this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.

If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Philosophical monthly support:

  • Grapheneos
  • Eff
  • Tor
  • Briar
  • Molly
[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Honestly, I don't care about bonus content, I just want the content I have on YouTube elsewhere without ads and tracking, and I'm happy to pay for it.

The only ones I'm interested in are:

  • Not Just Bikes
  • Half as Interesting

I looked through the rest, and I honestly haven't heard of any of them. I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but I do follow a few channels. Here are some of my favorites, by category:

Tech news:

  • Level1Techs
  • Louis Rossmann - on Odysee
  • Gamer's Nexus
  • Optimum Tech
  • Digital Foundry
  • The Phawx

Privacy/advocacy:

  • Audit the Audit
  • Mental Outlaw
  • NBTV - Naomi Brockwell

Math/science:

  • Stand Up Maths
  • Psyshow
  • Steve Mould
  • Tech Ingredients

Other news (balances liberal bias here on lemmy):

  • Reason TV - could replace with podcast; still love Remy vids though
  • John Stossel

Misc entertainment:

  • Mr. Puzzle
  • Lockpickinglawyer
  • Jerry Rig Everything

If I had one or two solid channels from each category, I could abandon YouTube. But I don't know any of the channels there, and I'm not super excited about looking through a bunch of new channels again, it took years to filter through the trash on YouTube...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He's done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.

The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving "Final Years of Majuro". There's also the channel "Extremities" from them, which "brings you the stories of how and why the world's most remote settlements exist". They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that's on YouTube on a delay; they've recently also announced an upcoming series called "The Getaway", but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there's the channel "neo", which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.

For tech news, there's The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can't comment precisely on their content.

No explicit privacy advocacy I'm afraid.

For science, there's Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.

Not sure I'd ever say Lemmy has a "liberal" bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular "The Editorial" is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There's also J.J. McCullough, who I don't watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they've added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I'm still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They've also recently announced a new news division, but we don't know exactly what form that's going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.

As far a misc entertainment, it's a very personal thing that's hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I'd say they're more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There's edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the "music" category is Tantacrul, though really I'd say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he's specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under "news", which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you're a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his "...For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games" series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.

Personally, I couldn't ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There's just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They're really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they're weak in, they're pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they're expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn't have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the "latest videos" section of the front page, I don't miss anything entirely. (Though there's always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I've come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn't have thought to be interested in before. It's big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it'd be hard not for someone to get their money's worth from it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Oh, another thing just occurred to me. There are also Nebula-exclusive podcasts. I listen to The Urbanist Agenda, hosted by Jason Slaughter, with regular guests including (but not limited to) the other urbanists on Nebula.

[–] SuperSpruce 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You forgot to mention that at least with the newer videos, the videos cut out all the sponsored sections.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Oh, yeah. I guess I just took that as a given. @[email protected], this is worth knowing too, if you weren't already aware.

(Though with SponsorBlock, you can achieve much the same thing on YouTube, albeit in a more morally grey way.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] Clandestine 11 points 8 months ago
  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

...none. I donate to foss projects monthly though so it's a subscription in spirit but it's not really classified as a subscription

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Can you list a few of them?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Off the top of my head: Lemmy, Lemmee, Signal, Molly, and Jellyfin

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Everyone's mum's only fans for online gaming

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (12 children)

Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] stoy 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] SuperSpruce 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
  1. Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
  2. 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Spotify? Does that count? Literally the only thing I subscribe to for money.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)
  • Bitwarden
  • Racknerd VPS
  • Backblaze B2
  • PIA VPN
  • Purelymail
  • Usenet
  • ChatGPT API

And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Bitwarden because it's super convenient, as well as Youtube 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. On top of that, I 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. And lastly I do 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ProtonMail, with my own domain, so that I have full control over my online identity and Spotify. As a developer I don't need anything else, I can work just fine with freely available stuff.

[–] Punk_face 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I have ProtonMail, but I'm pretty new to it. I do pay for premium (unlimited). How does the domain thing work with them? They actually host the email for the domain via MX records?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that's about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I used to, but I don't these days because the prices kept going up while the value kept going down. My last subscription was Pandora and Paramount+, but I wasn't using it enough to justify the continued cost.

I also hate ads on a paid service, that shouldn't be a thing. If there are ads, it should be free like Pluto.tv, Tubi, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
  • ChatGPT
  • Midjourney
  • YouTube Premium (which I get through a mobile phone subscription at a heavy discount)
  • Spotify
  • Channel4 ad-free (UK broadcaster)

In addition I support a range of software through GitHub and Patreon:

  • PhotoPrism
  • Gluetun
  • Little Navmap
  • wg-easy
  • DuckDNS

Finally I’ve got paid access to a couple of major and minor media sources:

  • Washington Post
  • Jyllands Posten (largest Danish newspaper)
  • Olfi (specialised Danish defense news, named after a Danish frigate Olfert Fisher)
  • Krigskunst (“The Art of War”, specialised Danish defense podcast)
  • Det Hemmeligste at Det Hemmelige (podcast about spy craft and stay behind movements during the Cold War - just gone behind a pay wall but used to run on a public service channel)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Aside from the VPS and object storage for housing Leminal Space, just Proton Mail. And The Anfield Wrap if we're counting podcasts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago
  • YouTube Premium
  • Netflix
  • Torguard VPN
  • Google One for storage

That's about it. I don't use ChatGPT often enough to sub. I sometimes subscribe to Canva Pro if I have a project ongoing.

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