The tools I build with, reviewed for the people paying for them.

restic is free, encrypts everything before it leaves your building, and only sends what has changed, which keeps off-site storage cheap. The tool matters less than the drill: once a month, a random folder is restored to a scratch area and checked against the original. You get a one-page report. If you take one thing from this: ask whoever looks after your backups when they last restored one.

For a straight line of steps (new form entry, add to spreadsheet, send a message) a visual tool like n8n is cheaper to build and easier for your team to understand and adjust. Once there are many branches, money involved, or rules that need testing, I write it as code with tests, because a diagram with forty boxes is harder to trust than forty lines of checked logic. n8n can be self-hosted, so your data need not pass through another company.

PostgreSQL is free, has been around for decades, and handles records, search, files metadata and even AI “embeddings” well enough for a small business. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to back up, secure and pay for. The exception is when a product you already rely on holds the data; then I connect to it rather than copying it.

The old way was to open a port on the office router and hope the password held. WireGuard creates a private, encrypted network between approved devices instead, so the server is invisible to everyone else. Tailscale is a managed layer on top that makes adding and removing staff devices simple; I use it where convenience matters and plain WireGuard where you would rather not depend on another supplier. Either way, removing a leaver's access takes one click.

I take a sample of your real documents, write down the right answers by hand, and run them through two or three candidate models. We compare accuracy, cost per document and where the data is processed. Sometimes a smaller, cheaper model is good enough; sometimes a model that runs on your own hardware is worth the trade-off for privacy. You see the comparison table, not just my conclusion.

Proxmox lets one server run several independent “virtual machines”, so your file share, your bespoke app and your monitoring do not trip over each other. Before any upgrade I take a snapshot; if something goes wrong, rolling back takes minutes. It is free to use, with an optional paid support subscription I will recommend if the server is critical to your business.

Every unusual tool in your system is a future hiring problem. I choose languages and frameworks that thousands of developers already know, so that if I am unavailable, or you simply want a second opinion, someone else can step in quickly. New tools have to prove themselves in the homelab before they reach a client.