a local NVR

Cancelling the subscription means buying the disk, sizing the detector and owning the false-alarm tuning yourself.

Frigate, Home Assistant Team chat

Replace Slack

Slack's free plan hides messages at 90 days and deletes them at one year. Get out properly, or do not bother.

Mattermost, Synapse Home automation

Replace SmartThings or a cloud smart home hub

The hub is the easy part. The radios need a coordinator, and some of your devices are simply not coming.

Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Node-RED Media

Replace Spotify

Not a like for like replacement. Do the arithmetic on rebuying your library before you cancel anything.

Navidrome, Jellyfin Productivity

Replace Todoist

Self-hosted task managers are weakest exactly where Todoist is strongest: on your phone.

Vikunja, PLANKA