EU Hosted CRM: Where Your Contact Data Lives
Umfeld is a hosted personal CRM, run from Europe. What that means for a database full of other people's data, and what actually happens when you delete your account.
It isn't just your data
A personal CRM stores phone numbers, addresses, and private notes about people who never signed up for anything. Your friends, your family, colleagues from three jobs ago: none of them agreed to Umfeld, and most would be surprised to learn they are in a database at all. Where that data lives and who is responsible for it is a decision you make, but the responsibility itself is not only yours. That is why hosting matters differently for an address book than it does for a notes app you use alone.
A hosted service, run from Europe
Umfeld runs as a hosted service, operated from Europe. There is no Docker image to set up and no way to run the application on your own server: if you are looking for a personal CRM you host yourself, Umfeld is not that. What you get instead is straightforward: servers in the EU, and a German company behind it, von Reyher Media UG (haftungsbeschränkt), based in Berlin. That is public record in the company's imprint.
That is a deliberate tradeoff. You give up control over the infrastructure, and in exchange you never have to back up a database, apply a security patch, or register your own Google Cloud project just to keep contact sync running. Umfeld runs the operations side. You get the time back that would otherwise cost.
What Umfeld actually stores
Umfeld holds two kinds of data. Base contact details, name, phone number, email, address, come from your Google account and stay in sync. On top of that, Umfeld stores what Google has no field for: where and how you met someone, the kind of relationship you have, notes you write yourself, a log of your conversations, and dates worth remembering. Custom fields are not part of the product. The fields are fixed, so this list is the whole picture, not a sample of something bigger.
In the database
Name, phone, email, address, synced from Google.
How and where you met, and the relationship type.
Notes and an interaction log with dates.
Important dates you choose to track.
What that means for your data
What that means in practice:
- 1
Google Contacts stays the source
Your contacts keep syncing both ways with Google Contacts. Umfeld does not keep a competing copy of your address book. It adds the context on top: how you met someone, what you last talked about, who knows whom.
- 2
You are never locked in
Because the sync runs both directions, nothing lives only inside Umfeld. Delete or edit something and it writes back to Google, and the reverse holds too. Leaving Umfeld does not mean rebuilding your contacts from scratch.
- 3
Private notes stay private
Anything you mark private never reaches the AI. Connect Umfeld to Claude or another assistant and it only sees what you have opened up, with private relationships and notes excluded.
- 4
Full deletion on request
Delete your account and it cascades through every table: contacts, notes, the interaction log, the relationship graph, all of it. Your Google address book is untouched. It was yours before Umfeld and stays yours after.
What that means next to other personal CRMs
Next to Monica, which built its name as a self-hosted, open-source project, the self-hosting question does not really apply to Umfeld, so it is not the useful comparison here. The real difference sits elsewhere: Umfeld ships updates continuously, runs its own MCP server so Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants can connect straight to your network, and syncs with Google Contacts throughout instead of keeping its own island of data.
If auditing the source code matters more to you than anything else, an open-source, self-hosted project is still the honest answer, and that is a reasonable line to draw. For most people the actual question is different: where the servers sit, who runs them, and whether you can get your data back out. That is what EU hosting is built to answer.
Your contacts aren't only your data. They're the data of everyone in your address book.
Frequently asked questions
Can I self-host Umfeld?
Where is my data stored?
What happens to my data if I cancel?
Can the AI see my private notes?
What does Umfeld cost?
Try Umfeld free for 7 days
Connect your Google address book. Your data stays in Europe, 6 EUR a month or 60 EUR a year after the trial.