Neil Brown has run his small English law firm on Free software for roughly five years. His 2026 account is an inventory with a maintenance history: some tools stayed, others split apart, and several servers disappeared. Actual use decides what survives.
- Split a troublesome bundle. Nextcloud caused more problems than it solved for him. Syncthing now handles files, while Radicale handles calendars and contacts.
- Retire unused services. Brown liked Jitsi, but most meetings happened on other people’s Teams or Zoom accounts. He stopped hosting it and offers Signal. CryptPad went too, because collaborative editing saw little use.
- Keep client compatibility at the boundary. LibreOffice Writer handles documents exchanged with other lawyers. Markdown, Pandoc and Typst serve other document workflows; Firefox joins externally hosted meetings.
- Automate repeated work. Bash scripts create presentation and blog templates and handle publishing. Espanso supplies reusable text. The automation follows tasks Brown already performs frequently.
- Separate sensitive work. Forgejo hosts website history and templates. More important repositories live on another machine that is inaccessible from the Internet.
Brown still runs a substantial stack, including email, monitoring, vulnerability scanning and backups. This is an experienced operator’s report; it supplies no administration-time budget or independent security assessment.
Self-hosting earns its place service by service. A tool can work well and still deserve retirement when nobody uses it. Brown’s strongest examples reduce the infrastructure he maintains while leaving the firm’s everyday work intact.