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
Submitted 7 months ago by dep@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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:
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.
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.
Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.
Good to know!
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.
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.
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.
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
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta.
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.
…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 thay I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can’t in the future.
If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list
Bitwarden because it’s super convenient, as well asYoutube 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. I also 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. I also 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.
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…
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.
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.
My data has a price
Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,
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 content 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.
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.
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
-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names
In addition I support a range of software through GitHub and Patreon:
Finally I’ve got paid access to a couple of major and minor media sources:
I used to, but I don’t these days because the prices kept going up while the value kept going down.
Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that’s about it.
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.
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.
pHr34kY@lemmy.world 7 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.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 7 months ago
You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP
WordBox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.
WordBox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
What all do you run?