SaaS, but yours
Vet du redan? · Know what you need?
Eight engagements, seven with a fixed scope quoted before we start. The full list, and how long each one takes.
All servicesGöteborg & Craiova · The SaaS arm of Chen.ist
Most stacks are rented three times over: the licence, the platform and the region. We replace them with software you can read, machines you can point at on a map, and configuration that stays in your repository after we leave.
# One file. One machine. One command. { config, pkgs, ... }: { networking.hostName = "you"; networking.domain = "sto.chenborg.eu"; # Static site, no runtime to patch services.nginx = { enable = true; virtualHosts."chenborg.com" = { root = ./site/_site; forceSSL = true; enableACME = true; }; }; # Private mesh to the office and the laptops networking.wireguard.interfaces.wg0 = { ips = [ "10.44.0.2/24" ]; privateKeyFile = "/run/keys/wg"; }; services.redmine.enable = true; services.ollama.enable = true; system.stateVersion = "26.05"; } $ nixos-rebuild switch --target-host you → activated; previous generation kept for rollback
Ruby
Nix
CSS
Nextcloud
Node-RED
Huginn
NixOS
OpenBSD 8.0
WireGuard
pf
Proxmox VE
PostgreSQL
Emacs
Ollama
D2
Ubuntu Touch
Sailfish OS
postmarketOS
Ruby
Nix
CSS
Nextcloud
Node-RED
Huginn
NixOS
OpenBSD 8.0
WireGuard
pf
Proxmox VE
PostgreSQL
Emacs
Ollama
D2
Ubuntu Touch
Sailfish OS
postmarketOS
Tre löften · Three promises
The three things every engagement ends with, whichever of the eight it started as.
Datahemvist · Data residency
Picking an EU region inside an American hyperscaler leaves the contract, the parent company and the applicable law exactly where they were. We move the machines, and that is what changes the answer you give an auditor.
Äganderätt · Ownership
Open source throughout, so there is no licence to be revoked and no roadmap to be taken away. The whole estate is declared in files you hold, so an audit takes a morning rather than an archaeology project.
Överlämning · Handover
The engagement ends with runbooks, a recorded walkthrough and two weeks of pairing with your team. The goal is that you do not need us afterwards. It is a strange thing to sell, and it is why clients come back.
Vad vi gör · What we do
Each service comes as part of a SaaS package or built for you to own, on your server or hosted by us (Custom). Every price is fixed and in writing before we start.
Marketing sites, documentation portals and handbooks built as static HTML. They are fast and cheap to host, and the usual attacks on a web server have nothing to target.
02Self-hosted project management with twenty years of history behind it, installed, secured, migrated and maintained on your own infrastructure.
03Files, calendars, contacts, documents and video calls on your own servers. It covers what your staff expect from an office suite, without transferring data to the US.
04Node-RED flows over Redmine and Nextcloud, on NixOS, built once and kept in version control. They replace the spreadsheet somebody updates by hand every Friday.
05NixOS, WireGuard and pf: declarative servers, private networking, and firewall rules readable enough to go through in a review meeting.
06Off the hyperscaler and onto EU and EEA providers, costed before any data moves and sequenced so that nothing goes offline.
07Open-weight models on hardware you own, connected to the tools you already use, plus the serving, versioning and measurement a company needs before it can depend on them.
08What you need is not on this list, but it can almost certainly be assembled from parts that already exist. We find them, put them together and hand the result to you under a licence you keep.
Demokratisk design · How we work
Five dimensions that have to hold at once, or the thing is not good enough. We borrowed the framing from a rather larger Swedish company. It was written for furniture, and it describes good infrastructure just as well.
It has to be legible. A firewall ruleset you can read aloud, a server described in one file, a site whose source a new engineer understands before lunch. Configuration is something people read far more often than they write.
It has to do the job on an ordinary Tuesday as well as in a demo. Fewer moving parts, boring technology, and a system that behaves the same in year four as it did in week one.
It has to be reproducible. Infrastructure is a text file in your repository: a new machine is one command away, an old one is one rollback away, and backups are restore-tested with the evidence sent to you.
It has to outlive us. Open source throughout, so nothing can be revoked; European hosting, so the jurisdiction question has a short answer; refurbished hardware that can be repaired rather than replaced.
No seat licences, no per-user tiers and no bill that changes shape without warning. The price is fixed and in writing before you commit to anything.
Arbetsgången · The sequence
Every engagement runs the same way, whether it is a five-page site or a migration off three hyperscaler regions. You can stop after any stage and keep everything produced up to that point.
I siffror · By the numbers
100%
Of the software we deliver is open source, licence-free and forkable.
61%
Median reduction in monthly hosting cost after a migration to European providers.
38ms
Median time to first byte across the Jekyll sites we operate, measured from Frankfurt.
0
Bytes of client data that have ever left the EU or EEA on our watch.
Datahemvist · Data residency
Yes — in Romania, Sweden or Germany.
You choose the country. You hold the account and the invoice at the provider, and we hold an operator credential you can revoke in thirty seconds.
Vad kunderna säger · What clients say
They deleted more than they built. Six months on we run a third of the services, on a quarter of the budget, and I can read the entire infrastructure in an afternoon.
Journalen · Notes from the workshop
Occasional notes on the things we keep having to explain twice: static sites, declarative servers, packet filters and where your data sleeps.
Refurbished ThinkPads that arrive with GNU/Linux or BSD already working, including every function key, the fingerprint reader a...
Read →Running the event, and the harder part afterwards: turning a good weekend into an organisation that is comfortable working in t...
Read →TALA went open source last week, so we are using the occasion to explain why every diagram we hand a client is a text file unde...
Read →Nästa steg
A first conversation costs nothing and takes forty minutes. You will leave it with our opinion of your stack, which is occasionally that you should change nothing at all.