What online subscriptions do you pay for?
In the corners of Tildes that I read on, I’ve noticed that a lot of us on here subscribe to online services like - Netflix, Kagi, Spotify, Dropbox, Mailbox.org, Patreon, Twitch, Bandcamp, etc.
I, myself, am kind of stingy about subscriptions but lately I’ve been considering subscribing to some online services.
So I’d like to know which online services (like those with monthly and annual fees) have you subscribed to (which tier if applicable) and which ones do you think is worth it and which ones are not?
To get the ball rolling, the only regularly recurring monthly payments I have right now are with Namecheap for the domain and IONOS for my server (the cheapest tier).
I’ve managed to avoid subscribing for entertainment like Disney+ or YouTube Premium or even music streaming platforms. Though I’m considering Deezer for the hifi option.
I’ve at some point subscribed to Patreon, Bandcamp and Twitch for artists I really liked.
And I’m currently looking into productivity apps that might be worth it to me.
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PS: It’s my first time posting and if this post would be better elsewhere, don’t hesitate to move it. Thank you!
I have no subscriptions at all. My local library has great books, I don’t own a TV, I watch YouTube here and there on my phone, and I sail the seas for all my music.
It’s probably a boring life for a lot of people, but I just smile when I invest 45% of my income.
The creators who produce the music you pirate wouldn’t smile if they read this, though.
I was a touring musician for years, have a bachelors and masters degree in music, and know the recording industry well. I spend around several hundred a month on concerts, merch, and physical media. I even upload my own music directly to large private music trackers; I want my music to be pirated. Yes it’s illegal; but I do not think it’s immoral.
Hear hear. The artists see so little on streaming that unless a label is holding them back, I bet that plenty do what you do.
It's not the 90s anymore.
Yep. Money is not made through streaming, and it’s only slightly better in physical sales/digital downloads. Your best bet is merch, social media, radio/tv/movie licensing and live shows.
As a small indie musician, I'd actually be really offended if anybody pirated my music.
I'd send you a .WAV file for free if you just asked lmao.
In all seriousness, I don't make anything by comparison to an actual job off of my music. It's my hobby, and it's one I'm so glad I have, but I'd rather have people listening to it than paying for it. I'd love to make money off of it, too, don't get me wrong - but I don't expect to. If somebody wants to hear it and doesn't want to pay, I would seriously send them the music myself just because they're interested.
That being said, I would be more upset if it was used for a large scale project, like a game, without some form of agreement between myself and that creator. Listening to my music and using it for your own profit are two totally different things though so that hardly applies in this case.
That’s my thoughts as well. My way of “giving it away” is uploading it to private music trackers.
I'm also a big supporter of the backup and archival aspect of this. I think we need to continue to archive content online because it's so easy for stuff like this to just disappear and never be recovered. I saw this thread a couple weeks ago on here about old websites that have been lost to time.
Torrenting and trackers are such a great way to back stuff up, and there's so many points of redundancy.
They also wouldn't smile if you told them you listen to them on Spotify.
Oueue "you wouldn't steal a DVD".
Hell yeah. I do have two subscriptions but save 35-40% of my income. I also like owning my books so while I do buy them, I usually buy used ($3-$5 per book). I love my boring life!
Looking back, I admit I have way more subscriptions than I should have lol.
Ones I find absolutely worth it:
Namecheap domain (12$/y). See below.
Simplelogin (30€/y). Basically gives me unlimited email aliases on the go, which when paired with a custom domain and the catch all option means I can literally write service@mydomain.com when signing up to a website and that address will be automatically created for me and start receiving mail. It's honestly such peace of mind having a dedicated email for every website.
Purelymail (10€/y) My chosen email host after someone on tildes recommended it. This is where I point all my simplelogin aliases to. But really any paid email host is likely better and more worth it than a Gmail account.
Services I find useful but aren't must haves for most people:
Amazon prime (50€/y). Mostly for the free shipping and the free twitch prime. I don't watch prime video at all but my parents both use my account for it so it's a win win.
Bitwarden (10€/y) I pay to support the development and so I can use my yubikey to unlock my vault. Plus it's super cheap. I don't think it's a must by any means though.
Carrd (20€/y) It's a simple but handy website builder. I use it to host my portfolio with my domain basically.
Real debrid (30€/y). I download a LOT of files from those hosts with limited download speeds and daily limits, and this is a great way to bypass all those restrictions for cheap. Also use it with stremio so I don't have to deal with slow torrents.
Completely superfluous stuff:
Playstation Plus Ultimate (120€/y). Got it on sale when I bought my PS5 so I could try out new gen games. Haven't used it as much as I thought I would but still got some fun out of it as well as discounts. Definitely won't renew it after the announced price hike though.
Nintendo Switch Online (35€/y*) with the expansion pack. I'm in a "family" plan with 7 other friends and we split the bill. It's dirt cheap for what it offers.
YouTube premium (8.99€/m). I used to use modded apps and whatnot to remove ads but I cant be bothered with it anymore. Plus I use YouTube music which is included in this premium sub.
Google One 200GB (20€/y) Got it when I bought a pixel so I could backup everything in original quality.
Several youtube memberships and twitch subscriptions. I like supporting creators I watch a lot.
Are you sure you're still paying only 50€/y? Amazon has been hiking rates for the last few years, a quick search says it's 90€/y now and even in the US it's $140/y now.
Yes, that's what I paid a couple months ago. It actually was 36 a year a couple years ago but they increased it last year to 50. It all depends on what Amazon you use. I use the Spanish Amazon.
They'll probably increase it again in a few years and I'll definitely reconsider it then but for now it's still worth it since I can't get free shipping otherwise.
I think I also started at 50€/y years ago, and it's now 69.90€/y
As fast delivery is a thing of the past and I compare prices between a bunch of amazon locations, I think only Prime Video (which my wife watches a bit) is keeping me subscribed
I read Prime Video is going to start adding advertisements next year and you'll have to pay monthly to remove them. :(
I would be curious to see that happening in Europe. But if they don't want my money, I could live without their service. The fast delivery of Amazon is not what it used to be anyway... And I often place orders on amz NL/DE/UK/BE instead of just FR where I'm 'Prime', shipping if free above 25€ or something similar.
Thanks for sharing, that's definitely a pretty large subscription list! I also have Namecheap domains so I get it. In my case I pointed one of them to my home (homelab server) with DDNS so I have no hosting or otherwise fees (I run Proxmox at home). Saves a bit of money although it costs time for me to maintain it all (as a hobby). But it also means I have free SSL certs for all my internal stuff, which is cool.
The sub I dislike the most is Amazon Prime. Their Prime Video is mediocre at best, and for shipping here in Canada any order >$35 qualifies for free shipping anyways, and half the time it's free 2-day shipping, and about 1/4 of the time it's free 1-day shipping. So I really never see the value in it, especially since Amazon has become an AliExpress knock-off with crappy goods from China. I miss the old Amazon. /rant
Nintendo is so funny. Their online infrastructure lags behind the competition but it's certainly priced accordingly. I also share a family subscription with some gaming friends. The one who owns the 'parent' account actually just hit us all up on Discord as it was time to renew and we all owed him $3-$4 or whatever it is a year.
This is what we do too. My husband is the family account holder, and it's so much nicer to just have a large family account than to have individual accounts.
A little late but Fastmail can combine simplelogin and purelymail, especially if used in conjunction with 1Password (password management). For example, let’s say my fastmail email is myfastmail@mydomain.tld.
When I subscribe to tildes (as an example), I can either just enter tildes@myfastmail.mydomain.tld or use fastmail or the 1Password integration to generate random.email123@fastmail.com.
With the former, I just use any email in that format with no hassle (other than setting up a rule that <anything>@myfastmail.mydomain.tld goes to my inbox) and it’s super easy to track whatever is emailing that address and later go into fastmail to block if necessary.
With the latter, the 1Password integration just generates it for me (or I manually generate it through fastmail) and I can still block it through fastmail pretty easy, but tying it to where it came from means searching for that generated email in my 1Password for that email to identify what site I generated it for.
Tying my aliases to my email host is something I specifically don't want because if ever want to move email hosts it will be a pain to move all those aliases over. With simplelogin I can just point to my new host with the click of a button. I prefer this for future proofing so I'm never tied down to a single email service.
I am a fellow Purelymail user and if I understand your use case correctly, you do not need SimpleLogin.
Purelymail has unlimited catch-all routing.
E.g., my primary email address is firstname@lastname.net. And since I have catch-all routing enabled, emails sent to netflix@lastname.net, spotify@lastname.net, nytimes@lastname.net, etc. all get routed to firstname@lastname.net. I can make these aliases up on the fly and Purelymail will route them to my primary email address.
I'm aware but this is something I specifically don't want. See this comment.
Wow, it's really easy for subscriptions like that to just get away from you.
I'm not sure if you're interested in doing something like this, but you can use a VPN to Turkey and subscribe to YouTube premium that way. It comes to 59.99TRY/month for a family plan (6 people total). You could either share this with your actual family or sell spots to your friends. Whether you want to turn a profit from it is up to you.
The problem with this is that it ruins it for everyone. Sure, people from wealthier countries can get super cheap games / YT / whatever this way. But once enough people do it, Nintendo/Steam/Google notices and drops the cheaper pricing, effectively locking the country (Turkey, Argentina, etc) out of the service. If you can't pay then pirate, but don't ruin it for people who literally can't afford it.
Entertainment stuff
My general strategy is to pay for things that let me avoid ads and DRM. I won't pay for a service unless there is an ad free option.
Tech Stuff
After all the discussion here, I'm looking at adding Kagi once I can work out the details around implementing it.
Podcasts/Substack/Patreon
Other stuff
Kagi for search, fastmail, and Deezer for music. Waiting for a better alternative to the latter though, not a fan of the recommendation engine. Monthly? Not much else though.
Prepping for a cycling tour so "ridewithgps" or something like that as well. Using it to simplify route planning. I think it has a monthly fee.
Ah, I also pay yearly for di.fm. Prob won't renew that though.
Nexusmods when I want to download a bunch of mods. It charges monthly but I immediately unsubscribe after using it for an hour.
Edit: and ye' old Mullvad. I'm still butthurt about the lack of port forwarding but haven't moved off of it yet. It works well for my phone.
It used to be whatever I couldn't "score" for free but lately I can't be bothered. "Just pay the damn $10 and add it to the pile" is my new motto.
Its just as well, I suppose
I mean, once you have the disaposable income it's a lot more convenient to just pay.
Not just that but I'm much more inclined to financially wanna reward and incentivize good behavior on the part of companies like building in data portabillity, integrating changes in consumer expectations that their data won't be packaged and exploited and used against their interests, compelling design and UI, etc.
I want to reward the good and ignore the bad companies but also shit-talk them mercilessly and point out their absurdity.
That's why Reddit no longer gets my attention or value, which I have exported to Tildes and friends.
I've gotten much less stingy about subscription services (particular software) as I've gotten older. Most of the software I pay for ends up being less than the cost of a beer a month, or a night out per year, which is more than worth it for software I get daily value out of (plus I like supporting software I value where I can).
These are all my currently-active subscriptions (yearly pricing divided):
Not sure if you’re aware of it, but Nitro Basic for $3/month has most of the features of the old Classic plan (and a few new features). Once they got rid of discriminators, I downgraded since that was the only big feature left that was missing from basic.
Oh nice, thanks for the heads up. I’ll take a look, I haven’t evaluated my subscription in a while and I think the shared emoji are all I care about at this point.
Not sure what platform you are (Apple, Google, etc) but if you're into YNAB and also Apple, I would advise a very hidden gem called MoneyStats. Its a little more effort to get setup but it is everything Kualto and Dollarbird should have been but you get to keep it and the dev is super pro.
Please look it up, it is an incredible app you buy once (for all devices iPhone/iPad/Mac) with all the goodies and your data is technically portable rather than centrally controlled and limited.
Its only $10 I belive for everything so def check it out if any of this resonates. Its been lifechanging and preserving for me in my disorganization and financial chaos.
I am in the Apple ecosystem–I'll take a look!
Bit of a small learning curve but its f'in worth it + incredible. I would be lost without it, I need forecasting for my finance program and for it to be built on and around it
How much manual intervention does it need? Aside from importing an updated csv once per month, does it automatically categorize expenses by description (within some error) after the initial set up? I just don’t want to switch and have to spend days annotating the last few years of transactions.
Once you get everything setup you can have stuff automatically and formulaicially recurr and clear itself automatically to mirror actual pre-payments or direct deposit and auotpay of bills.
The only manual aspect is you would either want to add your transactions each day or at least readjust the cleared balance by dictating what the accounts' most recent value/sum are in terms of the most recent available info on it.
It doesn't connect to your bank account thru Stripe of whatever but that's usually an expensive and privacy invasive service anyways and I feel like it doesn't force you to be as on yop of everything as a quick daily check and adjustment does in MoneyStats 💸💸💸
A daily adjustment doesn’t cut it for me, not worth the work. I’m hoping for at least a monthly upload of a csv downloaded from my bank, and then automatic categorization even of new merchants (within error).
You can add/merge CSVs in, like bank records, I believe. I did it once when I was first putting evrerything in 🤠
If you have Nitro only for that, can't you use something like NQN bot?
Not familiar with NQN bot! I’ll have a look, thanks.
Depending on how advanced you are Stronglifts 5x5 is generally considered an awful lifting program. Biggest issues are:
I highly recommend Perseus. Similar UI to SL5x5. But no smartwatch support I think.
I am definitely not advanced. But good to know if/when I get there!
5x5 is a beginner level workout anyway. It's not about endless progression but something to get you started. I think the dude that owns it is fairly upfront about that.
Then again, it used to be free.
Yeah I know. But usually people starting 5x5 don't really understand exactly what "beginner" workout means. It's a simple word for something that is actually fairly complicated, and the app doesn't teach you how or when to progress to an intermediate workout. It will basically just keep adding 5-10kg per lift per workout forever, until you fail, at which point it just says to decrease the weight, or switch to a 5x3 rep scheme (if I recall correctly), and obviously there are better ways of handling plateaus (not mentioned anywhere in the app or on the website).
As a counter example, GZCLP is a much more well rounded beginner program with a better spread of lifts, and a better progression.
Things I would define as Necessary outside of job loss and being destitute:
Things that are Not Necessary but that I like having:
I also have grandfathered lifetime premium accounts for Nexus Mods and Plex.
I know a lot of you will prefer piracy to the things like the video streaming, but my job is high trust infosec and getting caught pirating is the kind of thing that can actually get you fired and blacklisted, so I've gone clean on piracy since then - if I can't get it on a service I'm willing to pay for, I just abstain.
I have moved further and further away from piracy as streaming services have gotten better. I generally force myself to only pay for one at a time although we are currently bumming most streaming services from my sister-in-law.
I still hate Sports streaming. It's over priced for what is offered and the apps still tend to be pretty bad. The fact that blackouts are still a thing and still affect streaming is got to be the worst thing about sports after betting.
On a side note, what is high trust InfoSec? Like, working for the government?
In my case, yes, government, but there are other areas that are similar - anything in the financial sector for example. I have a CISSP certification as well, and it's grounds for having the certification stripped.
I use Fastmail for email hosting - $50/year
I have a few custom domains for web and email hosting - this is typically $12/year for the domain registration plus 50 cents/month to AWS for the DNS hosting
I run a cloud VM on Vultr for some self-hosted stuff - $12/month
I have some data backed up to Backblaze B2 - currently $6/month
I pay for a Pocket Casts subscription, which allows me to have podcast playback synced between my phone and desktop. I forgot the exact price of this and went to look it up - I originally paid $10/year, at some point it increased to $15/year, which is what I'm currently paying. apparently new plans cost $40/year but I'm grandfathered in to the old pricing. it's useful but not that useful, I would cancel my subscription if they tried to charge me that much.
I pay $5/year for a Shadow Weather subscription. weather apps on mobile are notoriously shitty - because they inherently run constantly in the background and know your location, it is very easy for them to collect user data. I don't mind paying this because I want to encourage weather apps with less shitty business models, and to avoid seeing ads every time I look at the weather on my phone.
I pay $10/year for Bitwarden, because the free plans limit don't support FIDO2 MFA. I could self-host this as Vaultwarden on my Vultr VM but I don't like having that many eggs in one basket.
my biggest expense by far in this category is YouTube TV, at $75/month. I generally keep it active only during handegg (American football) season and pause the subscription during the rest of the year.
Something worth considering for a weather app is if your government does environmental data. In Canada, Environment Canada does weather forecasts for all cities and towns and it is ad free and really thorough
yeah, the weather data is free in the US as well, from the National Weather Service.
I think this is why there's such a proliferation of shitty weather apps - you can use the National Weather Service for the upstream data and build your own UI around it, so it takes very little effort to build an app that will have permissions to run in the background and access the user's location, and if you can get people to install it you have a data-harvesting gold mine. (see Many temptations of an open-source browser extension developer for a similar story of how lucrative this data-gathering can be)
Stop Using Third-Party Weather Apps: Time and time again, weather apps—including The Weather Channel, Accuweather, and WeatherBug—have shown that they share your location data.
Handegg is brilliant. I live in a town with a big NFL team, so using that is going to be fun.
A good number of them:
I also leech off of some of my family's entertainment subscriptions, but I'm working on getting into some private trackers and just running Jellyfin at home, then sharing that back with the family once I get the network secured.
More than I need, but fortunate enough to be in a place where I can afford to pay for some niceties. If I'm watching a lot of Youtube I'll pick up a Premium subscription for a month and cancel. Usually I'll get my Youtube fix and move on to other content after the subscription is over (I typically do this when I'm home sick or something).
Surprised to see Namecheap brought up so frequently. I rolled over everything to Porkbun once Namecheap started actively promoting cryptocurrency and NFTs (looks like they're still promoting stuff). I'm much happier with Porkbun's interface, pricing, and support anyway
When you transferred your domains, did you have to manually migrate over the DNS, or does Porkbun handle that for you? I would like to transfer, but I'm scared of DNS. 😅
If I recall correctly, it was all done automatically.
I believe it depends on what nameservers you're using. They have a support doc to address this concern: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/89-how-to-transfer-a-domain-to-porkbun-with-no-downtime
These may or may not count as "online", but other tech-related subscriptions:
I don't currently pay for, but am considering:
One thing I notice is that everything I'm currently paying for are commodity services I could port to a different provider if I so chose. Another is that, except for B2 (which costs <$1/month), everything is invoiced annually or less frequently (my domains are registered in ten-year increments, for example). Streaming media subscriptions are right out; aside from vigorous philosophical objections to the model, they are generally not compatible with free software, and I'm obviously not going to pay for something I can't actually use. Media comes in physical form from the local library, which is an approach I highly recommend.
I don't use it, but what's wrong with GoDaddy?
Oh, boy, where to begin. Their founder and former CEO is also a piece of work. And they have a well-earned reputation for being somewhere between borderline and actually abusive to their customers.
Ironically, there's no service they offer that's not commodified, so the main thing keeping them in business is inertia and a bloated marketing budget.
I haven’t used them in a long time. I left because they made it so ridiculously hard to renew a domain without sneaking in other garbage I didn’t want to pay for. I also found their interface really hard to navigate.
What I pay for now:
What I am considering:
What I used to pay for and would consider again:
What I have trialed and decided against:
So, so many.
Entertainment: YouTube Premium and Disney+, and then I get Apple Music and Apple TV+ through Apple One Premiere. Ah and XBox Gamepass. Occasional others to binge watch something specific, or some TV channels to catch Champions League when it starts to heat up (sickeningly expensive). Some Patreons and YouTube memberships for creators I follow.
Digital Utility: Proton for VPN, Mail and hopefully soon Drive, Apple One Premiere (iCloud), Synology C2 Backup, NextDNS, Windows Home (Office), some domains but paid on 10 year plans.
Apps and Services: Kagi Search, HealthFit, Strava, Infuse.
Professional Exploration: MidJourney, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT Plus.
I've got a few subscriptions, mostly entertainment based.
Netflix - I rarely watch much on it now as I find the content to be pretty poor but my daughter loves the kids stuff so it stays.
Amazon Prime - I don't mind the range of content on Amazon Prime and the free next-day or sometimes same-day delivery is a bonus which I share with my partner so we definitely get our moneys worth.
Spotify - I use Spotify all the time, even with the recent price hike I get my moneys worth 10 times over, I listen to music and podcasts on it constantly. I love music and I used to be a big hi-fi nerd but as I've gotten older and priorities have shifted and my hearings gone to pot I've settled into being very happy with Spotify.
Patreon - I'm subscribed to a few D&D content creators, a couple of YouTubers and even Tildes. It's not much a month, maybe £12 or so for all of my subscriptions.
The Forge - A hosting solution for Foundry VTT, a TTRPG virtual tabletop system. I use it for D&D 5e at the moment but have also used it for Call of Cthulhu and Cyberpunk in the past.
Pact Coffee - I get freshly roasted ground coffee packed and shipped to my house every month, they send me a mix of fairly standard and interesting coffees to shake things up and I let them know what I thought of it so they know what to send me in future.
Private Eye - A satirical and current affairs news magazine that's legendary in the UK. Generally very funny and there's some great journalism done as well. Very cheap annual subscription considering you get a magazine every fortnight.
I’ll drop Duolingo in favour of buying a dedicated language learning course with a book and mp3s next year though. Like so many things I’m tempted to sign up for, I just don’t get time to use them enough to justify the cost.
Zoho Bookings is an exception though. It helps simplify making appointments enough to be worth the cost.
I rotate my streaming subs. Currently:
Considering Kagi.
I like going through my list every couple of months just to keep it in mind (I don't exactly keep a strict budget in general)
In my day to day, my family and I share entertainment subscriptions, though nowadays since I'm currently the only one working I've just taken up the brunt of it:
YouTube Premium (Family) and Netflix are paid for by my dad, and we share the logins.
I pay for:
AppleTv+ ($8/mo) - Mostly to watch my own shows plus I think their offerings currently are just better. No Android apps sadly and we're mostly an Android family
HBOMax ($16/mo) - Always paid for this, might have to cancel it soon since the quality has dropped off a cliff, but they have all the Ghibli movies too which my mom loves
Hulu/Disney+ ($2/mo) - Every year around Thanksgiving they always have a $2/mo offering that keeps extending lol
Amazon Prime ($160/yr) - I usually order from them a lot, but I've been switching to Target recently, probably gonna not renew but I do use the subscribe and save for a bunch of lifestyle things that Target doesn't carry sadly + Twitch Prime is usually good for the one or two streamers I watch every once in a while
DropoutTv ($5/mo) - don't really have a justification for this, i just like it lol
Spotify Family ($16/mo) - Shared with 6 people, they just pay me all at once and I just pay monthly
Duolingo Yearly ($80/year) - Shared with a friend, not really too into it though, got a LingoDeer lifetime recently and might switch to that once my year is up (Trying to learn Japanese and Korean!)
Xbox Gamepass ($10/mo) - A lot of value!
Humble Bundle ($12/mo) - Not as much value but I generally get some sales every once in a while + some interesting games to send to some of my more broke friends lol
AMC A*List ($25/mo) - Does this count as online? I love the movie theatre experience so I try to get to the theatre at least once or twice a month, makes it worth it at 2 movies
VPN - I used Mozilla and paid for a year, but it's running out so I'm thinking of switching to Mulvald when it goes through!
I used to use Fitbit+ before my Charge 5 broke and I'll probably restart it whenever I upgrade over to the new Pixel watch hopefully next month.
Looking at it laid out it's mostly just entertainment tbh. I can probably cut some but honestly I use everything at least once or twice and it's a bit of a hassle to resub when I can.
Mozzila's VPN is Mullvad, just more expensive (slightly).
is it?? That's disappointing because I feel like Mozilla VPN is really not great. I don't even think any of the media things I pay for are fooled by the VPN
Yes. I was looking for a new vpn service, saw how cheap Mozilla's was, clicked to see the server list and got redirected to Mullvad. They aren't hiding it though:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1324003
I massively prefer Astrill, but their pricing is absurd.
Sighhhh time to do more research on which VPN to use then haha. I remember seeing that Mozilla's was a bit IP leaky too which makes me less confident in Mullvad's now... I feel like none of the VPN solutions I've found does the streaming services properly while also being not collecting data
Amazon’s subscribe and save is a mixed bag in my experience. Make sure to keep a very close eye on what you are paying because they will adjust the price of items constantly. Have been burned when they adjust the price way up and makes any discount worse than just buying it normally at a store.
for what it's worth there appears to be an android app for ATV+ but the reviews seem to suggest it's pretty terrible lol
it's crazy that this never came up on my search before, i wonder if the + was throwing it off lol. Thanks for the help!
Apple TV only, and I was never able to make it work on unsupported devices.
Currently I personally only pay for the following four though my parents also pay for a few.
-- Youtube Premium ($14/mo): Honestly this price hurts but I use YouTube the most out of any site I visit so it's nice not having ads and nice feeling like I support the channels I watch. I also pay for it because I'm one of the 4 YouTube Music users on Earth and its recommendation algorithm works best for me out of the major music streaming services.
-- Private Internet Access (~$2.22/mo, paid $80/3 years): A nice general purpose VPN. Bought it at the height of my piracy streak so it was a necessity but now that I've gotten most of what I want to watch, I don't use it as much anymore. Still nice for the moments where I peruse various torrent sites. I think about just downloading all the music I listen to so I can ditch YT Premium but the discovery that streaming services bring is hard to give up.
-- Hulu ($2/mo): Got a student discount on this which brought it down to $2/mo but I don't know when it'll run out. Bought it originally on a $1/mo for 12 month deal they had for Black Friday years ago and then went a while without Hulu. I subscribed again towards the end of the pandemic so I could watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and a few other shows. I don't use Hulu as much anymore, mainly because I downloaded the shows I want to watch, but my grandma and mom both watch their Indian and Korean TV shows on it so I keep it around.
-- Discord Nitro Classic ($5/mo): I use discord primarily with my friends and share my emotes across a handful of servers. Might give this one up soon as I've found ways to sorta send emotes from other servers without needing Nitro. This workaround isn't as clean as Nitro but its free.
My parents pay for both Apple One and Google One Family Plans. My family is mainly all Apple (I also recently just switched into Apple) but we use a fair number of Google services so they pay for both. We also have
HBOMax through our AT&T internet. No idea if that's an extra fee on top of our internet, I just know that it was a complementary thing when HBO Max first launched. We also have Amazon Prime as the faster/cheaper shipping is super valuable.It lasts as long as you have a valid .edu email address.
Ah interesting, I assumed it'd run out after a set time period like 4 years. Appreciate the info!
Currently paying for:
So quite a few, but compared to my other expenses, it's not a big deal, and I get a lot of value out of them.
What does Spotify offer over YouTube music to be worth paying for it as well?
I just don't like youtube music tbh. No desktop app, web app was very minimal, etc. I totally could drop spotify if I wanted to save money, but they don't really cost that much so eh.
Streaming: Netflix & Disney. Keeps both kids happy. Also Apple Music.
Cloud storage: Google & Apple at a mid tier. Also $0.14/mo in AWS Glacier costs (need to remember to backup some more photos at some point)
Content: NPR+, AdmiralCloudberg, Dan Carlin, War on the Rocks. Marketplace in the past, can’t remember if it’s still current.
Hosting, etc: Nixihost and Hover for server and domains, and some mailboxes through hover.
Amazon Prime - But my spending there has greatly diminished, I forget about the Twitch prime more often than I remember, their streaming sucks, the kindles are becoming less and less reliable, and it's honestly all gone downhill. I renewed it last year because the cashback on the Prime card more than paid for the subscription, but I'm doubting it'll do so this year so when renewal comes and cancel the card as well.
Google One - Full size photo backup mostly.
Tildes - Because I like this place and most of y'all, not that it's really a "subscription" and more a monthly donation.
Patreon - Because there are other people I like.
Nebula - I support what they're doing and the cost balances well with how much I watch there.
Misc print and online magazines and newspapers.
Current subscriptions:
Subscriptions I dropped:
Subscriptions I am considering:
When is the last time you used YouTube Music? They still have videos, but they’ve really made it more supplemental than mixed in with the music.
Hi. Getting back to you regarding YouTube Music. I gave it a try again, using it for 3 days. These are my thoughts:
I haven't decided on how to proceed. I'd love to save $120/yr, but I'll have to spend some effort moving everything to YTM and hope that Google doesn't screw things up.
@Jedi another update.
Time-synced lyrics don't work with Chromecast, when casting the music to a Google Mini Speaker. Ughhhhh.
It has been a while, I admit.
I'll give it a try again and get back to you.
In the meantime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37659482 ..
Media: Spotify + Hulu (it's like a bundle deal where Hulu is essentially free), Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Videos, a single YouTube channel I follow, New York Times, and Washington Post, F1TV Pro. Oh and a monthly donation to Tildes!
Games: Eve Online, Final Fantasy XIV; both are MMOs. I think I still have Nintendo Switch Online? I was paying for Planetside 2 for several years, but finally stopped this year, since I barely play anymore.
Services: Amazon Prime, Discord Nitro, a domain at Namecheap, web hosting at Dreamhost, Carrot weather app, TP Link Kasa (for a home camera), Bitwarden.
Most of these are monthly, but some like Namecheap, Amazon, Carrot, Bitwarden, F1TV, and TP Link Kasa are annual. And Amazon Prime and F1TV are shared among family members, so we rotate on payment.
PlanetSide really needs a reboot, such a good franchise.
We miraculously got Planetside 2. Maybe we'll get Planetside 3 some day.
That said, it can't be by Daybreak/Rogue Planet who makes it. They need to sell or license the IP off to someone else. Not to say that they haven't done an OK job with it. They've largely had limited resources the majority of the time; I think at one point there were rumors the team was down to like 3 people. And I've spent a few thousand hours in the game; my main alone has just under 3000hrs.
But a studio or team that can really devote resources and effort to a PS3 would be something.
Yeah, someday hopefully there will be a PS3. After Daybreak shenanigans and the obvious lack of continued investment in the game I would hope someone else would be allowed access to the IP. I also had a silly amount of thousands of hours in the game.
I am kind of hoping gaming is like fashion amd repeats cycles. The BR cycle is finally starting to cooldown, and it seems like extraction shooters will be the next fad....Perhaps after that MMOFPSes are next? I would love planetside + mechs in a new MMOFPS.
A handful of Twitch streamers, as that's a primary source of entertainment for me on 6mo cycles.
Microsoft 365 for OneDrive and Office access. I see OneDrive as worth it, and Office as a perk.
Spotify, because I like having all of that music at my fingertips. I need to do more to financially support artists however.
Amazon Prime for shipping and Prime Video, which also ties into Twitch watch parties.
Microsoft Azure, I have $.30 on Azure Frontdoor per month for my unfinished personal site hosted as a Static Webpage.
Google Domains (bought by somebody else iirc) for my personal site, which I haven't finished yet. My name as a .com domain was $10/yr, so I did it.
I pay for Contrapoints on patreon.com and also pay for VPN.
I don't currently subscribe to any streaming services (I just cancelled the one service I was subscribed to). I do, however, contribute some money towards my housemate's subscription to a few streaming services, so we can share them. He subscribes to lots of streaming services, and I pay my bit for the ones I use.
I subscribe to Spotify.
I pay a regular Patreon contribution to Tildes.
I subscribe to a local newspaper's website.
I hire/lease/whatever a custom internet domain and subscribe to an associated email service (partly to keep my emails out of Google's grubby paws; even though I'm required to have a gmail account to use my Android phone, I don't give that gmail address to anyone).
And... that's about it.
One I've consistently kept is YouTube premium/music. My kids love YouTube, and I hate them watching ads so it's well worth it for me. Most other entertainment subscriptions I'll grab for a show or two then stop again.
Media : Amazon Prime 69.9€/y (video), Youtube Premium Family 17.99€/m, Nebula/Curiosity Stream bundle $19.99/y, acces to a digital edition of a national newspaper is included for free with my ISP subscription (worth 7.99€/m)
Home services/automation : Ring doorbell (39.99€/y) , Kami cloud (security cameras, 54€/y), IFTTT ($1.99/m)
Network : Dyn.com (~35€/y), Cloudflare registrar (~20/y), Bitwarden (10€/y)
Patreon : 10-15€/month on Youtube creators.
All that gives a total of roughly 700€/y or 60€/month, Youtube Premium familfy being the most expensive but totally worth it to get red of advertisement for the whole family.
Spotify
Protonmail (And the wider suite)
A couple of guys on Patreon
... I'm rather averse to most forms of television and movie streaming simply because of the availability ups and downs of licencing. I'd rather sail the seven seas.
Proton Ultimate.
FFXIV.
Currently have an Apple TV+ Sub for free but I don’t use it, so will cancel it once it expires.
I should probably keep better track of what I pay for, but...
For a while now
Todoist
Fastmail
Raindrop.io
Emby
HomeAssistant
Google Storage
OsmAnd
OpenAI API
Spotify
Telegram Premium
Discord
Bitwarden
HumbleBundle
Vultr
Recently
Fantastical
Kagi
iCloud
Obsidian Sync
(eval) Apple Music
This is what I currently have:
Monthly Subscriptions:
Annual Subscriptions:
For nearly all of my life I've been hyper-frugal and refused to shell out for any recurring costs that were not absolutely required for meeting basic needs (rent, food, phone / internet).
Once and a while I'll buy a month of Amazon Prime if I critically need fast shipping, but I always cancel it before renewal.
I have recently found an author I greatly enjoy and decided to subscribe to their Patreon: Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. I adore the story and am glad that the author is able to earn a generous full-time income from their labors - it also reassures me that they have strong incentive to continue their fiction through to the end. This is literally the one and only not-needed-for-basic-life recurring monthly expense I spend on.
I have been strongly tempted to sign up with Nebula though.
I use a few of the ones mentioned already (thankfully some I get from friends for free, like The Athletic, which I'm glad my friend shares with me because they write some good stuff and have ad-free versions of their podcasts). One thing I've not seen mentioned is any form of to-do list app. I use TickTick personally. It's $3/mo, and I enjoy it because it's pretty customizable and reliable. I use reminders a crap ton, and have various lists (shopping list, school assignment list, general to do, things I want to try in Minecraft, etc).
You can use it for free, the subscription just gives you unlimited lists and items in lists, as well as sub items per item. E.g. I have my TBR list on there, and for each series I'll go in and list out each individual work, and when I check those off it checks off the series). I liked it over Todoist because you can actually use it to set up reminders with alarms in the free version, whereas it's paywalled in Todoist. It's also more powerful than other alternatives, like Microsoft To-Do, Google Tasks and etc.
I've also recently been using Optery to try and clean up my Internet presence a bit and be more conscious of my own privacy.
google family
netflix
vlc remote $4.99/y
a cloud guru $16/m
There are three main ones :
OVHcloud to play with a few VPS (it depends but generally less than 20€/month).
Music : Spotify (with family subscription : 2,5€/month).
Gaming : Runescape (10€/month).
No streaming services (with overseerr and plex). No Saas, websites or apps subscriptions, I’m self-hosting all my virtual needs.
Mailbox and Spotify. Then I use some services for running my websites and game servers. Hetzner (VPS) and GoDaddy (domain names).
I oay 5$/month tier on Floatplane for Linus Tech Tips channels. I pay 1$/month tier as donation to Tildes. I pay 2-3$ (don't know price in dollars) for 100GB Google drive. That's it.
I also pay for my domain, I host my server myself.
EDIT: I ripped all my DVDs and Blu rays and music CDs (all original and I'm still buying new) and I watch/listen to them from my server (running Jellyfin).
Spotify for my tunes and Instacart to deliver groceries because I don't own a vehicle. That's it. No video streaming services like Netflix whatsoever. I used to pay for Discord until my account was hacked and lost; the pathetic attempts at customer 'service' I received ensured I would never pay them another dime again. Just use the free version.
At the moment, Netflix, Spotify, Google Storage and Disney+.
Previously subscribed to Crunchyroll, but I unsubbed for two reasons. The catalog is shit outside of the US & Canada (almost everything is geo blocked including what was previously on FunimationNow), and I refuse to support Funimation as a company.
My mobile subscription includes Spotify premium and HBO Max, so I'm paying for them through that, but really not a lot.
Edit: oh, and I pay for Bitwarden ( not included with mobile subscription)
Like others I rotate streaming services but I do ALWAYS pay for YouTube premium because I personally use it more than TV streaming services.
I was subscribed to some level of GamePass but I cancelled that and I'm going to buy games for Xbox. The only issue currently is that my kids play Minecraft online with friends so I'm considering buying a second steam deck to replace my Xbox One and selling the Xbox.
iCloud for now because I have a bunch of good photos mixed in with my cell phone photos and I don't feel like downloading the entire thing and sorting through it. Plus I need to sort out an off site backup solution to replace that.
Currently I pay for a VPS but I aim to figure out how to self host using an old computer. Currently need to learn how to segment my home network properly so that I feel comfortable with it security wise before I do that.
I used to donate $10 a month to wikipedia but cancelled that last year.
Netflix - yep
Spotify - canceled recently
Viki - canceled few months back
Kagi - on free trial, may end up subbing
TaW podcast - have until end of season
Optus EPL streaming - have until end of season
Aside from some of the common ones (Prime, Max, PSN, Apple One), some that I really like are:
-YouNeedABudget (YNAB $100/yr)
-Kagi Search ($108/yr)
-Private Internet Access VPN ($75/3 years?)
-Fastmail ($50/yr)
-Callsheet ($9/yr) slick looking movie database app
-Short Circuit ($30 lifetime unlock) -chatbot that lets you use use your own OpenAI API key
-Flighty ($45/year) flight tracking app
I’m currently testing AdGuard DNS/NextDNS but not sure which one I’ll subscribe to.
Also some one-time donations to OpenStreetMap, Replicant and some other projects.
What I pay for:
What I don't:
Subs:
Patreon:
I support a couple of content creators this way since views and ad revenue are a joke in most cases. Especially since it helps them make quality content instead of the low effort spam things like youtube encourage.
Reading:
Other:
I give PBS and Wikipedia $100 each a year just because I believe they deserve support.
There could be one or two more of I can't think of off the top of my head but that's the vast majority of it.
Usenet. Its the only one that you need.
I also have some recurring GitHub donations to support some great projects.
My RSS reader YOShInOn uses Superfeedr for ingestion which charges 10 cents per feed per month.
I use Fastmail for my email.
My one streaming service is Peacock right now which I got so I could get more Premier League (UK soccer) games than I can get for free from my NBC affiliate. Turns out it is also good for other international sports that YOShInOn keeps telling me about like the Rugby World Cup. (This spring I had a fight with my RSS reader over whether or not I liked soccer and my RSS reader won)
A few patreons for my history podcasts and yearly bitwarden. I think that's it. I'm consciously trying to get away from SaaS and into just purchasing products. Ideally, I only want to interact with a business once and never hear from them again.