Whoever runs your email, files and calendar can switch off your organisation. Not by breaking in, but by changing the terms, closing your account or following an order from a government you never voted for. For most European businesses, charities and families, that power sits with a handful of American companies. A sovereign workplace puts it back where it belongs: with you.
The question nobody asks at sign-up
When you open an account for email or shared documents, you think about features. Does it have a calendar? Can I edit a spreadsheet with a colleague? Is it easy?
You rarely ask the question that matters most: who can take this away from me?
Your mailbox is your organisation's memory. It holds your contracts, your customer conversations, your board decisions, your volunteers' details. Your shared drive holds the rest. If access to those disappears, your work stops — on the same day.
It has already happened
This is not a thought experiment.
- A court prosecutor lost his mailbox. In 2025 the Associated Press reported that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague lost access to his Microsoft email after the US government placed him under sanctions. Microsoft said it had not cut off the court itself. Either way, a decision made in Washington reached into a mailbox in the Netherlands.
- A father lost his whole digital life. In 2022 the New York Times described a parent whose Google account was closed after he photographed his child's medical condition for a doctor. His email, contacts, photos and phone number went with it. An investigation cleared him; the account stayed closed.
- Terms change without asking. Features you depend on disappear, data is moved to new systems, and AI tools are switched on inside your documents by default. You accept, because the alternative is losing everything.
None of these people did anything wrong. They simply did not hold the keys.
Three kinds of dependence
It helps to name what you depend on.
- Legal dependence. An American provider must follow American law, wherever its servers stand. That includes laws that let US authorities demand your data. (We explain this in our article on the CLOUD Act.)
- Commercial dependence. The provider decides what the product does next, which features stay and what happens to your data. You can comment; you cannot decide.
- Technical dependence. Closed formats and proprietary systems make leaving hard. The longer you stay, the more you have to lose by moving.
Each one on its own is manageable. Together they mean that someone else holds the switch.
What control actually looks like
Control does not mean running your own server in a cupboard. It means four simple things:
- Your data lives with a company under European law — and only European law.
- You can read, export and move everything, at any moment, in open formats.
- Nobody reads your mail to train models or sell ads. Not by default, not ever.
- The rules don't change behind your back. If they change, you are asked, and you can leave.
That is what we mean by a sovereign workplace: you decide what happens with your organisation's memory.
Why we are building SovraQ
SovraQ is a complete workplace — mail, agenda, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, files and chat — run by a European company, on servers in the Netherlands, built on open source. It is designed for people who want to be in charge of their own work: small businesses, non-profits and families who refuse to hand the switch to someone else.
We will not have every feature the giants have. We think that is a fair exchange for owning your own work. Read why we made that choice.
Take the first step
You don't have to move everything tomorrow. Start by asking the question for your own organisation: if our provider switched us off tonight, what would we lose?
If the answer makes you uneasy, you are not alone — and you have a choice.
Hold the keys to your own work
SovraQ launches in March 2027. Join the waitlist and get access before everyone else.
Frequently asked questions
Can an email provider really close my account?
Yes. Every provider's terms allow it to suspend or close accounts. Large providers do this through automated systems, and appeals can take weeks or fail entirely.
Is my data safe if it is stored in a European data centre?
Not automatically. What matters is who controls the data. An American company must follow American law even for data stored in Europe.
What is a sovereign workplace?
A workplace — email, documents, files, calendar — run by a company under European law, on European servers, using open formats, so the organisation that uses it stays in control of its own data.
