This approach asks something of you.

Most software is built around the assumption that employees can't be trusted to learn complex tools. So it hides complexity behind friendly interfaces, limits what's possible to what's safe, and charges you monthly for the privilege of keeping your team in a walled garden.

We think that assumption is both wrong and expensive. Not wrong in a naive way — some tools genuinely are too complex for general use. But email, spreadsheets, and a file server are not exotic technologies. They are the infrastructure of every serious business. The question is whether your team understands them well enough to use them well.

Training is the investment

The infrastructure setup takes one weekend. Genuinely — four managed services, point some DNS records, upload a folder via FTP. There is no server to administer after that. The real investment is team training: a few days of teaching people how to write clear emails, how to structure folders, how to maintain a shared spreadsheet, how to use a wiki.

Most people pick this up faster than you'd expect. The tools aren't technically demanding — they're just unfamiliar. Once the habits are in place, the team operates with more autonomy than any SaaS system produces, because they understand what they're working with instead of clicking buttons in an interface they half-understand.

The dividend is real: a team that can adapt their own workflows, troubleshoot their own problems, and build on the tools rather than around their limitations.

What this is not good for

We want to be direct about this. This stack is probably not right for your company if:

• You need enterprise SSO, SOC 2 compliance, or audit trails that satisfy a specific regulatory requirement.
• Your company's growth depends on tools that prospective investors or acquirers recognise in a due diligence call.
• You have a high-turnover workforce where training time is genuinely not recoverable.
• You need deep integration between your operational tools and a customer-facing system like a CRM or e-commerce platform that has no open standard equivalent.

None of these are failures of your company. They're just different constraints that lead to different answers.

What this is good for

It's good for companies where the people doing the work are also the people with context, where staying lean matters more than looking like a tech company, and where the CEO is willing to be slightly unconventional in exchange for not sending $5,000 a year to SaaS vendors for tools that partially solve problems that already have better solutions.

E-commerce and trading companies are a particularly strong fit. The work is coordination-heavy — suppliers, logistics, markets, products, customs — and email with a shared file server handles all of it without a per-user price tag attached to every team member. La Nao coordinates across 20+ countries and six people for under €30 a month in infrastructure. The savings are real; so is the reduction in operational noise.

The companies that do well with this setup tend to share one characteristic: they treat their employees as capable adults and invest accordingly.