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Which subscriptions do you consider to be worth their cost?
Aside from this wonderful website, what are things that have enough value to you that you're willing to pay for them not just once, but repeatedly over time?
Zero hesitation: GSuite. For $6/month, I have all the features that Google offers for free on my own domain name, and I can get support for them, and I don't have to worry about Google mining my data and what not. I feel it's the answer to a lot of complaints people have about Google: "If you don't pay you're the product" and what not -- well, you can pay, what are you waiting for?
For twice the price, I can get GSuite Business which includes something called "team drives", which allow me to share virtual drives with other email addresses and increases Drive space to 1TB. I find it super useful.
Aside from that I also have a Mega subscription for 200GB of encrypted space, and an Amazon Prime subscription now that I'm once again in a country where I order enough off Amazon to make it cost-beneficial to have one simply for the free deliveries.
I’m just asking because I don’t know...
Why do you think Google is not mining your data as a GSuite paying customer?
GSuite is somewhat famously exempt from data mining, largely because it's Google's "regulations compliant" service. See: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
thanks for this! I've been with them since they launched and I just assumed they've been scraping like normal.
This is comforting.
I love Sheets so much. Its rare I stumble across something I can't do with it. With scripts like IMPORTJSON.gs I've been able to build some pretty fancy data sets.
Very interesting, thank you.
+1 for fastmail. I switched in a bout of de-google-fying my life a few years back. Lives up to the name. And well worth the cost.
Why are you thinking of switching?
I have some concerns about the new Australian privacy law, but honestly it's because I can get the same (I need) with mailbox.org for 1 EUR vs. 3-5 EUR per month. And yes, I'll cheap out about this amount since subscriptions will add over time for sure and cost me more money in all places. (Like a netflix price increase for the third time)
Makes sense.
I'm not completely up to speed on the new Australian laws, but I appreciate that Fastmail are at least trying to fight it a bit. For me, the main concern around privacy is data mining/profiling/advertising/manipulation. I'd rather not that a foreign government has direct access to my communications, but as I understand it, the law would still be based on warrants/requests, not wholesale dragnet surveillance.
Plus, my email archive is ~20GB at the moment, so the €1 plan at mailbox.org wouldn't cut it for me.
And I really don't want to switch and re-set-up my whole email/contacts system :-/
I would also like to find a cheaper alternative to fastmail, one that is in a better country than Australia. However, FM's webclient is the best webclient out there, in my opinion, second to none. If you find a good alternative, please let me know!
You're right, they have the best and fastest web client ever. Good thing I'm using it a lot on my mobile and table with IMAP, so it's not that crucial. But if I'd need the web client on a regular basis I think the 2-3 EUR more would be worth it, but not the law :)
I have ~10 news subscriptions. In money per time spent, that's gotta be some of the most efficient money I spend.
Worthwhile news costs money to make. I'd much rather support the best news outlets directly than have them use another financing method ,or worse: stop making the content I consume.
Care to share which ones?
A subscription I'm very happy with is thebrowser.com. They browse the web for you and throw up 5 interesting articles (usually longish), one video, and one podcast each day.
FT.com news subscription.
I've gone for years in the wilderness of news, trying to find a source of information rather than a loosely cobbled-together band of foaming-at-the-mouth rabble-rousers to read.
Back in college we were encouraged to read the news, and I enjoyed it. News was about learning things - learning about the world, about issues, about challenges.
But then it turned into a race to the bottom in terms of polarisation, click-bait, and filter-bubbles. Even the broadsheets, the bastions of "quality news" started doing it and suddenly you were reading gossip rags that just used bigger words as a differentiator from the tabloids.
FT feels like going back to the college years. It's level-headed, fact-based reporting. Sure it has a bit of a boring at times big business/companies-bent to it, but its coverage of world events is in-depth, informative, and scrupulously fact-checked.
It's seriously made me interested in world affairs again for the first time in years.
Thanks for this. I've been debating pulling the trigger on a FT subscription for a while, but since it's so darn hard to read their stuff for free it was actually difficult to tell if I would like the quality. I am more likely to get one now.
Amen on 1password. And if you have an office type job you can almost definitely make a case to your boss for the company to pay for the Enterprise version. It's cheap and gets you a family account for free.
Namecheap: would rather recommend Gandi. But both are good.
IPVM -- an independent evaluator of video surveillance technology. They were the first to report out back door issues on surveillance cameras. With artificial intelligence gleaning information off of cameras and computers having "eyes", this is an industry to monitor. https://ipvm.com/
Well there is the obvious stuff like health insurance, life insurance, electricity, water, renter's insurance, and rent. I've got Amazon Prime, which kind of transcends categories and includes Twitch and Prime Video as well as probably a bunch of other crap I don't know about.
Aside from that:
Entertainment
These are too many honestly and I'd like to scale back. I had considered rotating HBO and Hulu based on whatever I'm watching, but my wife is too damned indecisive about when she wants to watch watch. My wife also refuses to part with Spotify, but I mostly prefer to buy music and Apple Music makes it easy to sync my libraries together. We will eventually end our detente and pick one though.
I'm still iffy on Prime. If not for the video and streaming sub bundled in I probably would have given up on prime for deliveries at this point. But with them there it's a lot of value for not a lot of money. Audible I have because my work pays for it, but I honestly prefer reading the old fashioned way. I'm a very fast reader and have trouble focusing when listening, so these just aren't meant for me. My wife enjoys it though.
News subscriptions
These are more about supporting forms of media I respect by staying away from ad driven business models. I have considered getting a newspaper subscription but I feel like I'm inundated with news all the time anyway and don't respect any of the major publications enough to bother.
Random stuff:
Bespoke Post sends you random, instagrammable "manly" stuff on a monthly basis. I only actually take a box once in a blue moon these days to declutter, so I will probably axe this subscription box soon. Bokksu sends a curated collection of Japanese snacks each month. I've only done it one month, but I like it. It's nice to expand my junk food palette and Japanese junk foods just feel less junky to me somehow. I'll probably end this one too just because I'm trying to cut down on recurring expenses.
Real life stuff:
My wife works out at the Y, it includes yoga classes which she would have paid for anyway so throwing in access to the entire community center, the pool, the weights, etc. is a great deal. My MMA gym is less of a deal, but I do enjoy martial arts (though I've been recuperating from a back injury for about 6 months now and am definitely not getting my money's worth at the moment).
Bikeshare is just great though. I already have a bicycle (hence, the bike rental locker), but I usually use that for regular commuting and going around town. But the bikeshare has been nice for cases where I need flexibility. For example, I will often bike to a bar or party and then take a cab or bus home. The downside is, I almost never have a helmet on when I'm using the bikeshare but I usually stick to protected bike lanes or quiet side streets so it's fine.
One Medical is a great sort of boutique physician network. They integrate a lot of technology into their practice that make things easier and more convenient. My doctor has "online office hours" where he basically just texts with patients on minor questions that are too basic to go in for. I can schedule my own appointments through their app instead of calling through reception. And they handle dealing with my health insurer for me on a lot of things. Granted, most of these perks would be standard or obviated by having a civilized healthcare system. But I live in the United States where our healthcare and health insurance systems are absolute dumpster fires. So the $200 annual fee to have a decent doctor who is trying to make my life easier and not deal with my nickel-and-diming insurance company is well worth it.
Things I plan on getting soon(ish)
Once I get my house and stuff in order I plan to set up a NAS and have it backup to a cloud backup service like Backblaze, but I still need to get around to doing that.
I might need some kind of car sharing service. I've been car free for almost 7 or 8 years now, and have been fine relying on buses, trains, bikes, bikeshare, and ride-share for getting around. On the rare occasions where I've needed a vehicle I've either borrowed or rented one. But now that I have a dog, I feel like it will just make things way more convenient to do a car-share like Zipcar, Car2Go, or Free2Move. I look forward to the day when such services are integrated into citywide transit apps that let you seamless mix transportation modes from booking cabs to renting cars to taking the bus.
Things I'm debating getting:
My own email service instead of free tier Gmail. I just can't make myself pull the trigger on it honestly.
Password manager. I currently use the free tier of LastPass and I haven't really felt like anything is missing that premium would get me. I do wish it would sync better with applications on mobile, but the premium doesn't do that great either. It also conflicts a bit with the Safari password manager on my Mac, but again premium is bad at that too. I'm fully prepared to pay for one of these when it comes down to it, but so far I haven't seen a need to.
Global Entry. This is a no-brainer, my credit card even covers it. I've just been too lazy to do the paperwork.
Get a domain name and set up a redirect so that emails land in your Gmail inbox. This way you get your emails at your own domain without having to go through with a transition to gsuite or fastmail. It's easy and makes for an excellent transition period.
As for password managers, I recommend 1password over LastPass. They have a free trial, give it a shot.
Not a website, but I'm a many years long user of the MediaHuman YouTube to MP3 converter. I'm mostly into VGM and chiptune music and so Spotify and the like doesn't really do anything for me, so YouTube's where I get most of my music. It's the only converter I've found to date that can efficiently download playlists with dozens or hundreds of items in them at full quality, get the album art for every video, automatically add the appropriate tags for date downloaded, position in the playlist, and creator, and bundles them all into convenient folders I can just copy and paste into my music folder and my devices, all automatically. Just copy and paste the URL. I'm sure I could replicate it if I tried, but for $10 a year, I've found it to be well worth the cost for the time it saves and how much use I get out of it.
I'm subscribed to a local Aussie streaming service called Stan. I've found this to be worth the cost. My housemate is subscribed to Netflix, and I've found their Australian catalogue to be rather limited and of little interest to me.
I've been subscribed to the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper/website for ages. That's very worth it - not only in terms of me getting access to the news every day, but also in broader terms of supporting independent quality journalism.
I started subscribing to Spotify some months back, in order to create a particular type of playlist because all the local radio stations which played that type of music have, one by one, changed their formats. I use this pretty much every day, so I suppose it's worth the cost.
I find Spotify to be incredibly worth it for their discover weekly playlists alone. I'm always looking for new music but it's pretty hard to just dive into a random band while disregarding how similar it may or may not be to my tastes. Spotify helps keep it to what I listen to primarily while also throwing stuff in that breaks the mold a tad. It's been very helpful.
Now if only they could unfuck their godawful mobile app.
For me, it's the exact opposite! I want oldies. Classic, known, easy, comfortable... golden oldies.
Hey, nothing wrong with that! At the end of the day, I like to settle down with some of my classics, too
The idea of getting rid of gas and electricity and going pure solar is an interesting one, but I'm not sure it's for me.
I do a lot of cooking and baking and I've never been very impressed with electric stoves/ovens. They might talk big, but the stove is too restrictive in terms of what pans you can cook with, and the bake quality of the oven is lower.
I'd be interested to hear what people have to say about the pros and cons of switching to all electric though. I personally don't know much about switching to electric central heat for instance.
There is more to electric than induction.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they prefer coil heaters to induction burners before. I have an electric coil now after having used gas in basically every place I've lived in before and I hate it. I've used induction burners a few times and been fine with it.
I still prefer gas, but I think this is mostly just habit and comfort. If I was going to build my own I'd probably go with a nice induction stove these days. It matches (possibly exceeds?) gas for temperature control and the the ease of cleaning and safety advantages more than offset the restrictions on types of cookware for me.
That said, I don't bake so I have no clue what's better for that. I've had both gas and electric ovens and managed to ruin dishes with both.
Sorry, you're right I forgot about normal electric stove tops. I've not tried cooking on them personally, but I've heard they're a lot less responsive compared to gas or induction since it's basically just a heating element. I guess my real problem is I'm just not convinced that electric options are up to par with gas.
Having lived for years with both types (different apartments), and both old and new, while cooking a lot, and have found electric ranges to be awful compared to gas. Slow to respond (can’t quickly reduce to low), handles mid-heat by cycling on and off instead of even heat (terrible for delicate dishes), takes longer to cool (have to move pans somewhere to prevent over cooking), usually lower max output. Glass-top electric (still elements underneath) has the only advantage of being easier to wipe clean with the flat surface. I haven’t found an electric oven that I’ve been impressed with either.
Enough of a difference to be a dealbreaker for me on a place now.
While gas is absolutely the best, there's nothing wrong with good electric stovetops. If you want to go low immediately, you just lift the pan (if you're using a heavy pot it won't be instant with gas either, the baseplate of the pot is effectively its own heat source). If it takes longer than 3-5 seconds for the stovetop to be low, it's not a good one - and yes this is totally possible with electric.
And cycling? I don't even accept that in a microwave any more, if you don't have electric controlled based on the actual electric output you're basically comparing gas to the shittest tier of electric stove.
Perhaps my previous landlord wasn’t as truthful as I thought, or there have been even more recent changes. A claimed “brand new (in 2017) near-top-tier glass top electric range” was still cycling on me.
As for picking up the pan for a quick switch to low, that works if you’re only managing that one thing. Gets more difficult to spare two hands with a more things going and needing attention.
My grandmother's electric stovetop didn't cycle over 2 decades ago, so maybe top tier was the brand? :-P
If you need low faster than 5 seconds, your focus was already on that one pan.
Interesting. Can you link me to a make and model? I’m not finding much searching. GE’s site, for instance, talks about the cycling being normal at temps below high (and sometimes even on high, for safety).
Which VPN?
I'm not the person you're replying to (obviously), but if you're looking to pay for a VPN,
this page has a nice comparison of them.
You could also run your own VPN, hosted by AWS, or other VPS providers, by using this free software: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
God dammit Unblock-Us isn't looking good here...
I have access to netflix and HBO through family or bundled with cable/cell service. I probably would pay for HBO during GoT. Netflix is iffy, as I'll not use it for months at a time and then binge a show in a few days.
I'm considering a VPN (wouldn't trust a free one). And possibly a password manager service (though I think some of the better options are self-hosted there). I'm also considering paying for a server to run various tasks without having to worry about keeping a home server up. Various cron jobs or containers. A kubernetes cluster would be fun to play around with to automate various things...but seems like too much free time that I don't have.
Humble Bundle
Origin Access
I subscribe to both and they've both been well, well worth the money for someone who enjoys all kinds of games. If you're someone who only likes certain types of games, they may not be for you. But I'm someone who buys multiple games a months, with a library in the thousands. For hoarders like me, these have been a godsend. I've actually stopped buying many games I'm interested in because I can be confident they'll show up in one of these two services.
As a Portland Timbers fan who doesn't live in the broadcasting area, I have decided that ESPN plus is well worth the $5 a month. To get a game here locally, I have to go to a bar or a venue and spend a good 30 to $40 on food and drinks to see it. And they play anywhere from four to six games a month.
Besides the ubiquitous and already mentioned, in Philadelphia we have Indego bike share where you can pay $10/month for unlimited bike rides through the many docking stations throughout the city. It’s a life changer never having to worry about the whereabouts and security of my own personal bike.