What web services do you subscribe to?

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.
What all do you run?

At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.

Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.

Philosophical monthly support:

Grapheneos
Eff
Tor
Briar
Molly

YouTube Premium

Unless you're doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there's Revanced or Grayjay.

Anyway, I pay for Nebula.

Nebula

Do you like it? There's only like 10 creators I watch on YouTube who are there, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to find replacements. If I pay for Nebula, I'd rather ditch YouTube entirely.

And yeah, I use Grayjay and I'm about ready to buy it. I love the new Twitch integration, and some are on Odyssey, so that's cool. The app seems to use a lot more resources than NewPipe, and it's missing a few NewPipe features I really like (seeing playlists is the biggest one), but overall it's pretty good. If it was FOSS I'd buy it today, I'm just hesitating because there's just too many tradeoffs.
- I'm a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.
  
  The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you'd get from them.
  
  But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it's sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators' Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I'd be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula's annual plan, it's just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).
- I've never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that's not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I'll stick with Revanced for now.
Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.
- Good to know!
On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly

That's my issue. I use YT primarily on my Chromecase and mobile.
Firefox + ublock is clunky.
3rd Party apps are a no-go for my Google Account. To much depends on that to get hacked just because I don't like ads.
My justification for the price is, that I pay less for that than for Netflix and I use it daily.
Also Creators get a significantly higher cut per view in comparison to regular viewers. So I don't need to feel bad when I block ads on Desktop and don't sub their patreon.
I mean, it’s something like $7-8 for 6 months via a one-time VPN payment in India or the like. Definitely worth it.
- Nah. Just donate a little to the creators you like and block the ads. Everyone would be better for it except Google.

I really hope ur using chatgpt via api and not their own frontend api is far cheaper and there is a multitude of clients u can use

The one advantage of their front-end is that it's enabled for live internet search. But yeah it's not worth the price difference. I'm hardly getting $2 a month vs. the 20 they charge for the front-end.
- Yeah I been looking for a frontend that can use an agent style preferably written in langchain capable of such things. I just been using Sydney but its been lab optimised to far and Microsoft are fuckers.
How do I use the API? I'd be willing to pay for ChatGPT pro if it was cheaper, especially if it was pay per use instead of pay per month
- I use better chatgpt its a git repo that Github will host for free for you then google opening api and get urself an api key. Its pay per use u get gpt3.5 as well as gpt4. I still use gpt3.5turbo for most things this cos its way cheaper than 4.

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.

Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.

...none. I donate to foss projects monthly though so it's a subscription in spirit but it's not really classified as a subscription

Can you list a few of them?
- Off the top of my head: Lemmy, Lemmee, Signal, Molly, and Jellyfin

Proton
Nebula
Deezer

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

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.
- I use Qwant and Startpage on my phone and PC, I'm happy with both

Everyone's mum's only fans for online gaming

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.
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.

Subscribe to?

None.

That is out of priciple to me, I refuse to have automatically renews subscriptions on my card.

I will however buy gift cards for services and buy new as I need them.

For that, I have one.

Geoguessr.

That game has helped me a shitload when I have been depressed, and now that I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can't in the future.

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.

Bitwarden
Racknerd VPS
Backblaze B2
PIA VPN
Purelymail
Usenet
ChatGPT API

And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.

How do you all use ChatGPT API? Any tools that interface well with it?
- I assume they're talking about this api
  
  Any tools that interface well with it?
  
  Lots of tools, but it depends on where you want to use it. For example, inside Obsidian you can use it as a text generator
  
  Inside VSCode you can use something like AI Genie
  
  If you just want to use it raw, you can use postman
- My main use is chatgptbox with my instance of searxng. Also comes in handy when looking for a shell command or script with ai-shell.
  
  Then there's the various integrations in documents, notes, etc...

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.

ChatGPT (API only)
Adobe Creative Suite
Astrill VPN
sync.com (cloud storage with better encryption and lower prices than dropbox)
a small VPS (gullo.me for $5 a year)
webhosting package (all-inkl.com, 7.95€/month)

Think that's it for the time being.

I've been using sync.com for a couple of years now for my large music files storage and playback. Thinking of going all in on the unlimited plan to add on all my family files. Curious what your experience is with delayed syncing. Occasionally I find something just doesn't sync to the cloud and I have to play about with PC on/off, connect to Mobile hotspot, clear cache etc to get it to work. Makes me wonder if that's happening with files where I don't realize it until it's too late.

Basically, how robust is it for you?
- Yes I'm experiencing the same and have escalated it to their technical support before, and every now and then they were able to resolve it. So far the client always notified me of issues with the sync process (the windows client that is, Android is very basic). I've also been begging for a Linux client for 5 or 6 years now, to no avail.
  
  So yeah while I'm happy with it as a storage solution in general and like the responsiveness of their support, there are still a few issues here and there. I'm in the solo basic tier and don't use more than 400GB of the storage, so that's plenty for my use case.

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.

Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,

Google One (extra storage, bonus YouTube Premium & YT Music premium)
MXroute for mail hosting (used to self host)
Amazon Prime (for the shipping, the content is a bonus for us)
Hulu (kid's gotta see that ONE show... 🙄)
Lemmy.world (via Patron)
Couple of YouTube creators and app publishers I enjoy regularly (via Patreon)

I'm considering joining Nebula because many of the creators I frequently watch on YouTube are setting up shop up over there, and I'm getting irritated with YouTube for how The Algorithm is affecting the quality and content of the infotainment channels I enjoy.

The phone app has it's problems at times, things like resetting to the main page, and other little nuisances, but I really like Nebula, went so far as to pay for their lifetime deal.
Was Google one (including yt premium) a limited time deal? I don't see them connected right now.
- You know? That might have been the case. I was an old Google Music subscriber, and I think when that rolled over to YT Music the subscription package bundled in YouTube premium. Later when I bit on the Google One subscription later, I think it was on a promotional offer. I remember it was about $100 at the time, and it aligned with some storage needs U had so why not?
  
  I just looked and it seems the Google 1 and YT sub's are billed separately. It was a while ago and my memory is hazy, but I'm into Google services for about $30 a month these days, and that's what I pay for.

Just a VPN. Thinking about trying out Proton's suite and maybe pay for that if it's worth it. Otherwise I'm more and more leaning on OSS and self hosted things these days because corporations have shown themselves not to be trusted with anything important.

From what I've heard self hosting your email though can be a big PITA so paying someone for email is not a terrible choice. Self hosting you need to carefully manage the system and reputation to make sure your email that you send actually gets delivered, and doesn't arrive in spam.
- Self hosting email has been a hard no for way over a decade at this point, maybe two. It's a terrible idea.
I recently swapped over from Dashlane to Proton, and I don't regret it at all. Plus I can decouple my stuff from Google, and use my own domain for my personal email, which I can then give out to individuals and hide behind aliases for companies/services. I rather like it. The VPN seems solid enough too, though I've nary a use for such things.
- Yeah there are many great things about Proton. It's just so damn expensive. Had it been like $7 per month (charged monthly) I'd already been a customer. I'm guessing the VPN carries the highest cost for Proton, so it'd be nice to have the option for the whole suite except the VPN.

ProtonMail, with my own domain, so that I have full control over my online identity and Spotify. As a developer I don't need anything else, I can work just fine with freely available stuff.

I have ProtonMail, but I'm pretty new to it. I do pay for premium (unlimited). How does the domain thing work with them? They actually host the email for the domain via MX records?
- Not the OP, but if youve got your own domain, you can register it with Proton so that you can create email addresses on it that route to your Proton inbox.
  
  How it'll work is:
  
  Proton will ask you to verify you own the domain (by adding a few TXT records on it)
  
  then Proton will give you some MX records you can add to your domain so that mail routes to Proton using your domain.

None.

Mullvad, ProtonDrive, and my mobile data plan if that counts.

I stopped subscribing to Google drive, but truthfully I miss Google photos a lot because of how good it is, privacy aside.

Ente Photos is a pretty decent alternative if you don't want to self host
- I would so use Ente if I didn't self host immich

Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that's about it.

-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names

I used to, but I don't these days because the prices kept going up while the value kept going down. My last subscription was Pandora and Paramount+, but I wasn't using it enough to justify the continued cost.

I also hate ads on a paid service, that shouldn't be a thing. If there are ads, it should be free like Pluto.tv, Tubi, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.

Aside from the VPS and object storage for housing Leminal Space, just Proton Mail. And The Anfield Wrap if we're counting podcasts.

Spotify but only because we are all sharing a family plan and the price makes sense at that point for the convenience.

As soon as Spotify gets rid of family plans and account sharing (just like all other streaming platforms) I’ll sail the seas with Lidarr.

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.

ChatGPT
Midjourney
YouTube Premium (which I get through a mobile phone subscription at a heavy discount)
Spotify
Channel4 ad-free (UK broadcaster)

In addition I support a range of software through GitHub and Patreon:

PhotoPrism
Gluetun
Little Navmap
wg-easy
DuckDNS

Finally I’ve got paid access to a couple of major and minor media sources:

Washington Post
Jyllands Posten (largest Danish newspaper)
Olfi (specialised Danish defense news, named after a Danish frigate Olfert Fisher)
Krigskunst (“The Art of War”, specialised Danish defense podcast)
Det Hemmeligste at Det Hemmelige (podcast about spy craft and stay behind movements during the Cold War - just gone behind a pay wall but used to run on a public service channel)

My financial /spending data has a price

YouTube Premium
Apple One Family (Music, TV+, iCloud, Arcade)
HBO Max (best value for high quality content but Apple is very close these days)
Prime (barely use it but it's $12/yr here)
Game Pass Ultimate
Usenet Farm, couple of odd blocks and indexers
Carrot Weather

Considering paying for RSS provider but they all seem overpriced for what they do above Feedly free tier.

What does a hosted RSS provider give you over a normal client? I use Nextcloud News (self hosted) but I don't really know the benefit over just using an RSS app on my phone (besides syncing my list I guess).
- Sync across devices at free tier which is the main thing. You pay by having access to things like real-time updates, filters, summaries etc. I don't keep a vps these days and I have a preferred client that's limited to commercial solutions.

Pcloud, NordVPN, Tidal, reMarkable sync

I'd use Obsidian Sync too if I used Obsidian across devices. I just back my vaults up in the cloud.

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.

YouTube Premium
Netflix
Torguard VPN
Google One for storage

That's about it. I don't use ChatGPT often enough to sub. I sometimes subscribe to Canva Pro if I have a project ongoing.

email
Nebula
Kagi
domains and VPSes
VPN
windyty

Firefox Relay ($1/month)
Bitwarden ($22/year, premium + family org)
Inoreader ($15/year, Supporter to be ad-free)
Joplin (donating 2$/month to the dev)
Spotify (Family plan)
Netflix (2 screens, HD)
Amazon Prime (for faster free shipping and Prime Video)
Amazon Kids+ (for the kids Fire HD tablets, they can play almost anything they want)
IFTTT Pro+ ($4/month, legacy plan)
NextDNS ($28/year) for the convenience of a pihole-like setup without having to host it
Google One 2TB for the extra features and storage for my wife's business at home.
Cheap-ass VPS on Atlantic.net ($1/month, legacy plan)
2 domain names, around $25/year for both on NameCheap

I give some bucks to disroot for email and cloud services and I donate monthly to a local server that hosts a mastodon instance and some other goodies. I occasionally donate to some software projects

My partner subscribes to media services which I use too, like max, Spotify and others.

Bitwarden

Proton Family

Spotify Family

Nintendo online

1 small Contabo VPS to host rocket chat

1 larger Contabo VPS for my main Nextcloud and Immich instances

1Pass NordVpn ChatGPT YouTube Premium

Surfshark VPN and YouTube premium. Recently cancelled Netflix and Amazon prime. Not much but I've had enough of subscriptions.

Mullvad and Tuta are the only services I pay for monthly

Just a VPS. £4/month.

Bitwarden
Addy.io
Backblaze B2 (technically not a subscription)
Managed Nextcloud (Hetzner)
Webhosting (Hetzner)

I'm a student and I don't work that much so I try to keep the costs down. I considered selfhosting Nextcloud but it doesn't seem worth it for now.

How do I webhost with Hetzner? I want to get into server hosting and Hetzner is a small business with a good price, but the learning curve is so steep.
- It's not that hard, just create an account and order a web hosting plan. You can edit the files using FTP. It's just web hosting though, you're probably better off with a VPS if you want to run your own software.

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

just for pia vpn since i don't trust free vpns, also try claude opus instead of chatgpt, it's better imo.

Also a dev.

Protonmail
YT premium
Hetzner VPS (€20/m)
Cloudflare domains

For me, as an SRE:

Mullvad VPN
Google Drive (until I set up my NAS)
YouTube Premium
ChatGPT (but I am thinking of trying out Claude 3 instead)

Other, non-tech subscriptions:

Public transport
Public bike sharing
Food delivery

Things I might pay for if my employer didn't:

IntelliJ Ultimate
GitHub Copilot

Random IT-adjacent services I occasionally donate to:

Codeberg
Wikipedia

Mythic beasts server hosting, namecheap domain hosting.

AWS Cloud services
Azure devops build services
OpenAI API
JetBrains Toolbox
OneDrive
Protonmail

Express VPN for foreign free to air TV, ad blocking on multiple devices. 200gb Google Cloud storage. Vultr VPN for Wireguard.

Google One, Spotify, Netflix and Nebula.

ProtonMail and Spotify. I'm also paying for one podcast but I do it voluntarily.

Edit: and Mullvad

Bitwarden and a domain, if it counts.

A couple of video streaming services, Hulu, which includes Disney+, Discovery+ and Netflix. That totals up to like $50/mo or so.

Other than that, it's aaaallllll independent creators, through Twitch or Patreon.

I'm a software engineer as well, but (almost) none of my subscriptions are related to that. Currently:

Netflix
Disney+ bundle
Bitwarden (yearly)
DNS names (yearly) - currently unused because I bailed on Vultr due to TOS BS; this is for personal projects
Tiller (yearly) - pulls transactions from my various accounts

That's about it. Everything else I buy one at a time, like video games or donations.

I'd like to drop Netflix and Disney+ over their stupid ad policy, but my wife and kids use them a lot.

Here's some stuff I plan to get soon:

VPN - probably Mullvad
Tuta - finally axe Google
VPS - probably Hetzner; I'd prefer one without forced arbitration though; could get by if something like Tailscale allowed custom domains and port forwards
Backblaze B2 - backups

bitwarden
proton VPN
purelymail

Too many but here’s a few off the top of my head:

GitHub Pro and Copilot
ChatGPT
Linode (I self-host a lot of things but keep Nextcloud off-site for backups)
YouTube Premium and Nebula
RadarScope, Windy, and NightSky (astronomy hobby plus I live in NOLA so good weather apps are kind of a must have)
Feedly
Bitwarden
TripIt
Apple Music

There’s more but as a developer, I try to pay for software. (I mean, if I don’t, who will?) I’ll sail the high seas for some stuff but only if the company pisses me off.

ChatGPT
YouTube Premium
DoorDash
ProtonMail
Google (storage)
Apple (storage)
MLB (game audio)
GitHub Premium
Various Twitch Streamers
Dropout
Apple Music

I think that’s it. I would subscribe to Port87, but I made it, so I don’t need to.

I understand that that’s a lot of subscriptions. I used to have a lot more, and I’ve been slowly unsubscribing.

I’ve almost replaced ProtonMail with Port87, so that will be the next to go. I like ProtonMail, but I only subscribed so that I could do the things Port87 does automatically. I’ll still subscribe to Proton VPN though. I need that for… Linux ISOs.

I’ve also almost replaced Google Photos with Immich, so that will go soon too.

I’m thinking about replacing Apple Music with a self hosted option.

I also am finding ChatGPT less and less useful as open source LLMs get closer in quality.

Can you please link a guide to how to setup open source LLMs or some list so that I can look it up?
- This is what I’ve been using:
  
  https://lmstudio.ai/

YouTube music only, unfortunately. Unfortunate not because it's the only expense of its type that I have, but because like so many Google products it's a worse version of something they used to offer for free. And there isn't a good alternative that I've found yet, and no music streaming service pays the artists anything worth mentioning.

Bitwarden Copilot YT Premium

Just a vpn

Seedbox (+included vpn)
Usenet
YT Prem
Spotify
Ionos Mail
O365 (but I bought vouchers for 3 years at a reduced price)
-> I prefer Outlook over Thunderbird. Though with the new interface they had done I will probably migrate to it once it expires. The OneDrive storage is used for Obsidian.md. I store obsidian locally but sync it with the community plugin "remotely save").
Bitwarden
1 or 2 items I don't remember right now.

Protonmail
Spotify
Kagi search
a handful of servers scattered in DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and AWS
Sendgrid