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Cake day: Jul 25, 2023

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Kinda. PeerTube is a self-hostable application that creators can use to host their content, so it doesn’t have ads per se. Invidious, just like youtube-dl, fetches video files from YouTube servers, so it also doesn’t play any ads that would normally be played before and during video.


Google is intrusive. The story where Google literally send police on a dad that had stored photos of his son on Google Drive that he meant to show to a doctor or countless stories with scanning emails. For the first one a mitigation could be to encrypt files before hand, but it’s not at all convenient for regular people that want to have their photos automatically synced and backed up. For the second one, you could also encrypt emails beforehand using PGP, but yeah, pretty much no one does that. And none of this potential mitigations make Google any less intrusive. And I think I could even argue they allow themselves to be like that because they are this big.

That being said, I’m not arguing that Google Workspace, that integrate tools, storage and emails for way cheaper that other alternatives, is not great value for companies. But it’s still Google, so no matter how you look at it, it’s still bad choice for privacy. But the other choice being Microsoft, there’s hardly a better way.


Also keep it mind that, while Grist looks like a spreadsheet, there are some key differences between it and a typical spreadsheet (see here). You may need to spend some time with the documentation (which is really good btw, and they have video tutorials as well), but in my opinion it’s really worth it.


I use Grist for this purpose. Check out this template, this may be just what you want and using widgets it is quite easy to create a form to append to the expenses database (just like here). Grist works really nice on mobile too and is also pretty easy to self-host if you need an extra degree of privacy, but you can use the official instance as well.

If you want I can send you my Grist template that does pretty much all things you want.