I offer software & SAAS selection advice for small-to-midsized European organisations that care about how they operate, not just what they do. If you worry about lock‑in, data jurisdiction, or simply tools that don't fit how your team actually works: you're in the right place.
For most of my career, clients have been paying me to build things. But, what they kept coming back for, was the thinking that came alongside: about tools, decisions, technology, vendor proposals, etc. People kept asking what I thought, and acting on it. When clients started asking if I could just do that part, it turned out I could … and kept going.
Many software decisions aren't really decisions.
Someone set up the website and that default analytics tool just showed up with it. Email goes through Gmail or Outlook because… that's what email is now. The CRM is whatever someone's last employer used. The marketing tool is the one with the chimp because… well, everyone knows the one with the chimp. Nobody really chose these things, they just somehow ended up there.
I call this ritual mimicry: going through the motions of choosing without really doing the choosing.
It works, for the most part, until it doesn't: until you want to use a language that isn't English, until half of your team has given up on features that technically exist but are too complicated to use, until someone's maintaining a spreadsheet alongside the system that was supposed to replace spreadsheets…
Or until you decide to leave and discover your data won't export properly and your communication history won't migrate (I've witnessed a two-week CRM migration turn into four months because of this).
And then a policy changes on the other side of the Atlantic, and your data is suddenly someone else's business.
Most European organisations with actual values – on sustainability, human rights, fair labour, democratic transparency, the environment – have given almost no thought to whether the technology they use reflects those values. Not because they don't care, but because these tools arrived looking like infrastructure rather than the results of decisions.
Your emails probably go through Microsoft or Google servers. Your files are likely sitting on Amazon ones. Your team chats and makes decisions over Zoom. These tools just ended up there, and now your organisation depends on them … and funds them.
That last part is worth focusing on: every subscription, every renewal, is a financial relationship. And, right now, several of the companies that underpin European online infrastructure are headquartered in a jurisdiction whose political direction is increasingly at odds with the values many European organisations are committed to.
You might be paying subscriptions for systems that are actively lobbying against your local regulations, your rights, and maybe even your mission.
This isn't abstract: in 2025, when the US sanctioned judges at the International Criminal Court, their Microsoft email accounts were suspended overnight. Their Apple IDs were disabled, their credit cards stopped working, they couldn't book hotels or hire cars. These were people living and working in Europe, doing legitimate work. And American companies shut them out of daily life, immediately and with no recourse.
Chances are, no US president is going to come for your email account. But the infrastructure that made that possible is the same infrastructure you're running on. And, beyond that risk, there's a simpler question: is that a financial relationship consistent with what you say you stand for?
There's a growing range of European and open-source tools that can do the job. Often with less fine print, clearer data jurisdiction, and without the political baggage. Austria's military has moved off Microsoft. France has built its own alternative to Zoom for public sector workers. Danish schools have been asked to abandon Google Chromebooks.
These aren't ideological moves. These are organisations closing the gap between their values and how they actually operate.
Whether you're choosing something new or replacing something that's failed you, the goal is the same: to make a clear, intentional choice you can explain to your team and your future self.
They were running on a project management platform built for organisations three times their size: overcomplicated, slow, invasive, and hosted outside Europe. We replaced it with something that matched how they actually worked and that was simpler, cheaper, open-source and European-hosted.
They needed a very specific set of email marketing capabilities. A European option existed – we tried it seriously – but the support was so unresponsive it represented a genuine operational risk. We chose the American alternative knowingly, documented the reasoning, and kept the European option on the list to revisit. Sometimes the honest answer is: not yet.
They needed an analytics setup that didn't contradict their own values around transparency and data privacy. We built a stack that gave them just the insights and funnels they needed, kept everything in Europe, and didn't quietly harvest the data of the people they were trying to serve.
If you know something in your technology setup isn’t quite right, but you’re not sure how exposed you are or where you should start, I offer a fixed‑price technology risk assessment.
It’s designed as a starting point: a low‑risk way to understand what you’re dealing with before committing to bigger changes.
Right now this is running with a small group of organisations while the format is refined. If you’d like to join them, get in touch or book a call and I’ll give you all the details.
I've been in this industry long enough to have co-founded one of the first internet service providers. I've built networks, assembled servers, written and designed web applications, launched a startup, and made the mistakes that only come from decades of doing this stuff.
And I've lived through enough hype cycles to know how to filter the substance from the noise (and there's a lot!).
In my work, I don't chase ideological purity: sometimes the right tool isn't European, sometimes it's a compromise. The point is to make that compromise knowingly, not to discover it three years later when you're trying to get out and can't.
Tell me what you're dealing with, I'll let you know honestly whether I can help. And, if I can't, I'll point you somewhere useful.
I write a short daily email about making better technology choices: practical, no hype, no pitches.