Is it typical to spend so much on software subscriptions? I pay for Spotify and a cheap VPS if that counts but that's it. I figured the average person probably has one or two media subscriptions (Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc) and nothing else.
And any tech hobbyist can quickly end up with a number of smaller subscriptions (e.g. hosting, backups, AV, password management)
But I've not yet found any mobile-only 'apps' that can justify the usually-overpriced subscriptions.
The upside is that I don't spend too many hours on mobile devices, as so many games/apps have such obnoxious monetisation (see Diablo Immortal, or any 'hypercasual' game with more real-money-gambling ads than actual gameplay), and the 'mobile web' isn't as good as it should be (endless app nags, poor ad-blocking compared to a real computer)
You mean the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla co-founder?
"Person made x, so why would you doubt them on y?"
Lots of people latch on to high school achievements as their life passes them by until they realize they haven't done much in a long time and have a mid-life crisis. Some people buy an expensive car. Others start a Chrome fork and crypto scheme.
> haven't done much in a long time
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I think you're giving him too much credit. This is the guy who cursed us with JavaScript and set back Web development by a solid decade, then went on to say "fuck you" to same-sex marriage before getting fired from his newly-attained CEO chair of Mozilla. His contributions to the world at large are more akin to the French: he added a lot of fancy, useless things to the world and then cowered and backpedaled when he was questioned for his beliefs.
I think we call this an argument from Ethos. i.e. it leans on what someone is, rather than their persuasiveness (pathos) or how well their argumentation is structured (logos). It is not a particularly strong way to make a case, but it is a way to make a case. If you have a problem with it, you are free to speak of what you feel should be considered instead. I personally think "it's a cryptocurrency and therefore a scam" argumentation is lazy and not very compelling, but perhaps your target audience does not.
Either that or they are very wealthy. I can’t imagine looking at this long list of subscriptions and being satisfied I’m getting value from them all.
Personally, my only subscriptions are for hosting, cloud, music and video.
Most other things can be done for free or without a subscription.
Not to mention that the point of the entire article is that they found out they weren't getting satisfactory value from all of them and cut back some! I feel like half of y'all read the post and thought it was a brag about how rich they were instead of a mea culpa about how they realized they were spending too much.
> but I didn't think my list was particularly egregious
Grammarly is $150/year!! How is that not egregious?
My only significant subscriptions are:
1. Netflix 2. Amazon Prime 3. Youtube Premium
All shared with other people.
This guy was paying $40/year for a weather app and was surprised he was spending a ton on subscriptions. How?
I don't personally find Grammarly useful. But I know people who swear by it and, if it's an application that helps you write maybe every day, $150/year is nothing.
I pay more than that for Lightroom which I also use a lot.
More than that for The New York Times which I read daily.
Etc.
There's definitely a subscription version of "Does it bring you joy?" But there seems to be almost a moralistic pushback on paying for software/services things that you find useful.
except it is a lot compared to alternatives like a library card and cultivating literacy.
IMO $150 a year for something you simply should just learn (it's a basic skill). A library card ~$20 a year and you get so many more benefits.
Spotify, Netflix, Disney, prime, Adobe, jetide, reface (occasionally) toon faces (occasionally), peak,Duolingo. These are the ones I'm consciously aware of.
Various educational services from Monthly to coursera to music ones such as pianote and ultimate guitar and songsterr. Previously stuff like code academy or oreilly etc. YouTube subscription. Half a dozen patron accounts I support (I am well-off enough, and as ex-programmer and ex-photographer sufficiently of content-producing/livelihood mentality , to have the luxury and intent to support the content I consume).
Then there are the ones I only notice when I really think about it or look at yearly transactions - Microsoft office, Google drive, apple Icloud, backup (originally sync.com then back laze and now I Backup or something). 1password. Sometimes nzbmatrix and whatnot. Apple arcade. Geforce now. And it keeps going.
This empathically does not include traditional subscriptions. My father in law lives with us and I am embarrassed at size of our cable bill as that's what he watches all day long.
Mostly I wanted to indicate you don't have to have extraordinary needs to accumulate subs.
We've gone from cable model to Netflix monopoly (how I miss it) back to myriad subs to get content for broad family.
similarly for software, if you like to fool around with utilities computers, it's not hard to rack up the subs. A file comparison utility wants me to pay yearly fee. Image browsing program wants to be a subscription. Everything wants me to keep paying.
- YouTube $10/mo and super worth it
- Netflix $15/mo and lately meh
- AppleTV $10/mo and meaning to cancel again
- AMC $10/mo ditto
- Apple Music $10/mo and want to cancel but need to figure out migration
- Adobe $10/mo for PS+LR and pretty happy with it
- DropBox $10/mo and I guess, whatever
- 1Password I forget how much…
- Old-School web hosting about $10/mo
- GitHub $5/mo, tribal membership fee
- Digital newspapers and magazines, probably around $50/mo or maybe double that?
…plus a few obscure software subs that are sort of “pro” and Amazon Prime which is for fast delivery to rural America a few times a year, plus a bunch of domains, plus Patreon including at least one software person. Plus whatever I’m forgetting.
My goal for media is to have one streaming movie/TV service at any one time, and go back to paying for music one album at a time. But who knows if I’ll get there. My monthly software cost will definitely increase soon.
And despite all this, I think I’m pretty conservative and don’t have too many subs. Someone with a good income who subscribes on a whim, probably spends at least double this much.
Also YouTube music is pretty decent and replaced Spotify for me. Since you're already paying for it, it may be a good replacement for Apple music.
My point is that it’s super easy to end up with this kind of expense, or much more, without subscribing to “much.”
In general, I find it silly to look at anyone else's situation, and outside of extreme situations, try to take a "you're wrong and I know better than you about how your life would be better if you spent your money differently." position.
You're look at it as a zero sum game though. The GP may be able to afford all of these and spend $850 on the latest widget too, all without blinking.
like i get a lot of hackernews can afford it but i got so many friends who r "broke" while spending like that and won't stop.
I think $100 may be low these days.
At a neighborhood party around 2017 I asked people what they were paying for their cable service, because I was thinking about switching from satellite. Not one was under $125, and most were in the $175 area. $250 with internet. The big sports fans were well over $300/month.
One guy who considers himself a "professional sports gambler" (when he's not repairing air conditioners 9 to 5) said he was paying over $600/month to feed the wall of six 60-inch TVs in his man cave.
"Hunnert bucks a screen!" he crowed proudly. I ended up keeping my existing service, which I think was in the $35/month range.
Good for you. But I wrote about cable television service, not about internet service. Two different things.
£20 a month for only 65Mbps seems not great to be honest.
The savings pay for a high end phone every year, or a complete desktop upgrade every other year.
But whether or not these speeds would be meaningfully useful to you personally, the real observation here is just that GP is paying ~4.7x as much on a Megabit per second per month basis – your 20Mbps “I just stream” connection should cost hardly anything, a bad deal however you slice it.
(As an aside: yearly phone replacement?? I buy hardware to last on a much longer timeframe, so it more than balances out)
edit: back of the envelope network stat math – the 7.5TB I moved last month (up+down) would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection for more than the month (34 consecutive days), assuming it was symmetrical (which a connection like that probably isn’t).
The GP was talking about a 50Mbps connection.
Also, I pay the same for a 150Mbps symmetric FTTP (well its fibre to the building and copper Ethernet to the demarc in my flat), with the option to upgrade to 1Gbps symmetric for £43pm. I dont use my home as a backup or major content creation store so for me its not worth the extra.
Either way, it sounds like Canada doesn’t suffer from the same problems as the USA as far as broadband goes.
> I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again.
I think you might be remembering conversations about mobile service or something. I live in the US and my gigabit fiber (to my house) is fifty bucks a month. The US is a big place.
But looking at some of these comments, we appear to be the odd ones out.
Median skewed by the fact that even people with little disposable income have phones with access to the App Store but aren’t dropping $408/year for premium Apple experience.
But the mean is skewed by money is no object users who don’t miss a thousand dollars a month.