Sustainability
Our commitment
At District5 we believe that building good software and being a responsible company are inseparable. This page explains how we think about our environmental footprint and the concrete choices we have made to keep it low.
We are a fully remote business; every member of the team works from home. This is not simply a practical arrangement; it has a real and measurable environmental benefit, primarily by eliminating the daily commute for everyone on the team.
Commuting is one of the largest contributors to an individual's carbon footprint. UK government transport statistics show that a typical car commuter produces close to one tonne of CO₂ per year from commuting alone. The International Energy Agency has found that the energy saved by not commuting is approximately four times larger than the additional residential energy a home worker consumes - meaning the net benefit of working from home is strongly positive. A 2021 Carbon Trust study across six European countries estimated that shifting to hybrid working across all teleworkable roles could reduce emissions by around 4.1 million tonnes of CO₂ per year in the UK alone, with comparable proportional savings across Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. For fully remote workers the benefit is greater still. Our team is spread across multiple UK cities; requiring everyone to travel to a central location each day would add thousands of kilometres of unnecessary car and rail journeys every week. Instead, those journeys simply do not happen.
Our footprint comes almost entirely from the cloud infrastructure we run on behalf of Sendhit users - so that is where the rest of this page focuses.
Where we run
Sendhit's backend runs exclusively in Google Cloud's europe-west4 region, located in Eemshaven, Netherlands. We chose this region deliberately. According to Google Cloud's published sustainability data (as of May 2026), europe-west4 has a Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) percentage of 83% - meaning that, on an hourly average, 83% of the electricity consumed there comes from carbon-free sources. Google designates any region above 75% CFE as "Low CO2", and europe-west4 comfortably exceeds that threshold.
The Eemshaven facility has a notable history: it was Google's first datacenter anywhere in the world to operate on 100% renewable energy from its opening day, back in 2016. The electricity mix that powers it includes the Delfzijl wind farm, the community-owned Windpark Krammer cooperative in Zeeland (whose 4,000 members collectively own the turbines), and the largest solar park in the Netherlands, also located at Eemshaven. Google has supported over one gigawatt of clean energy generation capacity in the Netherlands in total.
Google has committed to running all of its datacenters on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030 - matching every hour of electricity consumption with carbon-free generation on the same grid, not just annual averages. You can review their published region-level CFE data at cloud.google.com/sustainability/region-carbon.
Keeping our footprint lean
Beyond the choice of region, we aim to consume as little compute as possible. We run a minimal server fleet, right-size instances to actual load, and avoid storing data longer than necessary. Fewer resources provisioned means fewer kilowatt-hours consumed, regardless of how clean the grid is.
The app itself
End-to-end encrypted environment variables are stored and processed locally on your device wherever possible - this is core to Sendhit's security model. It also means the bulk of the sensitive work happens on hardware you already own and run, rather than on servers we operate. Less data transiting our infrastructure means less compute we need to provision on your behalf.
What's next
We will continue to evaluate our infrastructure choices as our usage grows and as cleaner options become available. This page will be updated as our thinking and actions develop. If you have questions or suggestions, please get in touch.