I've made some big changes to my personal tech ecosystem over the last few years and discovered some great applications along the way. Here are a few standouts.
Kagi
Paid for by the user
Replacement for: Google search, which I've used since at least 2004.
If you've noticed your Google results have been getting steadily worse—or if you're getting sick of having to scroll down below the fold to even see your results—you should sign up for a free trial of Kagi (rhymes with "doggy"), a search engine whose biggest con is also its biggest pro: you have to pay for it.
It's a pretty good pro, though. Google gets paid by advertisers, so they want what advertisers want (tons of ads, links to sites that run ads, results that prioritize online shopping). Kagi gets paid by you, so they want what you want (no ads, relevant results only). Considering how much time I spend searching for things online, the fee of $10/month is pretty reasonable.
So far I've only gone back to Google a few times. Google is better if you're shopping for a PS5. But Kagi has held its own in every other respect, especially programming questions. And it makes me happy to know that the only person paying for my search results is me.
Immich
Open-source, self-hosted
Replacement for: Google Photos, which I've used since 2011, and iCloud, which I've used since 2021.
Google Photos pulled a very predictable bait-and-switch on their "unlimited free photo storage" offering in 2021, and iCloud uses several dirty tricks (storing low-quality versions of photos on your iPhone to "optimize storage;" making it impossible to download all your iCloud photos at once) to lock up your pictures in the cloud so you'll feel forced to pay for expanded storage.
I'm never going to have fewer photos than I have now, so I saw where this was going: a never-ending spiral of higher and higher monthly storage fees. So I bought a cheap home server with a couple terabytes of disk space, installed Docker, and spun up an Immich instance. And it's been great. The mobile app syncs my photos behind the scenes and they're all accessible from a LAN server, no Internet connection required.
SyncThing
Open-source, self-hosted
Replacement for: Dropbox, which I've used since 2010.
Dropbox was pretty cool when it first launched. The app was slick, it was the only game in town, and there were tons of ways to get extra free storage. I relied on it all the way through college.
These days the free tier is more restrictive and the company seems to have lost its way. (What do they even do anymore? Why don't their ads make any sense? Why did they make a Microsoft Word overlay that's so hard to turn off? Darned if I know.) I was getting tired of cleaning out old files every time I wanted to move a 1 GB zip archive around, so I set up SyncThing on my home server and switched all my files over in about 30 minutes. It's been a flawless plug-and-play replacement ever since.
SyncThing is free, but if you want file access on your iPhone you'll need Mobius Sync, which costs $5—once, not monthly.
Firefox
Open-source
Replacement for: Google Chrome, which I've used since 2008.
I wish I had some big noble reason for switching to Firefox, like privacy or stickin' it to the man. But if we're being honest, I switched because Chrome crashed while I was at work one day and I couldn't get it to start up again. So I used Microsoft Edge for its one true purpose: downloading Firefox.
Firefox is great, though, and I have no regrets. It's neck and neck with Chrome in the latest benchmarks and, as a bonus, isn't planning to force-delete your adblocker next year.
OTP Auth
Paid for by the user
Replacement for: Google Authenticator, which I've used since at least 2015.
Every 2-factor authentication app is essentially the same. However, Google Authenticator has an extra special feature: it stores your auth keys in a proprietary format which prevents you from exporting them anywhere else unless you're willing to clone a community-supported tool from GitHub and mess around on the command line for a while.
Which I was.
OTP Auth is a great replacement and it works with your Apple Watch, so you can get your two-factor codes without even pulling out your phone. If that isn't luxury, I don't know what is.
Mastodon
Open-source, decentralized
Replacement for: Twitter, which I've used since 2015.
Mastodon is literally just "what if Twitter/Threads/Bluesky/Tumblr worked like email, so you could join whatever server you want and still follow all your friends?" Super simple.
Like Kagi, this is a case of incentive alignment. If a big tech company runs your social media, they're going to sell you out as often as they can, for as much money as they can. If Steve (who you met at a conference one time) runs your social media, he's probably too busy at his day job to be thinking about how to sell your data.
(You should tip Steve, he does a great job.)
Obsidian
Self-hosted
Replacement for: Edward, a writing app I launched in 2018 and discontinued in 2021.
Running a B2C app for novelists was great fun but extremely unprofitable. Luckily, after shutting it down I discovered Obsidian, a local-first Markdown editor with an impressive plugin ecosystem. And the one missing feature (word count in the file tree) was easy to implement on my own.
Now I do most of my writing in Obsidian, which gets better with every release. And it's great being able to keep all my files on my computer in an open format, so even if the app dies someday, I won't lose anything.
What's next?
I'd love to use even more self-hosted, open-source, and/or paid-for-by-the-user products in 2024. (Does anyone know how to leave Gmail and take your email address with you? ...No? Oh well.)
What are your favorites?
Top comments (21)
Affinity Photo & Designer by serif - upgraded from v1 using the Universal package deal. A fraction of the cost of Adobe CC and you get robust photo and vector apps. With the Universal package you get even more.
Both great tools
Interesting list. I would like to shout-out Cryptomator an open-source project to encrypt files.
cryptomator.org/
Excellent list of recommendations, Isaac! Appreciate the share.
Is Kagi actually worth the money? Do they provide such good results? I will check their site out later. I switched to DuckDuckGo some years ago and I'm personally very happy with it. You can personalize it and disable, for example, the voluntary ads. Oh, and you're able to easily switch between international and local results, which is a great feature for me.
I'm using Bitwarden for my passwords and 2FA. Their app also works on the Apple Watch and shows the 2FA codes there.
Obsidian is great; I'm using it myself.
As for browsers, I've been using Brave for a long time now, but I have everything like the wallet and earning money from their ads disabled. Besides some settings adjusted and with ad block on aggressive. Never had an issue. I never really warmed up with Firefox, maybe i give it another try some day.
I haven't used DuckDuckGo. My understanding is they might not track you like Google does but you still get ads in your search results. So they're not paid for by the user, open-source, or self-hosted, which disqualifies them from this list.
The display minimal, unobtrusive ads, which are clearly marked and contribute to keeping the service free. They respect user privacy by not tracking users and provide an option to disable ads in the settings as stated. While not open-source or self-hosted, DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy and user control makes it a strong choice for privacy-conscious users.
So, from my understanding, the only difference is that you don’t have to pay for DuckDuckGo. Sorry if that disqualifies them. I thought of them as a valid alternative here.
Kagi has no ads, ever. That’s the differentiator for me. I’m paying for my own search results, so they’re incentivized to show me the ones I want.
I’ve just signed up for a Kagi trial and am excited to test their service.
Edit: I gave Kagi a try and just reached their free tier limit. Honestly, it didn't quite live up to my expectations, especially considering the pricing; the search results were not better than what I get with DuckDuckGo and nothing else really stood out. Also, having to link my search history to an account is a big downside for me. But of course, everyone has their own preferences, so what didn't work for me might be ideal for someone else.
Great article. I definitely want to check out Kagi and mastodon.
As an aside relating to Kagi rhyming with doggy: does corgi also rhyme with Kagi, for you? Do hag and hog rhyme for you?
For me Kagi rhymes with waggy and Maggie, but not doggy.
Just very interested in the English language ❤
The Kagi FAQ says it’s pronounced “kah-gee,” and I interpret “ah” as a short O sound. They may have meant a short A though, as you say. There’s not really a way to distinguish between them if you write phonetically, they’d need to use IPA or something.
EDIT: They link to this YouTube video for a pronunciation demo. Definitely rhymes with "doggy."
It counts as self-promotion but I really recommend replacing your Android Default Launcher with Yantra Launcher if you are a CLI enthusiast
A great list. Thanks for sharing. A minor suggestion: post the links for each one.
I went back and forth on that, but didn’t want anyone to think I was affiliate link farming or anything. As a community mod I see a lot of that here.
Totally understand
What's wrong with the open source FreeOTP that you need a payed alternative?
You assume I know what FreeOTP is. I don’t, but on looking it up it doesn’t appear to be nearly as highly rated. It also doesn’t support key export or connect with Apple Watch.
You can review it's source. Very solid. If you trust more the user ratings of proprietary apps, that's super strange but so be it.
And I'm not an apple user so I don't know about watch.
wrt key export, I'm not sure what you mean. It has a backup function. Or you need something else?
Actually though nowadays I use much more the OTP capabilities of my chosen open source password manager than the standalone OTP app.
Browser vivaldi, and they recently released an iPhone version.
For a search engine I use the searx public instances which scans multiple engines of bing, duckduckgo, google.
I would suggest Brave as a browser alternative. I have Firefox as my default, but Brave is better at blocking a lot of things by default. Including youtube ads.
A lot of people have some very serious concerns about Brave, though broadly I do think it's better than Chrome.