What web services do you subscribe to?
Really just curious what folks out there deem valuable enough to give money for monthly or annually. As a software engineer I have quite a few that keep me productive and I'll list a few:
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Obsidian Sync
- YouTube Premium
I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP
Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.
What all do you run?
At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
Philosophical monthly support:
Grapheneos
Eff
Tor
Briar
Molly
Unless you're doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there's Revanced or Grayjay.
Anyway, I pay for Nebula.
Do you like it? There's only like 10 creators I watch on YouTube who are there, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to find replacements. If I pay for Nebula, I'd rather ditch YouTube entirely.
And yeah, I use Grayjay and I'm about ready to buy it. I love the new Twitch integration, and some are on Odyssey, so that's cool. The app seems to use a lot more resources than NewPipe, and it's missing a few NewPipe features I really like (seeing playlists is the biggest one), but overall it's pretty good. If it was FOSS I'd buy it today, I'm just hesitating because there's just too many tradeoffs.
I'm a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.
The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you'd get from them.
But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it's sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators' Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I'd be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula's annual plan, it's just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).
Honestly, I don't care about bonus content, I just want the content I have on YouTube elsewhere without ads and tracking, and I'm happy to pay for it.
The only ones I'm interested in are:
I looked through the rest, and I honestly haven't heard of any of them. I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but I do follow a few channels. Here are some of my favorites, by category:
Tech news:
Privacy/advocacy:
Math/science:
Other news (balances liberal bias here on lemmy):
Misc entertainment:
If I had one or two solid channels from each category, I could abandon YouTube. But I don't know any of the channels there, and I'm not super excited about looking through a bunch of new channels again, it took years to filter through the trash on YouTube...
So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He's done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.
The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving "Final Years of Majuro". There's also the channel "Extremities" from them, which "brings you the stories of how and why the world's most remote settlements exist". They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that's on YouTube on a delay; they've recently also announced an upcoming series called "The Getaway", but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there's the channel "neo", which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.
For tech news, there's The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can't comment precisely on their content.
No explicit privacy advocacy I'm afraid.
For science, there's Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.
Not sure I'd ever say Lemmy has a "liberal" bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular "The Editorial" is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There's also J.J. McCullough, who I don't watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they've added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I'm still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They've also recently announced a new news division, but we don't know exactly what form that's going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.
As far a misc entertainment, it's a very personal thing that's hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I'd say they're more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There's edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the "music" category is Tantacrul, though really I'd say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he's specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under "news", which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you're a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his "...For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games" series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.
Personally, I couldn't ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There's just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They're really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they're weak in, they're pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they're expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn't have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the "latest videos" section of the front page, I don't miss anything entirely. (Though there's always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I've come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn't have thought to be interested in before. It's big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it'd be hard not for someone to get their money's worth from it.
Yeah, I should've said "leftist" or "socialist."
I don't really fit in with Lemmy politically, I'm just here because Reddit has gone too far with tracking and monetization. I would've been willing to pay for Reddit if they were privacy-friendly, but that ship has sailed.
This looks fantastic! I just watched a video on YouTube (about the Belgian far right party) and it was high quality without all the rage baiting. Thanks!
Eh, I found it just devolves into the popular nonsense I try to avoid with clickbait titles and rage bait style. For privacy reasons, I completely disabled watch history and whatnot, and suggestions are now even worse (no surprise there).
I'm trying to completely replace YouTube and Google services generally as a rejection of their data collection (hence the "privacy advocacy" section), so I'm looking for an 80% solution. I can hopefully fill in the rest on Odysee and Rumble (looks like LPL is there), but those are filled with far-right nonsense, and Peertube seems kinda dead, so I'll need a solid base and only look for a handful of replacements.
Anyway, thanks! You've given a lot of great options, so I'll try it out and see if I can finally drop YouTube, at least for subscribed content (YouTube is still king for finding specific music). I don't really care about bonus content, I just want something like YouTube that doesn't have ads, tracking, and clickbait, and I'm willing to pay.
Another platform that I haven't yet signed up for, but probably will before too long, is Dropout. Created by the former head of the YouTube channel CollegeHumor after the old owners collapsed at the hands of a private equity firm, it now hosts a whole range of comedy content, from game shows (Um, Actually is mostly available on YouTube, and is excellent), to sketch comedy (clips from Game Changer and Make Some Noise are available as YT Shorts—I've seen them called a spiritual successor to Who's Line Is It Anyway, especially after Wayne Grady guest starred in an episode), and their D&D show Dimension 20. It's entirely in that "misc entertainment" category, and all from one single studio, but it's shockingly good for that.
Cool, that also sounds right up my alley. I'll check it out. :)
Oh, another thing just occurred to me. There are also Nebula-exclusive podcasts. I listen to The Urbanist Agenda, hosted by Jason Slaughter, with regular guests including (but not limited to) the other urbanists on Nebula.
You forgot to mention that at least with the newer videos, the videos cut out all the sponsored sections.
Oh, yeah. I guess I just took that as a given. @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works, this is worth knowing too, if you weren't already aware.
(Though with SponsorBlock, you can achieve much the same thing on YouTube, albeit in a more morally grey way.)
Thanks for the heads up. :)
I don't use SponsorBlock (but do use ad-block) because creators need to eat, but it's good to know that nonsense will be gone in Nebula. :)
I actually mostly love Sponsor Block for its non-sponsor things. Stuff like cutting out intro animations, cutting long silences in recorded streams, skipping "interaction reminders" ("don't forget to like and subscribe"), and occasionally jumping straight to the music in music videos.
I just drop channels that do that nonsense.
I'm okay with a 10-20s sponsor mention at the start or end, but some of them get long (like 1min+) or are right in the middle. Likewise, a quick 3s "like and subscribe" nod at the end is fine, just annoying in the middle.
If a channel is annoying its viewers, I know to avoid it because the content is also likely mediocre. If they truly care about the content, they'll keep the annoying crap to a minimum.
It has served me pretty well so far.
I've never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that's not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I'll stick with Revanced for now.
I mean playlists by a channel, not ones you create. I assume you can get those (Grayjay has playlists), but I don't actually has that feature at all.
I watch some channels with a huge back catalogue, and I'll often want to watch something in a category from a year or two back. I don't know how to efficiently find that on Grayjay, but it works fine in NewPipe.
Oh I see. Yeah I do use those from time to time. Would be a shame not to have them, for precisely the reason you describe.
Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.
Good to know!
That's my issue. I use YT primarily on my Chromecase and mobile.
Firefox + ublock is clunky.
3rd Party apps are a no-go for my Google Account. To much depends on that to get hacked just because I don't like ads.
My justification for the price is, that I pay less for that than for Netflix and I use it daily.
Also Creators get a significantly higher cut per view in comparison to regular viewers. So I don't need to feel bad when I block ads on Desktop and don't sub their patreon.
I mean, it’s something like $7-8 for 6 months via a one-time VPN payment in India or the like. Definitely worth it.
Nah. Just donate a little to the creators you like and block the ads. Everyone would be better for it except Google.
I block the ads by using SmartTube on my Shield Pro. But for my AppleTV 4K, I prefer paying a few bucks for Premium for a smooth experience ☻.
All I need as a student. I have a few open source projects that I aim to support monthly, as soon as I get my first paycheck after I'm finished with my degree, might count those as subscriptions then.
I really hope ur using chatgpt via api and not their own frontend api is far cheaper and there is a multitude of clients u can use
The one advantage of their front-end is that it's enabled for live internet search. But yeah it's not worth the price difference. I'm hardly getting $2 a month vs. the 20 they charge for the front-end.
Yeah I been looking for a frontend that can use an agent style preferably written in langchain capable of such things. I just been using Sydney but its been lab optimised to far and Microsoft are fuckers.
I don’t know if it will meet your needs, but I’ve recently picked up a license to TypingMind and I use the OpenAI API - it’s a very good tool IMO.
I'd prefer something Foss honestly might just have to write it myself at this point.
Yeah I agree, and I hesitated to buy TypingMind, but I figured the $30 or whatever was cheaper than my time.
How do I use the API? I'd be willing to pay for ChatGPT pro if it was cheaper, especially if it was pay per use instead of pay per month
I use better chatgpt its a git repo that Github will host for free for you then google opening api and get urself an api key. Its pay per use u get gpt3.5 as well as gpt4. I still use gpt3.5turbo for most things this cos its way cheaper than 4.
Thanks, I'll look into that! I also recently found an easy way to run local LLMs on my computer, so I can mix and match.
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.
...none. I donate to foss projects monthly though so it's a subscription in spirit but it's not really classified as a subscription
Can you list a few of them?
Off the top of my head: Lemmy, Lemmee, Signal, Molly, and Jellyfin
If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list
Everyone's mum's only fans for online gaming
Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.
I've been hearing good things about Kagi.
Google search got so bad I use DDG by default now, but that seems to be Bing by another name and itself seems to be deteriorating.
I use Qwant and Startpage on my phone and PC, I'm happy with both
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
Do you have any decent options for routing a DNS name to a local machine behind NAT? I usually do this with a VPS, but I really don't like the terms at a lot of VPS services (forced arbitration everywhere).
I paid namecheap for a domain, it was $50 for 8 years. So I guess I lied, I did pay for that ages ago. Then, I use my UniFi Dream Machine firewall to route traffic to my Plex and game servers within my network. It’s great because I have Minecraft.mydomain.com, files.mydomain.com and palworld.mydomain.com that people use to access things. Do note that this requires a static IP from your ISP unless you want to get a dynamic dns service running which isn’t too bad.
Yeah, I don't have access to dynamic DNS because I'm behind a NAT (ISP gives me a 10.x.x.x address). I can pay for a static IP, but I'd really rather not.
I was hoping there was something like Tailscale where I could forward ports over a VPN and use the VPN host's IP for my DNS. I can kinda get there with Tailscale's public DNS, but I can't use my own (well, I could use a CNAME, but I'd use their certs).
Anyway, it's a temporary thing since I should be getting a new municipal fiber connection soon.
CGNAT should be illegal.
Yeah, I can set up a VPN pretty easily, it's just annoying that I need to do it.
Namecheap supports ddns out of the box too, no additional service required. You just need a cron job that calls their API to update your IP periodically.
Ah perfect! Thanks for the additional info
Do you off-site backup as well? I don't have the kind of money necessary to self host an on network and an off-site backup of my data...
I used wasabi BackUp service years ago, it was about $50 a month for my 7 TB, and it took over a month to upload the initial back up. Now, I have about five times that much storage used up and there’s no way I would pay $250 a month for that. All stuff I’ve downloaded from Torrents, so if something bad happened I could get it back again. I save all my torrent files so I could re-download them fairly easily. I also run a raid 6 configuration so I can tolerate up to two drives failing before I lose data.
RAID is not a backup, NAS is not a backup. Obviously there is no reason to backup readily available torrents but it doesn't sound like you're backing up at all. Self hosting data integrity is a much harder task than implied.
It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.
Subscribe to?
None.
That is out of priciple to me, I refuse to have automatically renews subscriptions on my card.
I will however buy gift cards for services and buy new as I need them.
For that, I have one.
Geoguessr.
That game has helped me a shitload when I have been depressed, and now that I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can't in the future.
Spotify? Does that count? Literally the only thing I subscribe to for money.
100% it does. The right music makes the difference between a productive day and a total waste.
And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.
How do you all use ChatGPT API? Any tools that interface well with it?
I assume they're talking about this api
Lots of tools, but it depends on where you want to use it. For example, inside Obsidian you can use it as a text generator
Inside VSCode you can use something like AI Genie
If you just want to use it raw, you can use postman
My main use is chatgptbox with my instance of searxng. Also comes in handy when looking for a shell command or script with ai-shell.
Then there's the various integrations in documents, notes, etc...
Tell us about these integrations please
Nothing complicated. Nextcloud assistant with nextcloud office and generating emails in fairemail.
That's it. I don't quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.
Think that's it for the time being.
I've been using sync.com for a couple of years now for my large music files storage and playback. Thinking of going all in on the unlimited plan to add on all my family files. Curious what your experience is with delayed syncing. Occasionally I find something just doesn't sync to the cloud and I have to play about with PC on/off, connect to Mobile hotspot, clear cache etc to get it to work. Makes me wonder if that's happening with files where I don't realize it until it's too late.
Basically, how robust is it for you?
Yes I'm experiencing the same and have escalated it to their technical support before, and every now and then they were able to resolve it. So far the client always notified me of issues with the sync process (the windows client that is, Android is very basic). I've also been begging for a Linux client for 5 or 6 years now, to no avail.
So yeah while I'm happy with it as a storage solution in general and like the responsiveness of their support, there are still a few issues here and there. I'm in the solo basic tier and don't use more than 400GB of the storage, so that's plenty for my use case.
Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,
I'm considering joining Nebula because many of the creators I frequently watch on YouTube are setting up shop up over there, and I'm getting irritated with YouTube for how The Algorithm is affecting the quality and content of the infotainment channels I enjoy.
The phone app has it's problems at times, things like resetting to the main page, and other little nuisances, but I really like Nebula, went so far as to pay for their lifetime deal.
Was Google one (including yt premium) a limited time deal? I don't see them connected right now.
You know? That might have been the case. I was an old Google Music subscriber, and I think when that rolled over to YT Music the subscription package bundled in YouTube premium. Later when I bit on the Google One subscription later, I think it was on a promotional offer. I remember it was about $100 at the time, and it aligned with some storage needs U had so why not?
I just looked and it seems the Google 1 and YT sub's are billed separately. It was a while ago and my memory is hazy, but I'm into Google services for about $30 a month these days, and that's what I pay for.
I pay for yt premium family ($23/mo) now. Was also a yt red subscriber.
Same here. YT family plan, and $99/yr for the G1 storage (plus other benefits, but mostly the storage)
I'm just using the default storage, and have a Nextcloud instance for any files I need to access.
I do use Google photos, but I skirt there uploads using my old pixel 1 to upload my pixel 8pro photos :) so my storage is mostly static with Google
Bitwarden because it's super convenient, as well as Youtube Premium because I watch a ton of youtube. I also leech off my family's spotify premium subscription, so I don't pay for that personally but it is a subscription service I use. On top of that, I pay for a debrid service for pirating media since I'm sick and tired of the streaming service economy, which has been an excellent investment. And lastly I do pay for XBox Game Pass, though once I beat persona 3 reload I'm probably cancelling that.
Once I find work I'll probably subscribe to proton because I'd like to move a bit more away from google, but I'm not really in a rush to do that given my use of youtube premium and such. Kind of a longer term goal.
None.
Just a VPN. Thinking about trying out Proton's suite and maybe pay for that if it's worth it. Otherwise I'm more and more leaning on OSS and self hosted things these days because corporations have shown themselves not to be trusted with anything important.
From what I've heard self hosting your email though can be a big PITA so paying someone for email is not a terrible choice. Self hosting you need to carefully manage the system and reputation to make sure your email that you send actually gets delivered, and doesn't arrive in spam.
Self hosting email has been a hard no for way over a decade at this point, maybe two. It's a terrible idea.
I recently swapped over from Dashlane to Proton, and I don't regret it at all. Plus I can decouple my stuff from Google, and use my own domain for my personal email, which I can then give out to individuals and hide behind aliases for companies/services. I rather like it. The VPN seems solid enough too, though I've nary a use for such things.
Yeah there are many great things about Proton. It's just so damn expensive. Had it been like $7 per month (charged monthly) I'd already been a customer. I'm guessing the VPN carries the highest cost for Proton, so it'd be nice to have the option for the whole suite except the VPN.
Yeah. I don't really feel like VPNs are that necessary, though I also sort of get having it as a product. For me it wasn't really that tough a choice; I already paid $5 monthly for Dashlane, Proton Pass was a bit of an upgrade in terms of features (though they don't seem to check haveibeenpwned like Dashlane), and it came with a bunch of other services I really could use.
All that said, I believe they have a free-tier for all of their services, so you could always dip your toes in, see how you feel about it, and decide later if you think it's worth it or not?
As a complete aside, your username has me convinced to buy some plopp. It is Saturday after all.
Oh I use a VPN 24/7 and wouldn't have it any other way (even though I also don't think it's strictly necessary), but I already have a provider that I trust, is fast and cost only like <$3/month I think.
I'm thinking of trying Proton Pass for free which I think you can do, but the main attraction is to get away from the Google suite and incorporate a more privacy focused one. Having a calendar, generating unlimited email aliases to store in the password manager etc.
Go have some lördagsplopp!
Yeah, I don't think Proton would be my go-to choice for VPN when it comes to privacy. I've heard stuff about them actually keeping logs. In that case I'd be more interested in Mullvad since they just run their service on RAM. I did give the Proton VPN a spin, and at least as far as speeds go, it's pretty fast. They give you a notice if you use the "Secure Core" feature, stating that the connection speed might end up being a bit slow, but it still seems to reach the cap of my wifi (500mbit) so it honestly isn't that bad. So for streaming region locked stuff it seems to do the job. "Secure Core" as far as I can tell, just tunnels your connection through several nodes, I'm not well versed enough on networking to know how that could possibly improve security, because to me it sounds like adding more points of failure.
I do really like the email service and the password manager, and I'm sure I'll get some use from the drive as well at some point. When signing up for things, the password manager automatically suggests masking your email. Would've killed for something like that ten years ago; my gmail account is flooded with useless BS that it's nice to finally move away from it.
ProtonMail, with my own domain, so that I have full control over my online identity and Spotify. As a developer I don't need anything else, I can work just fine with freely available stuff.
I have ProtonMail, but I'm pretty new to it. I do pay for premium (unlimited). How does the domain thing work with them? They actually host the email for the domain via MX records?
Not the OP, but if youve got your own domain, you can register it with Proton so that you can create email addresses on it that route to your Proton inbox.
How it'll work is:
Ah ok, thank you!
-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names
I used to, but I don't these days because the prices kept going up while the value kept going down. My last subscription was Pandora and Paramount+, but I wasn't using it enough to justify the continued cost.
I also hate ads on a paid service, that shouldn't be a thing. If there are ads, it should be free like Pluto.tv, Tubi, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
Mullvad, ProtonDrive, and my mobile data plan if that counts.
I stopped subscribing to Google drive, but truthfully I miss Google photos a lot because of how good it is, privacy aside.
Ente Photos is a pretty decent alternative if you don't want to self host
I would so use Ente if I didn't self host immich
Protonmail, tuta, posteo, simplelogin, addy, ivpn, mullvad, windscribe, mega, filen, Trakt
Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that's about it.
I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.
In addition I support a range of software through GitHub and Patreon:
Finally I’ve got paid access to a couple of major and minor media sources:
Considering paying for RSS provider but they all seem overpriced for what they do above Feedly free tier.
What does a hosted RSS provider give you over a normal client? I use Nextcloud News (self hosted) but I don't really know the benefit over just using an RSS app on my phone (besides syncing my list I guess).
Sync across devices at free tier which is the main thing. You pay by having access to things like real-time updates, filters, summaries etc. I don't keep a vps these days and I have a preferred client that's limited to commercial solutions.
Only a 3.50€ VPS on OVH. Gets the job done. For music I just use firehawk52’s Deezer ARLs to download the music. For TV shows/movies the obvious is piracy. The whole subscription model drives me away from services.
(Yes i listen a lot to music)
How come several music services? Are some artists not on all of them?
That's right, but it's also about where I use them. Tidal and Qobuz on my (expensive) system because they got best sound quality. For my iem:s I use Deezer, I like the app and the "flow". I guess it's overkill but it's my hobby.
That's cool. Until now I've been using Qobuz for HD track downloads but will check Tidal next time they're missing something.
Yes, but know that Tidal doesn't sell for download.
My financial /spending data has a price
Aside from the VPS and object storage for housing Leminal Space, just Proton Mail. And The Anfield Wrap if we're counting podcasts.
That's about it. I don't use ChatGPT often enough to sub. I sometimes subscribe to Canva Pro if I have a project ongoing.
Spotify but only because we are all sharing a family plan and the price makes sense at that point for the convenience.
As soon as Spotify gets rid of family plans and account sharing (just like all other streaming platforms) I’ll sail the seas with Lidarr.
Pcloud, NordVPN, Tidal, reMarkable sync
I'd use Obsidian Sync too if I used Obsidian across devices. I just back my vaults up in the cloud.
spotify, NextDNS, 1password, lifetime pcloud, Microsoft 365 on annual sales, notesnook. I guess I donate to my mastodon/Lemmy instance and immich development.
Surfshark VPN and YouTube premium. Recently cancelled Netflix and Amazon prime. Not much but I've had enough of subscriptions.
Just a VPS. £4/month.
I give some bucks to disroot for email and cloud services and I donate monthly to a local server that hosts a mastodon instance and some other goodies. I occasionally donate to some software projects
My partner subscribes to media services which I use too, like max, Spotify and others.
1Pass NordVpn ChatGPT YouTube Premium
Mullvad and Tuta are the only services I pay for monthly
I'm a student and I don't work that much so I try to keep the costs down. I considered selfhosting Nextcloud but it doesn't seem worth it for now.
How do I webhost with Hetzner? I want to get into server hosting and Hetzner is a small business with a good price, but the learning curve is so steep.
It's not that hard, just create an account and order a web hosting plan. You can edit the files using FTP. It's just web hosting though, you're probably better off with a VPS if you want to run your own software.
Bitwarden
Proton Family
Spotify Family
Nintendo online
1 small Contabo VPS to host rocket chat
1 larger Contabo VPS for my main Nextcloud and Immich instances
Google One, Spotify, Netflix and Nebula.
Just a vpn
ProtonMail and Spotify. I'm also paying for one podcast but I do it voluntarily.
Edit: and Mullvad
I'm a software engineer as well, but (almost) none of my subscriptions are related to that. Currently:
That's about it. Everything else I buy one at a time, like video games or donations.
I'd like to drop Netflix and Disney+ over their stupid ad policy, but my wife and kids use them a lot.
Here's some stuff I plan to get soon:
A couple of video streaming services, Hulu, which includes Disney+, Discovery+ and Netflix. That totals up to like $50/mo or so.
Other than that, it's aaaallllll independent creators, through Twitch or Patreon.
YouTube music only, unfortunately. Unfortunate not because it's the only expense of its type that I have, but because like so many Google products it's a worse version of something they used to offer for free. And there isn't a good alternative that I've found yet, and no music streaming service pays the artists anything worth mentioning.
For me, as an SRE:
Other, non-tech subscriptions:
Things I might pay for if my employer didn't:
Random IT-adjacent services I occasionally donate to:
Too many but here’s a few off the top of my head:
There’s more but as a developer, I try to pay for software. (I mean, if I don’t, who will?) I’ll sail the high seas for some stuff but only if the company pisses me off.
Bitwarden and a domain, if it counts.
Express VPN for foreign free to air TV, ad blocking on multiple devices. 200gb Google Cloud storage. Vultr VPN for Wireguard.
I think that’s it. I would subscribe to Port87, but I made it, so I don’t need to.
I understand that that’s a lot of subscriptions. I used to have a lot more, and I’ve been slowly unsubscribing.
I’ve almost replaced ProtonMail with Port87, so that will be the next to go. I like ProtonMail, but I only subscribed so that I could do the things Port87 does automatically. I’ll still subscribe to Proton VPN though. I need that for… Linux ISOs.
I’ve also almost replaced Google Photos with Immich, so that will go soon too.
I’m thinking about replacing Apple Music with a self hosted option.
I also am finding ChatGPT less and less useful as open source LLMs get closer in quality.
Can you please link a guide to how to setup open source LLMs or some list so that I can look it up?
This is what I’ve been using:
https://lmstudio.ai/
Seedbox (+included vpn)
Usenet
YT Prem
Spotify
Ionos Mail
O365 (but I bought vouchers for 3 years at a reduced price)
-> I prefer Outlook over Thunderbird. Though with the new interface they had done I will probably migrate to it once it expires. The OneDrive storage is used for Obsidian.md. I store obsidian locally but sync it with the community plugin "remotely save").
Bitwarden
1 or 2 items I don't remember right now.
Mythic beasts server hosting, namecheap domain hosting.
just for pia vpn since i don't trust free vpns, also try claude opus instead of chatgpt, it's better imo.
Bitwarden Copilot YT Premium
Also a dev.