2y ago

cost of privacy related services

I have been reading about internet privacy for a long time. As time went on, I got a vpn subcription, a custom domain, a paid email hosting, etc. No regrets on the services themselves.

I recently had this conversation with a colleague of mine, complaining about the rising cost of everything including internet subscription services: netflix, spotify, youtube, you name it. I could simply disregard my colleague's complaints as I didn't have any of those and know the ways of obtaining materials. However, once I start adding up the privacy related services I'm willingly paying instead... they also add up into a considerable amount.

So, do you pay for anything privacy related, how much do you pay in total, and is it affordable for you? For example, many VPN providers offer yearly subscriptions around 40-50 USD.

41 comments

I pay for Proton, got my Mail Calendar and Drive use cases covered. I pay annually, it's not a small amount but it's only once every 2 years (ends up being equivalent to 8 euro a month, 191 euro total).
I use their VPN and SimpleLogin integration. The rest of my use cases are all covered by foss

12€/year for a domain incl. backup mx and sending relay for emails
10€/year for encrypted backup
Energy cost of my NAS (unknown yet)
48€/year for a ways service
So just under 6€/month + electricity.

Per year, I pay just less than €90. That gets me email, VPN, cloud storage/backup and domains. €7.50pcm is acceptable to me.

I pay 1 euro a month for e-mail that I think is secure enough. I think that's it at present.
- 1 euro a month? I'm guessing Posteo, Tutanota, Mailbox.org?

~$20/year domain name
€12/year Tutanota mail
~$idk yet/year energy costs of a self-hosted server (an old laptop lying around the house) which handles:
Backup solution
File hosting
Wireguard VPN Tunnel
Other free and open-source services which allow me to own my data locally.
Sometimes €5 Mullvad VPN for if I'm traveling internationally. Otherwise Tor or my home VPN would suffice.

I honestly only pay for Bitwarden. 10€ a year is very very cheap. And you don't even have to, the free features are all the things you normally need. I am paying just as a donation.
- You can also selfhost it and get the premium features for free.
  
  5$ a month for a Hetzner VPS or less than 1$ yearly for Bitwarden?

Mullvad VPN for 60 euros a year. Totally worth it. Especially traveling and whenever I want anything for “free”

I pay $110 total with $50 going to Proton for email and the other $60 going to kagi.con
- @shortwavesurfer @rar any advantage in using kagi instead of various searxNG/whoogle instances that are free to use? Also, brave's search engine is getting better.
  
  I do like SearxNG and used it, but many public instanxes get rate limited by ddg, google, and several others due to being a proxy fir many more searches than an average user would need. This makes the results from that instance very nearly useless. I am still testing Kagi and added enough for a 2 month subscription after my free trial ends. Since it is paid there are no ads at all, targeted or generalized. Plus they now accept crypto as payment so i can use a burner email and pay without giving up my identity and they are okay with it.

Couple of VPSes and domain names. Maybe 10 euro per month total. That's like 3 bottles of wine so not a cost I worry about.
- Wine for €3/bottle? At that price all I can find is bags!
  
  Bags of wine?
  Typical selection at my supermarket.
  
  Do you also buy your milk in bags?
- What kind of privacy benefits does renting someone elses computer power have?
  
  All of them?

@rar I pay for my own domain name + VPS for 45 USD per quarter. (I know there are cheaper providers, but I am happy with my current one).
I don't use VPN, I use Tor while browsing and use I2P while torrenting---so I don't pay a dime to obfuscate my online trails.
I use a free tier from a "privacy-conscious" email provider, so I don't pay for that either. I don't self-host my email and I don't seek die-hard email privacy with mine, currently. At most, I PGP-encrypt some of them.
I self-host my own matrix server, which is an e2ee chatting service. So, that goes into my VPS subscription.

41 comments