Resources · Sustainable Security
Own your technology. Spend the savings on your mission.
Most small nonprofits rent their website, their forms, and their file storage from platforms that raise prices every year and make leaving hard. We did too. This section documents, in public, how we replaced that stack with technology we own, what it costs us now, and how a student or volunteer can do the same for another organization. Articles, guides, screen recordings, and field notes come straight from our daily, weekly, and monthly operations; the weekly email is built from the same posts.
Latest
Field note · November 1, 2026
Field note: the new site is live on a staging address
Thirty-seven pages, fifty-seven redirects, three failed deploys, one line in a trust policy. What happened this week and what it taught us.
ReadGuide · October 25, 2026
The redirect map: never let a link in a grant report die
Every URL you have ever put in a grant report, a flyer, or a funder email is a promise. When you move your website, a one-file redirect map keeps every one of them. Here is how to build it in an afternoon.
ReadField note · October 18, 2026
Field note: what we pay for every month, and the one question we asked about each line
Before moving anything, we listed every recurring technology charge and asked one question of each. The list was longer than we thought, and the question answered itself more often than we expected.
ReadGuides
Step-by-step plans you can hand to a student, a volunteer, or your future self.
Guide · October 25, 2026
The redirect map: never let a link in a grant report die
Every URL you have ever put in a grant report, a flyer, or a funder email is a promise. When you move your website, a one-file redirect map keeps every one of them. Here is how to build it in an afternoon.
ReadGuide · October 11, 2026
Student project: move a nonprofit off rented technology
A semester-sized service-learning project. A student rebuilds a small nonprofit's website on technology the nonprofit owns, cuts its recurring costs, and leaves behind documentation the organization can maintain. Brief, milestones, deliverables, and grading rubric.
ReadGuide · October 4, 2026
Implementation plan: moving a nonprofit website to files you own
The technical plan we followed to replace a hosted website builder with a static site on AWS, published by GitHub Actions. De-identified, with the four mistakes that cost us the most time so you can skip them.
ReadArticles
Why we made the choices we made, with the numbers.
Field notes
Short entries from the operations log: what changed this week and what it taught us.
Field note · November 1, 2026
Field note: the new site is live on a staging address
Thirty-seven pages, fifty-seven redirects, three failed deploys, one line in a trust policy. What happened this week and what it taught us.
ReadField note · October 18, 2026
Field note: what we pay for every month, and the one question we asked about each line
Before moving anything, we listed every recurring technology charge and asked one question of each. The list was longer than we thought, and the question answered itself more often than we expected.
ReadWeekly email
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One email, every week: what we built, what it cost, what broke, and what we learned running a small nonprofit on technology we own. No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe in one click.