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
  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.

    If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.

    • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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…

      • thorbot@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • thorbot@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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).

      • thorbot@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      100% it does. The right music makes the difference between a productive day and a total waste.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • micke@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago
    • Mullvad
    • 1Password
    • pCloud
    • Kagi
    • Real Debrid
    • YouTube Premium
    • Posteo
    • Deezer
    • Qobus
    • Tidal Hifi

    (Yes i listen a lot to music)

      • micke@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          That’s cool. Until now I’ve been using Qobuz for HD track downloads but will check Tidal next time they’re missing something.

  • Clandestine@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago
    • 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.

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago
    1. Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
    2. 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.

  • Pixel@pawb.social
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • jetsetdorito@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    spotify, NextDNS, 1password, lifetime pcloud, Microsoft 365 on annual sales, notesnook. I guess I donate to my mastodon/Lemmy instance and immich development.