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
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I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
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.
- 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.
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.
I don’t know if it will meet your needs, but I’ve recently picked up a license to TypingMind and I use the OpenAI API - it’s a very good tool IMO.
I’d prefer something Foss honestly might just have to write it myself at this point.
Yeah I agree, and I hesitated to buy TypingMind, but I figured the $30 or whatever was cheaper than my time.
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.
Thanks, I’ll look into that! I also recently found an easy way to run local LLMs on my computer, so I can mix and match.
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.
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 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.
Namecheap supports ddns out of the box too, no additional service required. You just need a cron job that calls their API to update your IP periodically.
Ah perfect! Thanks for the additional info
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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- 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…
various integrations in documents, notes
Tell us about these integrations please
Nothing complicated. Nextcloud assistant with nextcloud office and generating emails in fairemail.
…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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
I pay for yt premium family ($23/mo) now. Was also a yt red subscriber.
Same here. YT family plan, and $99/yr for the G1 storage (plus other benefits, but mostly the storage)
I’m just using the default storage, and have a Nextcloud instance for any files I need to access.
I do use Google photos, but I skirt there uploads using my old pixel 1 to upload my pixel 8pro photos :) so my storage is mostly static with Google
- 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.
I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.
