# Personal Digital Infrastructure > A controlled, portable home for personal accounts, communications, documents, photos, and recovery across every device and agent - HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure - Status: in_progress - Started: 2026-10-18 - Technologies: Ente, Dashlane, Doppler, Filen, Proton Pass, Proton Mail, Cloudflare Email Routing # Vision Keep the practical parts of my digital life available across Ubuntu, macOS, Android, browsers, terminals, and supervised agents without leaving the only usable copy inside one provider. This project owns the choices that cut across individual devices and services: where personal records live, how people and agents authenticate, how a custom domain reaches a mailbox, what can be recovered after losing every usual device, and how much the combined service portfolio costs. Capability and availability matter more than avoiding every GUI. A reliable GUI remains a valid interface when an API or CLI would make the service worse. # Why this is a separate project The [Home Lab](/projects/homelab) operates machines, local disks, scheduled backup jobs, VPN gateways, and monitoring. This project decides what the personal data and account systems must provide. A cloud document library still matters while the Mac mini is offline. A password manager still has to work on a new phone before the home network is restored. [Inbox Signal](/projects/inbox-signal) consumes mailboxes and manages the messages inside them. This project chooses the durable address, mailbox provider, alias policy, recovery path, and provider exit. Changing mail hosts should not require redesigning Inbox Signal. The boundary is deliberate: | Concern | Owner | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | Provider choice, access policy, portability, recovery, and annual cost | Personal Digital Infrastructure | | Local copies, restic jobs, B2 repositories, VPN routing, and monitoring | Home Lab | | Mail classification, extraction, review, and controlled mailbox actions | Inbox Signal | # Current state * Ente Photos is the source of truth for photos and stores them across three cloud providers. The Home Lab keeps a local export. This setup is not under replacement review. * Personal documents from old computers and storage devices are being deduplicated on one external hard drive. Google Drive and OneDrive still hold historical fragments. * Dashlane provides dependable browser and Android autofill. Its Hotspot Shield benefit supplies the current consumer VPN. * Doppler works well for software and agent secrets, but it is not a personal password manager. * Cloudflare manages the custom domain. Proton is available as a new, mostly empty mailbox. # Requirements The portfolio should: * work on Ubuntu, macOS, Android, and ordinary browsers; * preserve the excellent autofill experience already observed with Dashlane; * let a supervised agent reach account credentials through a browser, GUI, or CLI, with quick rotation when one is exposed; * offer repeatable imports, exports, checks, and recovery without requiring a long sequence of web settings; * keep at least one independent copy of irreplaceable data; * support mobile access for documents and recovery material; * use the custom domain without making the domain registrar the mailbox; and * record renewal prices and exit steps before a trial becomes a migration. # Credential model The password manager is canonical for passwords, passkeys, recovery codes, and interactive logins. Doppler is canonical for scoped API tokens, service accounts, deployment secrets, and job configuration. Store each credential according to its type. One account may have its interactive login in the password manager and a restricted automation token in Doppler. If the service only supports one interactive password, an agent may retrieve it through the password manager's browser, GUI, or CLI flow. A dedicated vault is optional. Do not copy the same password into Doppler just to make it available to an agent. [ADR 001](/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/001-proton-pass-trial) keeps Dashlane in production while Proton Pass is tested with synthetic and low-risk accounts. Proton Pass is worth testing because its paid plan combines normal mobile and browser apps with a CLI and vault-scoped agent access tokens. # Email and domain boundary Cloudflare Email Routing can forward inbound mail for the custom domain to the free Proton mailbox. That is enough while sending from an `@proton.me` address is acceptable. It does not turn free Proton into a custom-domain mailbox. Sending and replying normally as the custom domain still needs paid mailbox hosting or a separately operated SMTP workflow. Proton Pass Plus offers a middle option: custom-domain aliases can forward into Proton and initiate mail through the alias. That can preserve an address without providing a full custom-domain mailbox. [ADR 002](/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/002-cloudflare-routed-proton-mail) starts with the free inbound route. Paying for Proton Mail becomes justified only when custom-domain outbound mail, Bridge access, or Proton's mailbox features solve an observed need. # Cost and capability These are public USD and EUR price observations from 18 October 2026, before country-specific tax. The Dashlane baseline is the $57.10 renewal quoted for 19 July 2026 rather than a public example price. | Portfolio | Recurring price used for comparison | Change from the current baseline | Capability change | | ------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------: | -------------------------------: | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Dashlane Premium with Hotspot Shield | $57.10/year | baseline | Proven autofill and consumer VPN; no personal CLI or configurable VPN profiles | | Keep Dashlane and add Filen 200 GB | $57.10/year plus €23.88/year | plus €23.88/year | Adds encrypted document sync, Android access, Linux CLI sync, mounts, WebDAV, and S3 access | | Proton Pass Plus and Proton VPN Plus | $119.76/year at renewal | plus $62.66/year | Adds password CLI, agent vault tokens, custom-domain aliases, alias sending, Linux VPN control, WireGuard profiles, Gluetun support, and port forwarding; does not add paid Mail or substantial Drive storage | | Proton Unlimited | $119.88/year at renewal | plus $62.78/year | Adds the same paid Pass and VPN, plus 500 GB shared Drive storage, paid Mail, three custom email domains, and Calendar | The striking comparison is the last two rows. At renewal, separate Proton Pass Plus and VPN Plus cost twelve cents less per year than Unlimited. If both products pass their trials, Unlimited is the rational purchase. It adds Drive and Mail for almost no extra renewal cost. The introductory period tells a different story. Proton currently advertises VPN Plus at $83.76 for its first 24 months and Unlimited at $191.76 for its first 24 months. Adding two years of Pass Plus makes the separate products $155.52 for that period, $36.24 less than Unlimited. The bundle earns that difference only if Drive or paid Mail is useful during the first two years. The move from Dashlane and Hotspot Shield to Proton is more capable for Linux, agents, and homelab networking. It is not automatically better at the most frequent job. Dashlane has already proved its Android and browser autofill in daily use. Proton Pass must prove that experience before its CLI matters, and Proton VPN must prove its routing and failure behaviour before Hotspot Shield is cancelled. Sources: * [Dashlane Premium and its included VPN](https://www.dashlane.com/personal-pricing) * Dashlane renewal notice for $57.10 on 19 July 2026 * [Proton Pass pricing and features](https://proton.me/pass/pricing) * [Proton VPN and Unlimited introductory and renewal prices](https://protonvpn.com/pricing) * [Filen plans](https://filen.io/pricing) # Working recommendation Do not buy Proton Unlimited to begin the evaluation. The first sequence is: 1. Record the current document volume and any existing Google or Microsoft storage charges. Use the confirmed $57.10 Dashlane renewal as the current password-manager and VPN baseline. 2. Trial Proton Pass Plus with synthetic and low-risk accounts while Dashlane remains authoritative. 3. Trial Filen with a representative document set. Compare Proton Drive only if Filen fails or the Proton bundle becomes justified by the password and VPN results. 4. Route custom-domain inbound mail through Cloudflare to free Proton. Keep outbound mail on the Proton address at first. If Pass succeeds, compare its custom-domain alias sending before buying mailbox hosting. 5. Run the Home Lab's Proton VPN and Gluetun trial without cancelling Dashlane. 6. Choose the subscription portfolio from the trial evidence and renewal prices. Avoid paying for Dashlane and a Proton bundle for a full overlapping year. The provisional ceiling is $200-equivalent per year for the services under review: password manager, VPN, email, document cloud, and offsite document backup. The existing Ente photo system is not part of this replacement budget. Variable Backblaze B2 cost must use measured retained bytes rather than nominal disk capacity. # Recovery and exit Every adopted provider needs a documented export, a clean-device recovery test, and an independent recovery secret. [ADR 003](/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/003-ente-locker-recovery-packet) uses Ente Locker only as a mobile and trusted-contact copy of a small recovery packet. The canonical encrypted packet and minimum offline material remain recoverable without Ente. The project succeeds when losing a device, provider, subscription, or home server causes inconvenience rather than data loss or account lockout. ## Initiatives - [Digital Twins for Everyday Life](https://robbiepalmer.me/initiatives/digital-twins-for-everyday-life.md): Keeps the accounts, communications, documents, photos, and recovery paths behind the personal twin available, portable, and under the owner's control. ## Architecture Decision Records - [ADR 000: Trial Filen for the working document library](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/000-filen-document-library-trial.md) — Proposed, 2026-10-18 - [ADR 001: Trial Proton Pass without replacing Dashlane](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/001-proton-pass-trial.md) — Proposed, 2026-10-18 - [ADR 002: Route custom-domain inbound mail to free Proton](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/002-cloudflare-routed-proton-mail.md) — Proposed, 2026-10-18 - [ADR 003: Ente Locker for a replicated recovery packet](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-digital-infrastructure/adrs/003-ente-locker-recovery-packet.md) — Proposed, 2026-10-18 --- Markdown index of this site: https://robbiepalmer.me/llms.txt