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
Everyone’s mum’s only fans for online gaming
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.
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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.
RAID is not a backup, NAS is not a backup. Obviously there is no reason to backup readily available torrents but it doesn’t sound like you’re backing up at all. Self hosting data integrity is a much harder task than implied.
It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.
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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.
Yeah, I don’t have access to dynamic DNS because I’m behind a NAT (ISP gives me a 10.x.x.x address). I can pay for a static IP, but I’d really rather not.
I was hoping there was something like Tailscale where I could forward ports over a VPN and use the VPN host’s IP for my DNS. I can kinda get there with Tailscale’s public DNS, but I can’t use my own (well, I could use a CNAME, but I’d use their certs).
Anyway, it’s a temporary thing since I should be getting a new municipal fiber connection soon.
CGNAT should be illegal.
Yeah, I can set up a VPN pretty easily, it’s just annoying that I need to do it.
Philosophical monthly support:
- Grapheneos
- Eff
- Tor
- Briar
- Molly
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.
- Proton
- Nebula
- Deezer
If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list
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.
- Mullvad
- 1Password
- pCloud
- Kagi
- Real Debrid
- YouTube Premium
- Posteo
- Deezer
- Qobus
- Tidal Hifi
(Yes i listen a lot to music)
How come several music services? Are some artists not on all of them?
That’s right, but it’s also about where I use them. Tidal and Qobuz on my (expensive) system because they got best sound quality. For my iem:s I use Deezer, I like the app and the “flow”. I guess it’s overkill but it’s my hobby.
That’s cool. Until now I’ve been using Qobuz for HD track downloads but will check Tidal next time they’re missing something.
Yes, but know that Tidal doesn’t sell for download.
- Proton
- Bitwarden
- VPN
- Spotify
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.
- Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
- A Domain name provider for my web domain
That’s it. I don’t quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.
Just a VPS. £4/month.
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.
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.
spotify, NextDNS, 1password, lifetime pcloud, Microsoft 365 on annual sales, notesnook. I guess I donate to my mastodon/Lemmy instance and immich development.