Stop paying Google Workspace and move to self-hosted alternatives

[OmeGak]

Google Workspace is costing ~$40 per month. We are using it for:

1. Email server for @bonfire.link addresses.
2. admin@bonfire.link and info@bonfire.link mailing lists.
3. Collaborative docs and spreadsheets.
4. Shared drive for media.

Potential replacements for 1.:

• Self-hosting https://www.dovecot.org/

Potential replacements for 2.:

• ???

Potential replacement for 3.:

• Self-hosting HedgeDoc for text.
• No idea of any decent collaborative spreadsheet.

Potential replacement for 4.:

• https://nextcloud.com/
• https://www.seafile.com/
• https://syncthing.net/

As a pre-requisite for all of the above, we need:

• Reliable, automated backups (Introduce automated backups #16).
• Comprehensive monitoring.

[sbutler-gh]

For #1 and #2, I found some good open-source mail service offerings recently:

• https://postal.atech.media/
• https://cuttlefish.io/
• https://www.mailersend.com/mailgun-alternative

Postal and Cuttlefish are self-hosted, and Mailersend can be self-hosted or work as a managed service.

For #3:

• Etherpad instance (https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite) -- the one drawback is their notifications system is currently broken, so you can't receive email notifications as smoothly as with Google Docs. Also, their commenting UI isn't as nice.

However, it's compatible with rich text, markdown, and can even work as an IDE. Also has an extensive API. Features comments and chat built in. And can be integrated with Jitsi. Also, a long history of open-source development and maintenance.

• On the spreadsheet side, I would just look for "open-source data grid" — which seem to satisfy collaborative spreadsheet functionality:

https://revolist.github.io/revogrid/
https://grid.glideapps.com/
https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/datagrid

For #4:

Nextcloud Ansible Playbook: https://github.com/spantaleev/nextcloud-docker-ansible-deploy

General notes:

• https://indieweb.org/ has lots of documentation/tools in use that are relevant to conversations like this. Also, a very easy community to jump into and ask questions.

• For any database (e.g. postgres), Supabase.io has been amazing to work with