Ask HN: What Do You Pay For? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Do You Pay For?

11 pointsasim21 comments

I was thinking about the number of free services we consume and how in some ways we default to that on the internet. But then the question arises. What do we actually pay for? What attributes enough value to pay for something? So I pose the question. What internet services do you pay for?

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I'm paying for:

- Youtube Premium: I travel a lot, often by plane, so downloading songs and videos, often tech-related ones, is a nice thing to have.

- Spotify: Same.

- ChatGPT: I'm still learning a lot about coding and programming, just started to dive into ASP.NET, it helps me a lot.

- Google Photos: I take a lot of pictures, also I like to share them with my friends. In addition, the rediscover aka "look back to this memory" function is lovely.

- Netflix: Also to download movies/series, helps me a lot during travelling.

Tidal - High quality music, good curation too

Mullvad - Best VPN service available

Midjourney - I'm not an artist, so it's nice to bang out concepts with midjourney

Firefox relay - I'd probably recommend anonaddr though. I'm trying to support Mozilla, but their offerings aren't very good

Libro.fm - Love audio books, hate breaking Audible DRM to host the books in audiobookshelf

YNAB - Best way to track money, hands down

Obsidian Sync - I don't think obsidian is a great knowledge based but I haven't found one I like more, and I've tried most

Why do you prefer Tidal to Spotify?

I currently pay for a few things:

Proton Mail - Solid email service. I'm not hardcore about privacy but I do like their ethics.

Spotify - Love having instant access to any music, though I wish their app was a bit more intuitive.

Two Twitch subscriptions - Both of the streamers are friends, but I do enjoy their content a lot and like supporting them.

Laracasts - I'm a new to Laravel/PHP and this website has been awesome for high quality tutorials.

Cheapest tier of iCloud for photos - I have other ways to backup photos but the convenience of iCloud is very nice.

I pesonally pay for:

• Strava - tracking my runs

• Fusion 360 - freelancing my designs

• Notability - where I keep my notes and ideas

• ChatGPT - no comment here :D

• Midjourney - also no comment

• Netflix - man has to relax at time to time

• Play Swiss - as I am swiss, I also watch Swiss movies and shows

• GitHub - version control + doing some collaborative projects with friends

It is probably not that much, but for me now when looking at this condensed list, seems a lot. :)

EDIT: Ah yes, thanks to the guys with the other comments! I also have several domains + SSLs + Hosting.

Domain names (too many!) and hosting (pretty cheap).

NextCloud hosting - can't be bothered running and securing my own.

BitWarden - I like their product and happy to pay for the family plan.

The occasional app or game. Mostly when they're on sale.

Very rarely one of my personal projects goes over the free tier of an API on Google or AWS, so a few quid here and there.

But that's about it. I'm usually happy to sacrifice my time in order to save money.

The only Internet service I pay for is a domain name for my email. I don’t feel I miss out on anything else.

Quite a few:

- Software: Paragon's extFS, Littlesnitch, 1Password Family, ClamXav and more.

- Services: Fastmail, Spotify, YouTube Family, Disney+ Family (to be discontinued), NetFlix Family, Starlink, AWS (route53, s3, CloudFront)

I used to only use free services. Then a few shut down, so I started paying for services to help support them.

- Fastmail

- TickTick

- Bitwarden family

- Dynalist - Personal knowledge management

- Several servers & domains for self-hosting

- Laravel Forge - server management

- Hetrixtools - Uptime monitor

- Bunny.net - CDN

- Anonaddy - Email aliases

- Standard Notes

Spotify, 1Password, Netflix, Domains, Hosting, Discord Nitro, gsuite/google workspace, Mullvad, Tidal.

I think that's about it for subscription services?

- Fastmail

- LinkedIn Premium

- Shield (for LinkedIn)

- Canva (every few months, then cancel)

- Domains & hosting

- Wordpress.com

- Plausible

- Beanstalk git

- Spotify

- Disney+ (I change up he streaming every few months, never pay for more than 1 at a time)

I only pay for hosting (~1.5 EUR / month). Used to pay for VPN, too, but I don't have much use of it these days.

Email hosting (Namecheap, meh)

A VPS for my websites (DigitalOcean)

A VPN for torrenting (Private Internet Access)

Spotify

Wachete (monitors sites for changes)

Plausible (privacy-friendly analytics)

That's about it

SourceHut and a domain I've bought together with my friends.

I don't need much.

- Apple Music, TV+, iCloud (less than $4 a month)

- Xbox Game Pass (probably around $40 a year)

Game Pass is such a wildly good deal it’s hard to believe it exists. I grew up spending $60 on 360 and GameCube games, $40/yr is such a steal

iCloud 200gb is worth it imo for the backups I can back up my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro and if I upgrade I basically just login and sync and everything is set up the same as my old device.

YouTube premium, Amazon prime, chatgpt and mid journey, Instacart plus.

Youtube Premium.

- Google Drive

- iCloud

- Leaf / Plant ID app

- 1Password

- Fishbrain

- GCP - run a few servers as my hobby lab

Dropbox

Joplin

Additional Google Storage

Google Sheets add-on

Hetzner VPS

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