I offer independent tech 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 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. On tools, decisions, technology, vendor proposals, etc. I was always the person who noticed what others had glossed over. 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 sets up the website and that default analytics tool always comes bundled with it. The email platform is 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 showed up.
I call this ritual mimicry: going through the motions of choosing without actually choosing.
It works – mostly – 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 genuine values – on sustainability, human rights, fair labour, democratic accountability – have given almost no thought to whether the technology they run on reflects those values. Not because they don't care, but because these tools arrived looking like infrastructure rather than decisions.
Your emails probably run through Microsoft or Google. Your files likely sit on Amazon's servers. Your team 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 sitting with. Every subscription, every renewal, is a financial relationship. And right now, several of the companies that underpin European digital infrastructure are headquartered in a jurisdiction whose political direction is increasingly at odds with the values many European organisations are committed to. You may be paying subscriptions for systems that are actively lobbying against your regulatory environment, your rights frameworks, and in some cases, 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 without recourse.
Your organisation is probably not going to be sanctioned by a US president. But the infrastructure that made that possible is the same infrastructure you're running on. And, beyond the risk, there's a simpler question: is that a financial relationship consistent with what you say you stand for?
There's a growing ecosystem of European and open-source tools that can do the job. Often with fewer hidden strings, 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 gestures. They're 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, deliberate choice you can explain to your team and your future self.
They'd been running on a project management platform designed 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 right, but you’re not sure how exposed you are or where to 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 and I’ll send you 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.
Along the way, I've seen enough hype cycles to know how to spot the substance among the noise.
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.