I'm leaving Google: it's easier and harder than I thought
This is a first dispatch from the other side, and it's still a bit scary! I've been using Google Workspace with my own domain for 10+ years. It works so seamlessly that you stop questioning whether you actually want Google holding your email, your calendar, your photos, and your passwords. I think about EU digital sovereignty at work (and at work) every day. And yet there was my entire private life, sitting in Trump land.
So I moved. Or rather: I started moving. And I want to write about it honestly, including the parts that are harder than the enthusiast blogs let on.
What I moved so far
Email and calendar are live on Proton. 121,000 emails imported. DNS flipped. ruben.org now routes to Swiss servers. That part is done and it feels good.
Passwords moved from 1Password to Proton Pass, just to cut quite some costs even though I love 1Password (but it's bloated and expensive now). Most things came over fine. Passkeys didn't: that's an industry-wide limitation, not a Proton bug, but you'll need to re-enroll them manually per site.
Drive and Photos are downloaded from Google but not yet uploaded to Proton. Why? Because 1.8 TB of your life takes up more local storage than you have lying around. That problem is queued, since AI is causing world wide memory shortages so I didn't want to buy a 2TB SSD drive for €500 yet...
The cold shower
Keyboard shortcuts are a genuine regression. Gmail's [ key (archive this email, show me the next one) is so deep in my muscle memory I didn't realise how much I used it until it was gone. Proton doesn't have it. One of their most upvoted feature requests, for years.
Calendar is the most social problem in the migration. The tech took an hour with Proton's really nice Easy Switch tool. But shared calendars were tied to my Google account identity. My girlfriend, daughter and I use our calendar constantly and those hundred-odd shared events? They need to be re-invited. One by one. That's on the humans, not the software 😬
There's no magic sync button. Google Drive to Proton Drive means: Google Takeout export, unzip, re-upload. For 1.8 TB, that's a weekend project. Except I ran out of local storage halfway through. Proton doesn't offer a cloud-to-cloud migration path. Neither does Google of course, because why would they?
The web app is slower than Gmail. There's a reason power users end up running Apple Mail via Proton's Bridge app which handles the encryption. The browser experience is clean but not fast. I tried Airmail too, but apart from the annoying 3 day demo - automatically pay for a year trick, it didn't feel nicer than Apple Mail...
The encouragement
Proton's design is genuinely good. Cleaner than Google's in places I didn't expect. Onboarding was frictionless. The apps feel considered, not bolted together.
Watching "encrypting and backing up your photos" feels different from watching Google Photos quietly inhale your memories. I didn't think the psychological dimension would matter as much as it does. It does.
Proton's business model is the real thing. Their controlling shareholder is a non-profit Swiss foundation legally obligated to defend their privacy mission forever. No VC investors. No advertising model. You literally can't invest in them — by design. Google's product is you. Proton's product is privacy. That distinction is structurally enforced, not just a marketing claim.
And the fact that I'm doing this at all with a custom domain, on my own terms, able to point my email anywhere I want is only possible because I own ruben.org. If you take nothing else from this: get your own domain. €10/year. It's the cheapest form of digital independence available. Do it before you need it.
What's next
Drive and Photos uploads once I sort the storage problem. Evaluating whether Moral Fabric (my ops company for nonprofits) should become a Proton or Mosa Cloud reseller. And a proper guide once the migration is complete, for anyone who wants to follow.
For now: the cold shower is real. So is the reason to keep going! 🇺🇸 🍊 🇪🇺
