Open Source Rewards Patience
And this month it finally paid off.
Hey guys! It’s been about a month since I posted here, and I’m not going to apologize for it, because I want to tell you what that month was actually for.
Back in May I wrote up my Confluence talk and walked through the sovereign stack layer by layer. Your website. Your email list. Your payments. Your community. And then, right there in the middle of it, I admitted something that has been nagging at me ever since:
I was still using Google for my documents and storage, and Zoom for my meetings.
I said at the time that it’s okay to cross that bridge slowly, and I stand by every word of it. Purity spiraling helps nobody and burning yourself out helps nobody even more. But there is a difference between crossing the bridge slowly and just not crossing it at all. Those two layers, files and communications, were the ones I hadn’t touched. And those are the layers you actually live inside every single day.
So that’s where the quiet month went. Closing my own gap. And then building it into something I can hand to you.
Nobody does this alone
Even in my own journey, I have been struggling to make these changes as quickly and as effectively as I’d like. It turns out this is like any other self-improvement practice. It takes real work and real time, and there is always more to do than one man has hours for.
Which is exactly why community matters so much.
We need connection to thrive. Without someone to share the wins with, the meaning drains out of the work pretty fast. There are some great online communities forming around this stuff, sharing their wins and their setbacks openly, and I’ll put together an article soon on the ones I like most.
For now I want to thank my Qortal community of friends and fellow developers who support me daily. If it weren’t for them and the connections I’ve built there over the years, I would be completely lost on a lot of this tech. I’m not too proud to say that.
Jason Crowe has joined the team
Jason Crowe, the founder of Qortal, has joined WINNR Digital as my senior engineer.
If you read the Confluence piece, you already know how much weight I put on Qortal as the infrastructure layer of a sovereign stack. Hosting without a host. Identity tied to your own private key instead of somebody’s terms of service. A network that has been running since 2020 with no CEO to pressure and no central point to shut down. Jason helped build that. And now he’s building for our clients.
Together we’re putting together an entire plug-and-play system, so you don’t have to learn what we had to learn to get here.
What NuQloud actually is
The centerpiece is NuQloud, a customized instance of Nextcloud that Jason has extended with the Qortal data network underneath it. What that gets you is a private cloud that you own, running on hardware you choose, in one place instead of scattered across a dozen accounts.
Here’s what’s inside it:
A dashboard. One hub for your apps, services, settings, backups, and account. One login instead of fifteen.
Files and collaboration. Private file sync and sharing across all your devices. Your team’s documents live somewhere you control.
Documents. Real collaborative editing, in place, without duplicating the same file across three disconnected tools and losing track of which one is current.
Talk. Messaging, calls, and meetings for your team, inside your own platform.
Q-Mail. Encrypted, decentralized mail running over Qortal, accessible right from inside NuQloud.
Decentralized publishing. You can push selected files out to the Qortal data network instead of depending on centralized hosting to keep them alive.
It also makes a pile of monthly subscriptions unnecessary:
Storage and documents: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, iCloud, Google Docs, Notion, Confluence
Chat and meetings: Google Chat, Google Meet, Zoom, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord
Workflow and project tracking: Trello, Asana, Jira, Airtable
Look at that list and think about what you’re paying every month, in dollars and in data, to keep those accounts open.
And I’m actually using it
Now back to that confession I opened with. Google for my documents and storage, Zoom for my meetings.
The first half is done. My files and my documents live on my own NuQloud instance now, running on hardware I control. I am no longer renting space from Google Drive to hold my business, and I am no longer writing in documents that somebody else can read, revoke, or lose access to on my behalf. That one still feels strange in a good way, every time I open it.
The second half is in motion, and I’ll be specific about exactly where it stands in a minute.
That is what the quiet month bought. Not a product I read about and decided to resell, but the thing I now use every single day.
Where I’ll be straight with you
I’m not going to oversell this, because I’d rather you trust me in a year than sign up today.
The meetings piece is built for teams, not for stadiums. If you run a working call with your staff or a class with a few dozen people, it handles that comfortably. If you run 500-person webinars, we’ll build you a plan for that layer specifically rather than pretending one tool does everything.
So here’s the second half, the meetings one. I’m using a service called Whereby for my bigger calls right now. It isn’t the sovereign answer and I know it, but it got me off Zoom, and that was the move I could actually make at the time. My NuQloud instance is set up and running, and moving those calls onto it is my next step.
That’s what crossing the bridge looks like in practice, and I’d rather show you my real halfway point than pretend I’m already across.
The project tracking is clean and it’s enough for most small businesses. It is not going to feel like Jira to someone who’s been living in Jira for six years. I’ll tell you honestly whether it fits before you move.
And Q-Mail is encrypted decentralized mail on the Qortal network. It’s excellent for what it is. It is not the thing that receives an email from your mother-in-law’s Gmail account. Your regular inbox is a separate layer, and we handle that separately.
This is the same bridge principle I’ve been preaching since Confluence. Move the layers you can move now. Be honest about the ones that aren’t ready. Keep walking.
And then there’s the AI
We can also build full local AI into your NuQloud stack. Open-source, open-weight models running on an agentic framework with a custom orchestration layer, tuned to whatever metal you decide to run it on.
Jason and I have spent the last several weeks getting my own system fully local, and we’re closing in on the kind of performance you’d get from the big centralized models. We’re not all the way there yet, mostly down to the limits of my current hardware, but we are working local now.
And I have to tell you, it feels so good.
This is the piece I think we all need. AI that helps you build your business with less overhead and less stress, without the moral weight of handing your strategy, your client list, and your private conversations to a company that is actively working against the things you believe in.
So, we’re open
If this is something you’ve wanted but had absolutely no idea where to start, that’s the entire reason we built this.
You do not need to be technical. You do not need to understand Docker or self-hosting or key management. That’s our job now. You just need to know which layer of your business is bothering you the most.
That’s always where we begin, and I would love to talk!
In Sovereignty, Mike Winner
Amazing work, congratulations bro!
This is great news! You and Jason are the reason why I joined Qortal many years ago. Looking forward to seeing this and other articles on Subwire, Qortal's blogging app.