The same reason I ride a cargo bike, I built my own server

Let me start with the bike, because that's where this actually starts.

There's a few reasons why I ride a cargo bike, and why I keep on riding it. The fairly obvious one: I work for Bullitt. It's not a requirement, but let's say I'd feel bad showing up on any other bike. I ride an analog Bullitt — no e-assist, not dependent on a battery or some electronic thing that might break. And don't take this as a criticism if you're riding electric. Sometimes I really wish I did — for the occasional lazy day, the rainy days, the windy days (which is pretty much every day in Denmark). I don't have kids, I sometimes carry some furniture, but I have the freedom of carrying pretty much everything when I need it. And that's a bit like the story below.

A cargo bike is, if you squint, a small declaration of independence. You opt out of a whole machine — cars, oil, congestion, the lot — and you take back a bit of your day. It doesn't make you a hermit. But it's yours, and it's enough to feel the difference.

I didn't expect to bump into that exact feeling while building a website. But here we are.

The thing I didn't notice I was doing

OpenCargo is a small, independent directory. No investors, no ads, nothing to sell. And yet, building it, I'd quietly handed pieces of it to half of Silicon Valley. My content lived on one company's platform. My database on another's. Hosting on a third. Notes, analytics, email — each one a monthly subscription, each one a company that now held a slice of the thing, and a slice of the data.

One evening, adding up the bills, two thoughts landed at once.

The first was practical: that's a lot of money for a project that doesn't make a cent.

The second got under my skin. I'd built a directory to help people stay independent of the cargo bike world's gatekeepers — to map the market openly, link straight to the makers, owe nothing to anyone — and I'd built it on rented land, owned by the biggest gatekeepers of all. I was doing on a screen the exact thing the bike let me opt out of on the street.

Same itch. Same answer.

Buying the thing back, one box at a time

So I bought a small server. A little fanless mini-PC, a few watts, sitting next to the bikes in my flat in Copenhagen. Nothing fancy — an old laptop would do to start.

And slowly, I've been moving things home: the tools that run OpenCargo, the scrapers that keep the catalogue fresh, my passwords, my notes. Bit by bit, the project is coming back under my own roof. Literally.

I won't pretend it's all roses, or that I'm some expert. I'm not a sysadmin. I learned one piece at a time, broke things, googled a lot. But the shape of it is simpler than it sounds:

Own the data. The point isn't the hardware. It's that the project's data sits on a disk I can see, not in an account I rent and don't really control.

Private by default. None of it is exposed to the open internet. A tool called Tailscale lets me reach my server from my phone anywhere, while the public web can't see it at all. No open doors. The few things that need to be public, I let out deliberately, one at a time.

Boring, tested backups. Encrypted, nightly, off-site — and I actually restored from one once to be sure it works. A backup you've never tested is just a wish.

That's most of it. The rest is patience.

Easy in, hard out

Think about how these things actually work. Newsletters, apps, basically anything you touch online — you sign up in two clicks, pay in three, and then you're in. Quietly. Until you remember to leave, or some annoying email reminds you you're still paying.

A while ago I did a little experiment. I took an old email address — one I'd had for twelve years and stopped using — and tried to actually erase myself from everything attached to it. Account by account: unsubscribing, deleting, digging through settings clearly built to make leaving as tedious as humanly possible. It took me the best part of a working day. Eight, ten hours. Every one of those sign-ups had taken seconds.

That asymmetry isn't an accident. Frictionless on the way in, sticky as hell on the way out — that's the design, not a bug. And once you've felt it, you can't unsee it. It made me rethink how I use my tools, and it's a big part of why I now want to self-host as much as I can: if a thing lives on my own server, nobody gets to make leaving hard.

Why it's worth the hassle

Here's the honest part: self-hosting is more work than paying someone. The cloud is convenient precisely because it's frictionless — someone else worries about it, you just pay. Same as a car. Turn the key and go.

But convenience has a price you don't see on the invoice. With the car it's the fuel, the parking, the dependence — the sense that your freedom to move is rented. With the cloud it's the subscriptions, sure, but also the data, the lock-in, the quiet fact that your thing lives or dies by someone else's terms of service and someone else's incentives.

A cargo bike trades a little convenience for a lot of independence. So does a home server. Once you've felt the trade on the bike, the one on the server makes obvious sense.

And the best part — same as the bike — is that it isn't some elite thing. You don't need to be rich or technical. You need an old computer, a free afternoon, and the willingness to start with one small thing and learn as you go. Independence was never only for the people who can afford to buy it.

A small, on-topic example

To prove the point — and to drag this back to cargo bikes, because this is a cargo bike directory — one of the first things I built on that server was for my mum.

She rides a cargo bike too, and she wanted calm routes: quiet streets, separated paths, nothing scary, even if it's a little longer. So I built her a tiny planner that finds exactly that — the low-stress way across town instead of the fastest. It runs on my server, it cost nothing, and it answers to no one. I put the whole thing online so anyone can run their own: github.com/vincebullittcph/cph-safe-bike.

A small tool, for one person, owned outright. That's the whole idea, really.

Where this is going

OpenCargo isn't fully independent yet — a few things still live in the cloud, and that's fine. It's a journey, not a purity test. Next I want to bring the analytics home, and host this very newsletter myself. Each step, a little more of the thing is mine.

I don't think everyone needs to run a server, any more than everyone needs a cargo bike. But the instinct behind both is the same good one: to notice where you've quietly become dependent, and take a bit of it back. On the street, and on the screen.

Thanks, as always, for cargo biking.

— Vince