Sovereign Switch is the umbrella for working tools that get you off Big Tech without becoming a Linux engineer. The first tool live today is SoTranscribe — privacy-respecting transcription with five hosting tiers and end-to-end encryption between your machine and whichever server you choose.
Sovereign Switch is not one app. It names a single move: export your data from every service you use, and re-host it on infrastructure you own. Not a one-off migration — a repeatable path from rented platforms to a stack that belongs to you, service by service, until the whole picture has switched over.
Each service is a link in the chain. SoTranscribe is the first link — built first because voice is among the most sensitive data routinely handed to Big Tech. The same pattern — find the export route out, stand up the self-owned destination — then repeats for the next service, and the next.
Meeting recordings, voice notes, interviews, therapy reflections, walking memos — routinely sent to U.S. cloud transcribers without a second thought. SoTranscribe is the sovereign alternative: same workflow, your audio never lands on a U.S. server, and you choose how much of it our infrastructure ever sees.
Run the open-source release on your own hardware. We never see your audio.
Hardware we colocate at named facilities in Austria and Switzerland.
Contabo / Hetzner DE. Adequate for routine transcription that’s not actually sensitive.
Two processing profiles (Thorough vs Fast), per-file encryption, scoped admin-grant flow for organisations, honest scope on what encryption does and doesn't fix.
We focus on the threats most people are realistically exposed to — not the ones that scare you out of acting at all. If you're a journalist in a hostile jurisdiction or running a node for someone who is, see Advanced.
Big Tech sells what you do. Their business model is your data.
Our answer: services whose business model is your subscription, not your data — starting with SoTranscribe.
Governments dragnet everyone. The U.S. CLOUD Act reaches your data even if it sits in Frankfurt.
Our answer: EU jurisdiction by default, end-to-end encryption where the data type allows.
Someone steals your laptop, picks up your phone, or breaks into a service you use.
Our answer: disk encryption, 2FA defaults, password discipline — bundled, not lectured.
Sovereign Switch is not a hardcore security or privacy site. We optimize for the curious non-techie who wants out of the dragnet this weekend — not for the journalist who already runs Qubes.
If you're protecting against state-level adversaries, supply-chain compromise, or hardware management engines, you have better resources. We link to them on Advanced.
If you want to understand how we choose what to recommend, read the methodology. Short version: we distinguish "clearly malicious" (data is the business model) from "backdoor" (provider has structural opacity). v1 optimizes against the first.
Earlier versions of this site featured concept-level explorations — OpenMac, OpenWindows, three migration paths, local-groups globe. They've moved to /drafts — visible, but flagged as exploration, not commitment. We lead with what is actually working.