Ask HN: What SaaS or apps are you paying for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What SaaS or apps are you paying for?

54 pointsbusymichael69 comments

I am curious to know what saas or apps are HN user's paying out of their own pocket for? Not business apps, but for your own personal use.

Personally, I pay for feedly (rss reader), G Suite domain (for my personal email), beyondpod (podcast app for android), mighttext (syncs sms to gmail), todoist premium (task/to do app).

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Spotify, TrainerRoad, Zwift, Strava.

I used to pay for Crashplan until they terminated the plan I was on.

I hop on and off the paid plan of my own SaaS just to test the payment flow from time to time ;-)

Zwift is pretty much the best SaaS service I've ever paid for. My wife and I had a baby recently and it's let me stay in shape while watching him. I think even when I can ride outside more again I'll keep using it -- the way it gamifies cycling makes it a better workout and almost more fun than the real thing.

>I used to pay for Crashplan until they terminated the plan I was on.

I think Code42 ended up removing their consumer business to Carbonite in some form of partnership. Looks like Crashplan is just for businesses these days.

You can still use CrashPlan business plan, it's just not as cheap as before.

why are you using g-suite instead of gmail? is it just to get email's like name@your-domain.com ? or you have other reasons as well?

When I started, it was just to get mylastname.com email for myself and my family. But, now I pretty much use Google Docs exclusively and the cloud sync for all my files and photos.

Someone has my-last-name.com for my last name. They are selling email accounts for like $30 a year. No. Bitches.

Owning your email-address gives you a portability option and gives you freedom. It let me seamlessly migrate from Gmail to FastMail when Google’s offering stopped impressing me.

I don’t know about you, but I won’t let anyone else own my email-address, my digital identity.

A good amount!

Media: Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, put.io

Personal "Work": GitHub, Heroku, Photoshop, Sketch, Dribbble Pro

Workflow: Superhuman, Dropbox, 1Password

Donations: Wikipedia, Watsi

Interesting to see superhuman there, I thought that died after being in the media for a brief while. Is it worth the subscription? What makes it that you would really need it, for you, not the ads.

You might be thinking of another product? As far as I can tell, they're doing pretty good. The hype may have died down a bit, but as far as I can tell the company itself is doing great. They're still in beta, and slowly rolling out.

For someone who spends most of my time in email, definitely. It's $29/mo, which is nothing for how much time I spend. It's really fast, and as a vim user I love how everything can be done with a keyboard shortcut. They have a ton of awesome little features, such as auto-BCCing people in intros, or snippets (which are way more than you'd expect... you can use snippets to do things like auto-CC someone you CC a lot, or insert text).

I mean, at the end of the day, it's still just an email client. However so far, I've really liked a lot of the nice little features and attention to detail.

I forgot about passwords -- I pay for for a password manager.

I used to have a spreadsheet just exactly like this, w/ as many subscriptions. But nowadays that I feel inclined to use technology and the internet less (hopefully it doesn't come around and haunt me when I finish my undergraduate degree), I have canceled most of the subscriptions.

I am paying for: Spotify, G-Suite (personal email), and Go-Daddy (domain - does this also count?).

Otherwise, I also used to be a monthly donor to Watsi. I love the information, timeline, and follow up they have about the patients. They also sent me a lovely hand-written letter (may I add with my name hand-written!) and booklet once that I still have - think it was around Christmas time too.

Newsblur for RSS feed reading.

NearlyFreeSpeech for web-site hosting.

VentraIP for my .id.au domain. This includes DNS and email forwarding. The email forwarding is awesome - no need for G-Suite just for personal email domain. I just use a regular Gmail account.

Cerberus for phone anti-theft on all family phones.

I use to pay for Lastpass and Xmarks, but they shut Xmarks down, and the free offering of Lastpass expanded to include the features I needed. (To be honest, I've been looking to move off Lastpass since LogMeIn bought them, but especially since they shuttered Xmarks. That really rankles.)

I found myself paying upwards of $100 monthly in these small incurring charges until my credit card was lost and they were all cancelled. I'll answer with what main services I used to pay for and what I replaced them with. Evernote got replaced by OneNote. It's not an equivalent, but it gets the job done. I moved from lastpass once they changed their subscription model to the free tier. I'm considering moving to bitwarden's free tier. I'm somehow unable to get together the few hours it will take to migrate a handful of sites and email accounts from my 1and1 site to something less painful, but every time I try to move, it becomes a small nightmare.

I actually get really excited when I need a new credit card, for just this reason. We should start some sort of service that just denies payment to every monthly subscription once every six months.

https://privacy.com/ kinda does that :)

Except more and more cards and services are moving to things like the Visa Account Updater server [0] that allows recurring transactions to continue even after changing card numbers.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-accoun...

I have a separate credit card that I put all recurring charges on - it keeps it so much easier from some of them getting lost in the mix of your regular transactions - also let’s you get a sense of just how much you’re spending on that stuff

Backblaze business(two computers), Spotify, Github, Amazon EC2 and RDS(Rancher DB and Master), Digitalocean(Rancher Workers), Circleci, Buddybuild, Google Business (three seats), Name.com( one IO, a dozen dot coms), Netflix, Amazon Video

I have a dedicated machine from online.net that hosts a few services that would incur a monthly cost but self hosting helps save a bit of cash there. These are: GitLab for private projects (because I work with a team and per-seat costs multiply fast), Confluence and Jira for project management (again, team size scales the cost and a self-hosting license is only $20/yr).

As for actual SaaS: Backblaze personal, Adobe full suite ($400 per year I think, gives me everything I need for art/video projects), A password manager, and... that's it actually! No netflix, no google, no dropbox, I'll probably keep it this way.

It is interesting to see that most people only pay for some large brand name services, would love to see more people paying for SaaS solutions from smaller businesses/startups and for more technical resons (I guess SME's would better qualify for this than individuals)

As for my spending I guess I also fall short of the above point: Play Music - music streaming, Netflix - chill, Github - Private repos, GSuite - mostly emails, GDrive - storage, Namecheap - Domains, Google Cloud and AWS - cloud stuff, Asana - side project management, AdWords - side project marketing

Numerous comments here on HN suggest that this is due to lack of confidence in the startup/small business survivability.

If I am going to build a business, I would like to be reasonably sure that the tools I'm using to build it won't suddenly close if they lack funding.

Of course, this is by no means any guarantee, as there's also the case where a startup is so successful that some bigger company will buy it and close down the service anyway.

How does one utilize the chill functionality of Netflix?

Also: Netflix, Prime, iCloud, and CrunchyRoll.

Newsblur for great and flexible RSS experience. Fastmail for great email experience (does that count as a SaaS?). Sync (sync.com) for cloud backup and storage (switched after Dropbox faked OS X password prompt and didn't even blush). 1Password for passwords. MyNoise app for white noise / procedural music generation. Github is paid also for my own private projects. I also used to pay for Evernote, but lately, the quality of their service declined in China and I gave up.

JuiceSSH - android, highly recommened GSuite a t2.micro EC2 - tiny websites, personal url shortener, screen with ssh sessions to every machine I have access to more Win10 licenses then I care to admit to - my VMs gave keys! Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, VRV, DirecTV Now - HBO is included in dtvnow, and we're grandfathered in to the intro $35/month plan Office 365 from work - If I love jobs, I'll pick up an Office subscription myself.

What url shortener script do you use?

YOURLS - https://yourls.org

Just needs a SQL database and php

Thanks!

I pay for Charles Proxy, Digitalocean(droplets), and Netflix.

+1 For Charles. One damn fine piece of software.

Would you pay for Charles if they converted to a recurring subscription model?

Only if they also converted to a more polished, native UI.

What does Charles offer that is not free in Chrome devtools?

Two I haven't seen mentioned that I pay for

* Postman: an awesome tool for API work (I'm not affiliated)

* Amazon Glacier: cheap offsite backup of photos/video (also not affiliated)

Not all active at the moment, but: Robinhood gold, tipranks (in the past), marvel unlimited, Intellij IDAE (not really a SaaS per se), Adobe Creative Cloud (same) ,Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO (Hulu and HBO only when there is a good show to catch up on... ). iCloud, AWS, leetcode (in the past)

In order of amount I pay for each service:

Atlantic.net (Hosting), Fastmail, Discord Nitro, Todoist, Private Internet Access, Twilio

Some that I paid for in excess of 1+ years (or Lifetime):

Freedom.to, Brain.fm

Couple that I'm using premium plans, but not currently paying for (prolonged trial offers, etc.):

Reddit Gold (still have several years left), Todoist

Have you liked Brain.fm? I used to use it, but started to think it wasn't really worth it/much more useful than regular whitenoise

Not OP. But I’m using it for 2+ years now almost daily. Love it. I use focus and nap modes primarily.

I use it on and off. I've only primarily used the focus mode, and it's a decent way to help get "in the zone" if there's a really deep task I need to do.

Apps, in the strictest sense? I can't think of any that are purely personal. Unless you count entertainment oriented stuff like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime with some "add on" channels like Shudder and HBO.

LWN, Wikipedia, FastMail, Digital Ocean, Google Play Music, Plex, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

I buy music at Bandcamp, bleep and direct at artist pages. I buy movies at rifftraxx.

I donate to various FOSS projects with money and time.

#dev: cloud9 digitalocean serverpilot

#education: onemonth udacity/coursera as needed Gotham

#entertainment: HBO netflix hulu youtube Red (music)

#other: dashlane dragon dicatate amazon prime apple storage

I use the free tier of many other services.

GSuite, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Github, Sightengine, Travis, Twilio

Google Play / YouTube Red: ad free streaming music, ad free YouTube

G-Suite: mostly for email for my personal domain

Netflix: streaming video

101domain: domain registrar

Amazon Prime: faster free shipping

DigitalOcean: virtual machines

AWS: cloud stuff

I forgot YT Red -- I pay for that too for music and ad free YT.

OneDrive 1TB of storage. It's convenient for photo/video storage and sharing.

Glacier. Very cheap storage, but extremely inconvenient.

Evernote, Resharper, Backblaze, Office 365

Have you tried not using R#? The only reason I ask is that a lot of its utility now exists in Visual Studio.

R# actually overwrites many default VS key bindings and provides the same functionality, just with a different UI. So people are like "hey look what I can do!", when in actuality they could have done the same thing without R#.

Also, it's a resource hog. I've only met a handful of people who contest this - and they are long time users, who haven't gone without resharper recently (full uninstall) for a meaningful period of time.

VS doesn't have any of the functionality under Generate Code:

- create delegating methods

- create equality methods

- create formatting members (ie override ToString() and just click on the properties - mostly for debugging)

https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/code_refactorin...

This list doesn't include things like converting some patterns back and forth to Linq expressions, converting foreach to for, better extract method that takes advantage of local methods and lets you choose which variables you want to capture, and various other code hints.

It also doesn't include safely adding and removing parameters, intelligently knowing when a class is used via DI when you are looking for unknown classes.

The unit test runner is also much better than the built in VS Test runner.

Interesting that you need/use all those things

I'm usually hired to fix existing code bases/departments. I trust automated refactors to get my head around really bad huge classes.

Kolab for email, and tarsnap for backup.

Bear: the best note-taking app I’ve ever used, with a great tagging system

Spotify: music subscription

Github: private repos

1password: password manager

Netflix, Spotify, GitHub, gdrive... Evernote but Inreally must cancel that

Office 365, Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Patreon, Cricket Stream, NFL Stream

I didn't add streaming services.

In that case DirectTV, Hulu no commercials, Netflix (not really its free with T-Mobile) and everything I said below.

Linode hosts my website

FastMail for email from said site

Dropbox for storage

Spotify for music

And the $1 icloud upgrade (for ios backups)

GitHub and Laracasts

Spotify Family, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Backblaze

Fast Mail and Cold Storage (google and amazon).

* Adobe Suite

* Boomerang

* Heroku

* AWS S3

* https://wip.chat

* Apple iCloud

* Amazon Prime

* Spotify

I pay for laracasts.com and apollohq.com

GSuite, 1Password, NewsBlur, Mullvad VPN

Additional Gmail Space and 1Password

Spotify

Donations: Wikipedia, Firefox

Crashplan, Spotify

runbox.com

AWS, Soundcloud, Github, Namecheap, Google Apps Suite

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