Why Are We Doing This?

Free Your Tech is a large non-profit project built by a small group of volunteers. We've put in hundreds of hours and our own money, with no prospect of financial gain. Why do it? Because the way we use technology matters. Right now, a few companies have too much power over our lives.

The Problem

Online services are part of our work, friendships, family lives, and free time. We use them to connect, share, learn, create, and play. Software used to run on our own computers and work offline. Now even basic things depend on services we don't control.

These services are convenient and often free. The cost is our data, attention, and control. Much of what we share is stored or processed on someone else's servers in the cloud. That means computers in data centers, run by companies whose priorities are different from ours. Your family photos may be on Google Drive, your budgeting sheet in Microsoft Office, your chats on Facebook, your purchase history on Amazon, and your iPhone's location tracked by Apple. Smaller services also rely on the same big cloud providers, and many use tracking tools such as Google Analytics or Meta Pixel.

In practice, much of our digital lives passes through a few powerful companies. So what's wrong with that?

• They collect intimate details about us, buried in dense policies and changing terms
• They combine and share that data to build profiles that shape what we see, what we're offered, and how we're treated
• They can lose it, too. Data breaches keep exposing people's private lives
• They profile us with startling accuracy and detail
• They design feeds to keep us scrolling (BBC)
• Those feeds can narrow what we see and trap us in information bubbles
• They use what they know about us to target ads and push us to spend
• We've seen political targeting in US campaigns and the Brexit referendum. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to target voters, and Romania's 2024 election showed how coordinated campaigns can use online platforms to influence public debate. These tools can influence your vote.
• Meta has used public posts and images to train its AI models
• We can only guess at what companies will do with the data they already hold

Collecting data is only part of the business. A service starts out useful, then becomes hard to leave. Companies make it harder to use without an account, remove features, raise prices, and squeeze more from the people who depend on them. When growth and profit come first, users end up with fewer and worse options.

The Alternative

Free and open-source alternatives exist for almost everything, but they start at a disadvantage. Schools often teach Windows and Office; many industries rely on Adobe or Autodesk. Those products are what people know. Switching means learning new tools, which can feel like one more burden when people are already busy.

Learning a new tool isn't the only hurdle. Easy sharing, syncing, and collaborative editing need servers and careful setup. Running a server can be too technical or expensive for one person. So people are left choosing between handing their data to a tech giant or going through life on hard mode.

The Solution

Non-profit collectives can offer another way. By sharing resources and knowledge, groups can build infrastructure that makes these tools practical. Communities are already doing this, but reliable setups take time and expertise. When every group has to start from scratch, the work gets repeated. Small associations rarely have the technical resources to build and maintain their own systems.

That's why we created Free Your Tech. We bring people together with meetups, share knowledge through articles and documentation, and provide a reusable stack. Our stack connects selected open-source tools and handles much of the work of setting them up. It creates and configures cloud servers, installs the software, and applies the settings. You provide a few details, such as a domain name and email address. Updates are designed to be straightforward and low-risk, and can be rolled back.

We want groups of any size to use open-source tools and keep control of their data, without a team of experts or an expensive managed service. The stack is free to use for a collective, a business, a family, or an individual. Hosting and a domain still cost money and setting up a server takes some technical confidence: you'll configure a domain, choose a cloud provider, edit a configuration file, and run a few commands. That still takes effort, but it's easier than building and maintaining the whole system from scratch.

If you're thinking of setting up the Free Your Tech Stack for your group and have some questions, just reach out to us. We're happy to help. Would you rather just use the servers we set up, and support our mission? Become a member here :)