De-Googling is a sequencing problem, not a willpower problem. Search, browser, and calendar take one afternoon and are trivially reversible. Photos and files take a weekend each plus a Google Takeout export. Email takes six to twenty-four months of changing addresses everywhere and is the only genuinely hard move, so it goes last — and the right destination is usually a paid provider on a domain you own, not a self-hosted mail server. Here's the full map, ordered by return on effort, from someone roughly 90% of the way out after eighteen months.
The migration map
| Google service | Replacement | Difficulty | Exit cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | SearXNG | Trivial | None |
| Chrome | Firefox | Easy | 30 min re-importing |
| Analytics | Plausible or Umami | Easy | GA4 history won't migrate |
| Calendar/Contacts | Nextcloud CalDAV/CardDAV | Easy | Clean .ics/.vcf export |
| Keep | Joplin or Trilium | Easy | Takeout gives HTML/JSON |
| Photos | Immich | Moderate | Takeout metadata repair |
| Drive/Docs | Nextcloud + Collabora | Moderate | Docs convert imperfectly |
| Gmail | Paid host, your domain | Hard | 6–24 months of logins |
| Maps | Organic Maps / OsmAnd | Partial | No business reviews |
| YouTube | Nothing, honestly | — | Subscriptions via RSS |
Difficulty rates the full migration including getting your data out, not just the install.
Weekend one: search, browser, calendar
SearXNG is a metasearch engine — it queries Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others and aggregates the results — so switching costs you almost no result quality. It's a ten-minute Docker deploy, and you set it as the default engine in desktop and mobile Firefox the same afternoon. If you don't want to host it yet, pick a public instance and migrate later; the browser setting is the only state.
Calendar and contacts export cleanly as .ics and .vcf from Google, import into Nextcloud in minutes, and sync back to Android with DAVx5 (free on F-Droid, about $6 on Play). iOS speaks CalDAV and CardDAV natively, no app needed. This is the highest privacy-per-effort move on the whole map: your calendar is a live feed of where you are and who you meet.
Photos: the one people actually care about
Order your Takeout export early — Google takes one to three days to prepare a large photo archive, and it arrives as multiple archives (choose the 50GB size to reduce the count). The catch everyone hits: Takeout strips much of your metadata into JSON sidecar files instead of writing it back into the images. Don't upload the raw dump into Immich; use immich-go, which merges the sidecars, keeps albums and favourites, and dedupes:
immich-go upload from-google-photos \
--server http://192.168.1.10:2283 \
--api-key "$IMMICH_KEY" \
~/takeout/takeout-*.zipBudget one evening for a 100GB library over gigabit LAN, then a week of spot-checking albums before you trust it. The full walkthrough, including mobile backup and hardware sizing, is in Leaving Google Photos.
Drive and Docs: Nextcloud, with expectations set
File sync is the easy 80% — Nextcloud's desktop and mobile clients are mature, and a 2 vCPU / 4GB instance handles a family. Documents are the honest caveat: importing .docx into Nextcloud Office (Collabora) works well for ordinary documents and degrades on heavy formatting, comments, and anything using Apps Script. My rule: live documents migrate, and anything legal or archival also gets exported once as PDF so its appearance is frozen regardless of future format conversions.
Email last, and probably not self-hosted
The de-Google move that matters is the custom domain, not the server. Once mail flows to [email protected], the provider behind it becomes swappable in an afternoon, forever. Point the domain at Fastmail, Proton, mailbox.org, or Migadu ($3–5/month), set Gmail to forward, and start the long grind: grep your password manager export for @gmail.com — mine had 214 logins — and change ten a week. Expect six months before the forward goes quiet, and keep the Gmail account alive indefinitely as a tripwire and because purchases and YouTube history anchor to it.
Actually running your own mail server is a separate decision with real deliverability costs; read the honest assessment before trying.
What doesn't replace cleanly
Being honest about the last 10% prevents relapsing on the first 90%. Organic Maps and OsmAnd navigate fine offline, but live traffic and business reviews have no open equivalent — most people keep a maps app in a work profile and accept it. YouTube has no replacement; third-party front-ends come and go, but channel RSS feeds (https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=...) into your feed reader quietly kill the recommendation engine, which was most of the harm. On phones, GrapheneOS on a Pixel is excellent and runs most apps via sandboxed Play services, but treat it as its own project, not a weekend item.
What it costs
About $70/year: a domain (~$12) plus paid email (~$50–60), assuming the server itself already exists for other reasons. Against that, most people drop a Google One tier ($20–100/year) — the cash roughly washes, and the data custody is the actual return.
What I'd do
Today: SearXNG and Firefox. This week: order the Takeout photo export so it's ready for weekend one with Immich. Weekend two: Nextcloud for files, calendar, contacts. This quarter: buy the domain and start the email grind at ten logins a week. Never: feel bad about keeping Maps and YouTube — 90% out with your photos, files, and mail under your control is a result, not a compromise.