Small stuff, but it adds up. hiignite.com runs Altcha instead of Google reCAPTCHA, and self-hosted Umami instead of Google Analytics. This week I moved the fonts off Google's CDN too.
All three do the same job as the thing they replaced. None of them send visitor data to Google.
Three swaps
Altcha runs its challenge locally — proof-of-work in the visitor's own browser, rather than a call out to a third party to grade whether someone looks human enough.
Umami runs on my own infrastructure. It still tells me which pages get read and roughly where readers are, without setting a cookie and without an analytics company sitting in the middle of it.
Fonts are now served from my own domain, so there's no request to fonts.googleapis.com handing over a visitor's IP on every page load.
The font one is the easiest to miss
That last one slips past people, and I think I know why: it arrives through a CSS import, not a script tag.
When you audit what a page loads, you look at scripts. Scripts are where tracking lives, so scripts are what you check. A stylesheet link doesn't read as a third party — it reads as styling. But a font request is still a request, with an IP attached, made by every visitor on every page, to a server that isn't yours.
The performance argument flipped
The old defence of Google Fonts was the shared cache: enough sites use the same CDN copy that visitors turn up with it already cached, so you get the font for free.
That argument is dead. Browser cache partitioning gives each site its own cache entry, so nobody arrives at your site with your font pre-cached from somebody else's. What's left of the CDN is a DNS lookup and a connection to a third-party origin that has to complete before the font can even begin downloading.
Self-hosting removes both. It's usually the faster option now. The tradeoff people were accepting on privacy grounds doesn't really exist any more.
The actual reason
Same pattern I've been following elsewhere: self-hosted mail, self-hosted infrastructure. Not because Google's tools are bad — they're mostly excellent, mostly free, and better engineered than what I'd build. It's that I'd rather not hand more of the stack to companies whose incentives aren't mine.
And it might turn out to be a real selling point. Trainers handle client health and fitness data: weights, measurements, progress photos, injury history. My guess is they care about where that ends up rather more than they tend to say out loud.