What subscription services do you actually pay for and get value from?
What subscription services do you actually pay for and get value from?
I'm usually against subscription services, but there are a few I use that I think provide enough value to justify the cost. Are there subscriptions you think are worth the money for you?
Marine Traffic - I live by the sea.
Proton Mail - trying to give up Gmail.
Bitwarden - had to stop using the same password for everything.
My Row Counter - for knitting, it's a fantastic app.
Amazon prime and all the million services that bundle with it.
- SourceHut
- Kagi
- NearlyFreeSpeech
- PurelyMail
- ComEd, electricity
- Verizon, phone
- Spectrum, Internet - not cable because I refuse to watch commercials.
Yes these are technically subscription services.
- Pandora because _fuck ads and commercials - I never listen to the radio anymore.
The rest of my subscriptions are hit-or-miss. Disney+ because my fiancee likes keeping it I guess technically qualifies.
I don't subscribe to much as I try to avoid subscriptions
Bit warden subbed as soon as last pass went to shit Duolingo been studying Spanish every day Crunchyroll anime High-dive anime not on Crunchyroll
Mailbox.org
Real-Debrid+Stremio
Humble bundle
Mullvad VPN- Mullvad
- Addy.io
- A TV EPG provider so i can set my HTPC USB receivers to record stuff each week for the family (1. It details for specific channels new series/new episodes for the week aired between certain times of day which websites dont seem to do 2. Its cheaper & far more efficient than a TV mag/newspaper 3. Its extremely cheap so great value)
- I donate to some open source projects/devs when I find I'm using a product regularly
Surprising this thread is so positive so I'll share mine I've gotten downvoted for before:
Discord Nitro.I use it a lot as I'm active in a bunch of servers. I don't even pay for the expensive one, just the $3/month one and it's TOTALLY worth being able to make emojis of my cat and annoy people with them, here are my favorited and frequently used emojis:
- meat delivery service. Organic butcher sends me meat everyweek
Tons of amazing original content, and very cheap.
Hulu. Best collection of shows for me, right now.
Spotify. I listen to music constantly, it's a necessity.
Libro.fm for audiobooks, and supporting my local book store.
My gym membership (lumping Zwift in there too). I exercise a lot, like 15+ hours per week. These are part of my chosen lifestyle.
Opensnow. The only phone app I pay for. It's a weather app but better if you're a skier/snowboarder.
RuneScape. I love OSRS and I enjoy playing in my downtime. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.
- Tidal ($5.82/month student), like my HiFi music, even if it's indistinguishable on most of the speakers I use
- Nebula ($2.50/month), mostly the same shit as on YouTube but as-free (without adblock) and usually a bit early access
- PIA (~$2.33/month), avoids a Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV+, Discovery +, Paramount+, you get the gist+ subscription. You had a good thing going but you got greedy and fucked it
- Recurring donation to Lemmy dev ($5/month), despite any of the devs political views, I appreciate the service and continued support of the software and recognize that dev isn't free,though I do need to sit down and set one up for my instance as well as my mastodon & pixelfed instances.
Some of these are yearly but reduced to monthly for ease of viewing
Amazon Prime; I run a business repairing things. I'm small enough that I can't afford to keep everything in stock for various makes/models. Getting it here quickly allows me to repair more machines faster. There are no places to get the parts I need locally.
- YouTube Premium, because I listen to a ton of music but I also like listening to dorkier deep-dive video channels.
- Disney+ w/ Hulu because I am a raging Marvel fanboy and like to be able to keep up with shows like Simpsons/Family Guy/Bob's Burgers.
- Office 365. This is the most likely to get canceled at some point. I used to need Office for work, but now I mostly use the Notes app and Excel on my phone... and the 1 TB of OneDrive storage isn't as great a deal as it once was.
Ground News because I want to see what's going on in news across the media spectrum and they make it a lot easier.
Discord nitro classic because I don't have a better alternative and I get the features I actually need at half the price I'd pay for the normal subscription.
A VPN because none of your goddamn business.
Just web hosting.
YouTube premium. Mostly for music but no-ads is nice.
I have the basic iCloud sub but it feels like a scam. I should at least get more storage if I buy more Apple products. If you have two devices your backups get too big for the free storage amount.
I offloaded a bunch of things from iCloud but it becomes a hassle for how cheap their subscription is.
The Atlantic. Because of its magazine heritage, there's the perfect number of new articles per day (5 or 10), all top notch journalism and beautifully written. I look forward to reading a few of them each evening.
Technically, none.
But I do regularly buy gift cards for my self to get Geoguessr, I just refuse the whole subscription model.
If companies offered a one year pass without a subscription attached I believe they would have more customers.
They could even make it a few € more expensive than the normal subscription price for that period and I believe it would work fine.
A few weeks ago I found that you can get a lifetime pass for Nebula and Curiosity Stream for a resonable cost (a few hundred USD IIRC) and I am seriously considering it.
- A seed box (Whatbox). I'm paying USD 15/month, and they've actually upgraded my storage and bandwidth twice now without any price increases. I think I've been using that for roughly 10 years now. At this point, it's cheaper than any single streaming service, while allowing me access to basically every TV show and movie ever produced, and I can easily share my library with friends via Plex. Now that I have *aars, it's very little effort to keep up with my favorite shows.
- Whatever the YouTube music thing is called now. I signed up when it was brand new, and while I occasionally consider going back to piracy for music, it's just not worth the effort for me these days, but I am extremely opposed to ads.
- Amazon Prime. I should probably cancel, but I don't have a car and definitely utilize the same day delivery quite often.
- Housing. Do mortgage payments & HOA fees count as subscriptions? Lol. I definitely get a lot of value out of housing, and appreciate the fact that I don't have to wonder if my landlord is going to renew my lease each year.
Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, protonmail / drive / vpn, Usenet, bitwarden
That's about all I have.
Although I pirate 90% of what tv and movies we watch, I feel like I pay my fair share for internet stuff.
I might sub to a few local streaming sites from time to time. To catch up on tv.
MullvadVPN, Posteo, Bitwarden, Hetzner VPS, Hetzner Storage Box, Porkbun domain
JetBrains IDEs.
ProtonMail, Nebula, Backblaze, Parcel, BigNews, Glass, my local paper, local coffee delivery.
I pay for Apple iCloud too but I'm trying to figure out how to get away from it.
A daily newspaper, a monthly computer science paper, internet, electricity, water, gas. That's probably it.
Realdebrid
Mullvad VPN!
Real-Debrid. No more paying for compressed streaming services!
Usenet (Grandfathered real cheap plan) Brewfather (Excelent recipe manager for beer brewing) Netflix + Spotify (Keeps girls at home happy) Domains (for selfhosting) Backblaze B2 & Cloudflare R3 (Backups)
Yeah that's it
Protonmail
Spotify
Motortrend (now Discovery Plus)
Nebula
An small-time streamer
Amazon Prime - planning to cancelI have a subscription to natural gas I really get a lot out of
Mullvad.
A gym membership, my mail account (mailbox.org) and Spotify.
Apple One+
Music, TV, Games, and 50GB storage for $10/month via Verizon.
- Spotify: yes, you can download and set up your own music but spotify has a bunch of integrations that just work without any effort. I'm also using a student subscription (that will probably keep working forever) so it's not very expensive.
- Mobile contract: mobile data is expensive compared to other countries but at least my current ISP has coverage everywhere. Too bad everything else about the company sucks.
Trade coffee. I enjoy trying new coffees. And it's easy to pause the service if I'm traveling a lot and picking up coffees on my own.
If you can get 5 people for the Apple One Family plan, it's worth it.
- Apple Music
- Apple TV+
- Apple Arcade
- iCloud+
Deezer. Last year I listened to 770hrs of music. The majourity of that using the suggestion algorithm. I couldn't buy that many albums and I certainly couldn't name the all the albums I've pulled songs from.
At home I'm an album person. But, in the distractions of everyday life keep blasting singles at me and I'll wait for something to catch my ear.
Also, Deez nutz jokes are so easy.
Some that I use:
- Proton Unlimited, which gives me access to mail, storage and a VPN.
- Linode, I have a VPN which I use for selfhosting some things.
- Various domain names. They're actually cheaper than you think they are.
- Youtube Premium. I watch a lot of YouTube, and it helps creators.
- Discord Nitro. Begrudgingly.
- 1Password. Technically I don't pay for this, as I get it free as part of a plan from work, but I'd probably buy it when that runs out.
I'm kinda interested in watching streams more (to diversify my video watching habits), so am kinda curious about Twitch's ad-free premium plan thing as well...
Of course, there's also donations and patreon/subscribestar/ko-fi subscriptions, but I don't really consider those "subscription services".
Logseq sync, need it for work, and its only £3.74 (5 cows for the Americans). Tried proton VPN plus as well, too expensive for me being £8.38, but its fine because their free tier is generous and I can do video calls with plus aswell. Food is also a good subscription, you can find food shops everywhere with great variety, but the price of the overall spend is higher, but if you buy high volume low cost food you can combat this price increase; some people like to spend extra and add alcohol to their subscription, but i don't see the appeal unless its liquor shots like Apple sour or Baileys, because they taste good.
Prime video
Apple One is expensive but my whole family uses it and the only offered service I don’t really use much is Apple News.
Max. Better than Netflix any day.
VPN
Spotify and DropOut for me!
Signal Lemmy Pi-hole Bitwarden YouTube + a whole raft of creators
Crunchyroll. Largest catalog I’ve seen and I don’t have to sail the seas for everything. Also enjoy all the dubs.
I've been using Trade coffee for the last 2 years or so. The subscription basically amounts to free shipping.
The selection is good, and I get something new every time I order without having to go to multiple websites to see who has what in stock that I'd like.
I don't think their recommendations are that great, but the filter options make it easy to find something I am interested in.
I subscribe to two podcast networks on patreon. I could listen for free, but I feel it's worth paying for the several hours a month of entertainment I get from them.
Udio. There aren't yet any locally-runnable music generation tools like it, and even if they were they'd have to be pretty darned good to rival Udio's quality. I make a lot of use of it for tabletop roleplaying games, but also "just for fun." It's only $10 a month.
Uber Meats. Nothing but gabagool on demand.
But seriously, a VPN.
Inkarnate. It's a tool for making fantasy maps for those who haven't heard of it. I think they have an extremely reasonable price per year for it.
Disney+
I'm learning a language as a hobby and Disney+ BY FAR is the most consistent in having dubs and subs available in a variety of languages. I haven't actually watched anything that didn't have it (for the language I'm learning). Whereas most things on other streaming sites don't tend to have it at all unless it's a foreign film and that's the original language.
For me, it's easily worth the money just for that
$50 a year to Starcraft Broodwar Patreon that casts Korean language games into English.