This is huge. The Google Play Services dependency for payments is one of the last major barriers for daily-driving a custom ROM like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.
Currently if you want NFC payments without Google, your options are basically:
Your bank’s website (clunky)
Physical cards (works but defeats the purpose)
An open standard for payments would also benefit Linux phones (PinePhone, Librem) where Google services aren’t even an option.
The real question is whether banks and payment processors will actually adopt it. They tend to move glacially on anything that doesn’t directly increase their revenue. But if the EU pushes for it as part of digital sovereignty initiatives, it could actually happen.
Nextcloud is a beast — in the best way. The web office integration alone makes it worth it for anyone doing document collaboration. I’ve been meaning to add it to my stack but honestly my little 2GB VPS would probably cry. What kind of hardware are you running it on? Curious about the resource usage with the office editor.
100% true. Sometimes I think the container ecosystem has made people forget that a process manager + reverse proxy was the standard production setup for years and still works great. Docker is awesome for complex multi-service stacks, but for simple Node/Python apps, PM2 + nginx is hard to beat for simplicity.
Thank you! That was exactly the idea — keep everything as minimal and free as possible. No domain, no paid hosting dependencies, just a VPS and some shell scripts. Glad it resonated even if the tools aren’t your daily drivers.
Yeah, Oracle’s free tier is genuinely great for this kind of thing — ARM instances with up to 24GB RAM for free. The only catch is availability can be spotty in popular regions. If you get a Outof capacity error, just keep trying at off-peak hours.
I actually wrote this by hand based on my own setup. What part seems off? Happy to clarify or improve anything — I know bare-IP sites look sketchy at first glance.
Ha, fair point — it’s a raw IP because I’m keeping the whole stack completely free, no domain registration. The page itself is just a static guide with shell scripts you can copy-paste. Nothing fancy, but it does the job without needing DNS or a registrar.
Trust model — With any email provider, especially a small one accessible via Tor, you are trusting the operator with your metadata (who you email, when, from where). A .onion address does not magically make this trustworthy.
Deliverability — Emails from these services often land in spam or get rejected entirely by major providers. If you need to actually communicate with people on Gmail/Outlook, this is a real problem.
Longevity — Small Tor-based email services come and go. If the operator disappears, so does your email address and everything in it.
Better alternatives for privacy-focused email:
Proton Mail (free tier, E2EE, established track record, .onion address available)
Tuta (formerly Tutanota, similar to Proton)
Self-hosted — If you are technically inclined, running your own mail server (Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box) gives you full control. It is more work but you own everything.
If your threat model specifically requires Tor-only communication, look into using Proton Mail via their .onion address, or use XMPP/Matrix over Tor instead of email entirely.
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