- rsync.net for backup (although I took their lifetime subscription offer so I no longer actively pay them).
- Self-hosting related costs (rented servers and domain names).
- Buttondown for sending out blog updates. (I was generously gifted a lifetime subscription, but had I not been I would likely have paid for it eventually anyway.)
- The Economist for moderately-biased news spanning the entire world.
I also pay for Spotify, though I increasingly doubt whether it is giving me more value than purchasing the music I want directly. I suppose I do it out of convenience rather than economic gain.
This feels like a very HN set of subscriptions...
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Things I don't pay for:
- Excalidraw: I didn't even know that was possible.
- Google Photos: it keeps bugging me to, and I keep intending to exchange it for Immich.
- YouTube: I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but NewPipe and adblocker goes a long way.
- LLMs: I find API credits to be better value.
- VPN: I run OpenVPN on the closet server. That said, I have moved and I don't trust the new home ISP as much so this might change.
- Password manager: KeePassXC and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Notes: Org and Orzly and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Cloud storage: SyncThing and a closet server is sufficient.
Agreed - There certainly are other apps that provide better discovery, but nothing that is as seamlessly integrated to where I'm already listening to music.
YouTube subscription is great but very overpriced. Streaming services are much cheaper and they produce original content. I just can’t justify double the price of Apple TV so I can watch content Google hasn’t produced.
Yeah I begrudgingly paid increase when it went from $19 to $29 NZD a month. My friend in Aus just got an email saying they were putting his up to $39 from $29 a month… it’s not worth that to me. If anything it’s a great excuse to watch less on there.
If you're using a Samsung device then you can use Screen Curtain within Samsung's Good Guardians application on the Galaxy Store, which allows you to play media with the screen turned off.
Agentic stuff is probably the exemption to this because it chews tokens like nobody's business. For average prompting, API is the way to go. I've spent an average of around $7.50/mo between OAI and Claude, and that's using o3 and Opus for most queries.
- Kagi for search and translation.
- rsync.net for backup (although I took their lifetime subscription offer so I no longer actively pay them).
- Self-hosting related costs (rented servers and domain names).
- Buttondown for sending out blog updates. (I was generously gifted a lifetime subscription, but had I not been I would likely have paid for it eventually anyway.)
- The Economist for moderately-biased news spanning the entire world.
I also pay for Spotify, though I increasingly doubt whether it is giving me more value than purchasing the music I want directly. I suppose I do it out of convenience rather than economic gain.
This feels like a very HN set of subscriptions...
-----
Things I don't pay for:
- Excalidraw: I didn't even know that was possible.
- Google Photos: it keeps bugging me to, and I keep intending to exchange it for Immich.
- YouTube: I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but NewPipe and adblocker goes a long way.
- LLMs: I find API credits to be better value.
- VPN: I run OpenVPN on the closet server. That said, I have moved and I don't trust the new home ISP as much so this might change.
- Password manager: KeePassXC and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Notes: Org and Orzly and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Cloud storage: SyncThing and a closet server is sufficient.