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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Philosophical monthly support:
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta.
Everyone's mum's only fans for online gaming
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.
How do you all use ChatGPT API? Any tools that interface well with it?
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...
I assume they're talking about this api
Any tools that interface well with it?
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
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.
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.
That's it. I don't quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.
YouTube Premium
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.
On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly
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.
Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.
Good to know!
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).
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.
Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that's about it.
If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list
...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
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.
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
-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names
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.
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.
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.
Aside from the VPS and object storage for housing Leminal Space, just Proton Mail. And The Anfield Wrap if we're counting podcasts.
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.
Just a VPS. £4/month.
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.
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.
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:
1Pass NordVpn ChatGPT YouTube Premium
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
Mullvad and Tuta are the only services I pay for monthly
Surfshark VPN and YouTube premium. Recently cancelled Netflix and Amazon prime. Not much but I've had enough of subscriptions.
spotify, NextDNS, 1password, lifetime pcloud, Microsoft 365 on annual sales, notesnook. I guess I donate to my mastodon/Lemmy instance and immich development.
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.
(Yes i listen a lot to music)
Not really subscribed to anything. Most of the OTT subscriptions are bundled with the ISP
Paying around 20$ for domains renewal and thinking to get an email server which will be around 7$/year.
Express VPN for foreign free to air TV, ad blocking on multiple devices. 200gb Google Cloud storage. Vultr VPN for Wireguard.
just for pia vpn since i don't trust free vpns, also try claude opus instead of chatgpt, it's better imo.
ProtonMail and Spotify. I'm also paying for one podcast but I do it voluntarily.
Edit: and Mullvad
Also a dev.
Mythic beasts server hosting, namecheap domain hosting.
Bitwarden and a domain, if it counts.
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.
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:
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:
Google One, Spotify, Netflix and Nebula.
