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
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I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
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.
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
- Bitwarden
- Racknerd VPS
- Backblaze B2
- PIA VPN
- Purelymail
- Usenet
- ChatGPT API
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…
various integrations in documents, notes
Tell us about these integrations please
Nothing complicated. Nextcloud assistant with nextcloud office and generating emails in fairemail.
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.
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.
I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.
Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,
- Google One (extra storage, bonus YouTube Premium & YT Music premium)
- MXroute for mail hosting (used to self host)
- Amazon Prime (for the shipping, the content is a bonus for us)
- Hulu (kid’s gotta see that ONE show… 🙄)
- Lemmy.world (via Patron)
- Couple of YouTube creators and app publishers I enjoy regularly (via Patreon)
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.
Protonmail, tuta, posteo, simplelogin, addy, ivpn, mullvad, windscribe, mega, filen, Trakt
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.
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.
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.
- YouTube Premium
- Netflix
- Torguard VPN
- Google One for storage
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.
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.
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.
