This is the third part of a small series. In Thought #174 I wrote about my father’s Consul typewriter and the touch-typing course in Olbernhau. In Thought #175 about SELFHTML, english-test.net and the tens of thousands of euros I paid to agencies and freelancers over the years. Today I want to tell you what happened on my Chromebook in a single day – and why I no longer need those detours.
Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Webador, 1&1 IONOS – the promises all sound alike: a website without code, online in minutes. uno.team itself ran on Webflow until late October 2026. What I experienced: underneath the pretty surface you get a soup of nested <div> containers, generated class names and scripts that load on every page whether you need them or not. You can only do what the builder allows. And when you want to leave, you quickly notice how little actually belongs to you: the content sits in their system, the structure in their template, and the bill arrives every month.
That isn’t sovereignty. That’s rent.
The other route I know is the agency with a Scrum team. A relaunch like the one we did these past days – new homepage, new about page, a rebuilt archive, connections between more than four hundred thoughts in two languages – could easily have cost 20,000 euros or more there. Spread over weeks of Jira tickets, sprint plannings and alignment meetings. And somewhere between my idea and the finished code, as I experienced with english.best, part of the original thought would have been lost.
Today I sat at my Chromebook, in the Linux terminal. We worked as a triad that runs without friction:
No ego battles. No bad moods. No “that’s not in the ticket”. I have full control at every step, I see every move and can stop it, correct it or throw it away. And along the way I learn more than in any course: why a redirect should take one hop, not three. What a canonical tag is. How to build a page that loads instantly even on a weak phone. This learning on the fly is priceless.
The tools are changing month by month right now. An agent working in the terminal reads only the files it needs and runs commands instead of producing pages of explanation – that saves time and tokens. If, on the other hand, you paste everything into a chat window every time, you bloat the context and pay for it. And new models keep arriving from all over the world that will push costs down even further. What costs a few euros today will probably cost cents tomorrow.
To me, digital sovereignty doesn’t mean typing every line myself. It means: the code is mine. It lives in open files on my computer; I can read it, copy it, back it up and host it anywhere. No rented templates, no provider who raises prices tomorrow or drops a feature.
The boy who learned to type among the secretaries in Olbernhau is sitting at a command line again. Only now, when something goes wrong, there’s someone answering who thinks along – and I’m still the one at the wheel.
What this shift means for the balance of power in the web industry – for agencies, the Scrum universe and the people who work there – I tell in the fourth part, Thought #431.
Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
