What subscription services do you actually pay for and get value from?
I'm usually against subscription services, but there are a few I use that I think provide enough value to justify the cost. Are there subscriptions you think are worth the money for you?
At the risk of being crucified, YouTube Premium.
I like having no commercials on something by legitimate means, and unlike most streaming services, the content stays there once it's there. For the hours we use it, it's still a hell of a deal.
I adblock and sail the seas, but Premium gives what it promises without any real hassle. We use it way more than we used Netflix or Disney+.
Same, I have the Family tier and it just makes sense. At 23/month if all 5 slots are filled it works out too $4.60/month/person.
No ads AND no hassle with this and that instance going down or that app being blocked or browser shannigans
Every time I talked myself into it they ended up raising the rate. I've stopped trying to talk myself into it.
Same here. I'm mostly paying because at least some of the money goes to creators, and I don't want to have to constantly be fighting with the adblocker stuff. I watch a lot of youtube (perhaps more than is healthy) and realistically it does cost Google money to host it.
This is mine too. I use the hell out of it and YouTube music that comes with it. If we look at $/hr, then this is a no-brainer for me.
Same here. I use YouTube a lot so it's nice to have no ads, and the inclusion of YouTube Music is great and I've switched from Spotify because of it.
I watch a lot of YouTube videos and hate ads. It's a pretty good value.
I do also have Spotify, because I had it way before YouTube Premium and all my playlists are there. For how much I listen and discover, also a pretty good value.
Someones' gotta pay for it 💅
I got Yt premium as a side effect of the Google one thing. I don't necessarily need the extra space I got the Google one thing for, but I'll probably keep it because I'm too lazy to clear out my storage and the side perks like Yt premium are probably worth more than I'm spending on one.
Bring in the downvotes, but Spotify. I listen to music several hours a day, both old and new and it helps me discover lots of new music and even genres. For me personally, that's worth the money.
I feel the same. I like not having commercials in my music and being able to listen to a wide variety.
Also offline mode and list syncing. I would die on long flights if I didn't have music to listen to and my tastes change frequently.
Same, I think it's worth it. I rarely listen to the radio, so I get to discover new music with them. And the offline play saves on data when I'm just going around the corner or something.
I've been trying to unravel my Google workspace for months now to head toward proton. I've signed up for so many things that use my workspace for auth
Tons of amazing original content, and very cheap.
I also really like Dropout. I will sub for a few months then put it on pause for a few months, so it's basically half price. The company allegedly treats its staff very well, they produce lots of good shows, very inclusive for queer, disabled, non-white etc people which I love. They also recommend password sharing and stopping your subscription if you can't afford / don't want any more. And all that obviously worked since I'm advertising for free for them 😂
Joined for Dimension 20, stayed for basically everything else.
Same! And if anyone disagrees, feel free to get in the comments! 😉
I joined for Game Changer, but Dimension 20 I've what made me keep my subscription lol
Amazon Prime; I run a business repairing things. I'm small enough that I can't afford to keep everything in stock for various makes/models. Getting it here quickly allows me to repair more machines faster. There are no places to get the parts I need locally.
I know this is the "wrong answer," but YouTube. I watch it a lot, and mostly on my PS in the evenings. If I only watched it in my phone or PC, I wouldn't bother.
I also pay for Spotify for my mom and I, and ProtonVPN/Mail for myself. Oh, and PS+, which I still think is bullshit. 🙄
It's only a 'wrong answer' because people here downvote on an ideological basis. If it works for you, then it's okay 👍
My domain.
It's called a "house" and the subscription is "rent"
But does your so called "house" come with a drawbridge, castle or peasants? I think not!!! \s
$20/year for Nintendo Switch Online. That's $20 more than it should be, but at least it's not nearly as expensive as the other consoles.
Wait.... It's how much? For online access?
And others are more??
I'm a dedicated PC gamer, so I'm out of the loop on what's happening with consoles, but this seems nuts to me
PSN Plus is $80/year, XBox Live is $60/year. And both of those are for the lowest tier.
Ground News because I want to see what's going on in news across the media spectrum and they make it a lot easier.
Discord nitro classic because I don't have a better alternative and I get the features I actually need at half the price I'd pay for the normal subscription.
A VPN because none of your goddamn business.
YouTube premium. Mostly for music but no-ads is nice.
I have the basic iCloud sub but it feels like a scam. I should at least get more storage if I buy more Apple products. If you have two devices your backups get too big for the free storage amount.
I offloaded a bunch of things from iCloud but it becomes a hassle for how cheap their subscription is.
Hulu. Best collection of shows for me, right now.
Spotify. I listen to music constantly, it's a necessity.
Libro.fm for audiobooks, and supporting my local book store.
My gym membership (lumping Zwift in there too). I exercise a lot, like 15+ hours per week. These are part of my chosen lifestyle.
Opensnow. The only phone app I pay for. It's a weather app but better if you're a skier/snowboarder.
RuneScape. I love OSRS and I enjoy playing in my downtime. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.
osrs is the best
MullvadVPN, Posteo, Bitwarden, Hetzner VPS, Hetzner Storage Box, Porkbun domain
A daily newspaper, a monthly computer science paper, internet, electricity, water, gas. That's probably it.
Some of these are yearly but reduced to monthly for ease of viewing
Surprising this thread is so positive so I'll share mine I've gotten downvoted for before:
Discord Nitro.
I use it a lot as I'm active in a bunch of servers. I don't even pay for the expensive one, just the $3/month one and it's TOTALLY worth being able to make emojis of my cat and annoy people with them, here are my favorited and frequently used emojis:
This is a better ad for Nitro than I've ever seen from Discord haha.
I use nitro for emotes, everything else is just them annoying the fuck out of me.
I pay monthly to a local makerspace. Its worth every cent.
Is that like a shared work space?
ProtonMail, Nebula, Backblaze, Parcel, BigNews, Glass, my local paper, local coffee delivery.
I pay for Apple iCloud too but I'm trying to figure out how to get away from it.
Apple Music. It’s just easier than pirating music. You also get Apple Classical which is awesome as classical music can’t be indexed in the same way as regular music.
And Atmos! And 4K music videos! Couldn’t agree more.
Mullvad VPN!
The Atlantic. Because of its magazine heritage, there's the perfect number of new articles per day (5 or 10), all top notch journalism and beautifully written. I look forward to reading a few of them each evening.
Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, protonmail / drive / vpn, Usenet, bitwarden
That's about all I have.
Although I pirate 90% of what tv and movies we watch, I feel like I pay my fair share for internet stuff.
I might sub to a few local streaming sites from time to time. To catch up on tv.
Just proton. VPN + drive + pass is great.
I think I’m gonna swap over to them once my nord runs out. Them or mullvad
Either is better than Nord. Definitely drop Nord.
as much as I hate to admit it. amazon. still if my wife passed I would likely not continue it.
damn
Taxes. They pay fory wifes wage.
"Hello, IRS? Yes, I'd like to cancel my tax subscription, please."
With enough money you can.
Bitwarden.
Annual donation to KDE Foundation.
Donations to a number of my podcast hosts.
Premiumize.
Upvote for bitwarden. I love that service.
I especially love that you can host it yourself if you want. I don't do that right now, but I did in the past for a work thing. It's great.
A gym membership, my mail account (mailbox.org) and Spotify.
Just web hosting.
I'm still paying for kagi because I hope they succeed, but my god the results are fucking dogshit most of the time, especially if your two languages are French and English but you don't live in NA
Also WTF is the rating at the side of the results? If I put it down is that my rating for that site for any search, or my rating for that site for this particular search?
Can't find the answer to that anywhere
I only use it in English but I've found the results to be equal to or better than Google most of the time. I rarely end up checking things in Google after comparing the results for the first few weeks I first started using Kagi, the times I have recently Google has been just as bad (e.g. no results found, or nothing useful) or worse (e.g. a bunch of SEO crap and advertising and whatever other nonsense Google decides to spit up).
My understanding is that the up or down rating pushes results from that domain up or down in your personalized search results for all searches, not just the current search. I flag down things occasionally because they are obvious shit or don't interest me but haven't used the feature much otherwise. I think it could be one of the reasons I find Kagi better than Google though, there's so much crap that just doesn't end up in my results now because I down ranked already. I'm not completely certain that is really how the feature works though, I'd encourage you to contact Kagi support for a definitive answer.
Realdebrid
Mailbox.org
Real-Debrid+Stremio
Humble bundle
Mullvad VPN
JetBrains IDEs.
Usenet (Grandfathered real cheap plan) Brewfather (Excelent recipe manager for beer brewing) Netflix + Spotify (Keeps girls at home happy) Domains (for selfhosting) Backblaze B2 & Cloudflare R3 (Backups)
Yeah that's it
Protonmail
Spotify
Motortrend (now Discovery Plus)
Nebula
An small-time streamer
Amazon Prime - planning to cancel
Some that I use:
I'm kinda interested in watching streams more (to diversify my video watching habits), so am kinda curious about Twitch's ad-free premium plan thing as well...
Of course, there's also donations and patreon/subscribestar/ko-fi subscriptions, but I don't really consider those "subscription services".
Apple One is expensive but my whole family uses it and the only offered service I don’t really use much is Apple News.
I have a subscription to natural gas I really get a lot out of
If you can get 5 people for the Apple One Family plan, it's worth it.
Apple One+
Music, TV, Games, and 50GB storage for $10/month via Verizon.
Prime video
Max. Better than Netflix any day.
Deezer. Last year I listened to 770hrs of music. The majourity of that using the suggestion algorithm. I couldn't buy that many albums and I certainly couldn't name the all the albums I've pulled songs from.
At home I'm an album person. But, in the distractions of everyday life keep blasting singles at me and I'll wait for something to catch my ear.
Also, Deez nutz jokes are so easy.
Spotify and DropOut for me!
I subscribe to two podcast networks on patreon. I could listen for free, but I feel it's worth paying for the several hours a month of entertainment I get from them.
I've been using Trade coffee for the last 2 years or so. The subscription basically amounts to free shipping.
The selection is good, and I get something new every time I order without having to go to multiple websites to see who has what in stock that I'd like.
I don't think their recommendations are that great, but the filter options make it easy to find something I am interested in.
Same. And the coffee is really really good
Crunchyroll. Largest catalog I’ve seen and I don’t have to sail the seas for everything. Also enjoy all the dubs.
Signal Lemmy Pi-hole Bitwarden YouTube + a whole raft of creators
Proton Unlimited, Mullvad VPN and Kagi are all great. Standard Notes is a great app, too.
VPN
Logseq sync, need it for work, and its only £3.74 (5 cows for the Americans). Tried proton VPN plus as well, too expensive for me being £8.38, but its fine because their free tier is generous and I can do video calls with plus aswell. Food is also a good subscription, you can find food shops everywhere with great variety, but the price of the overall spend is higher, but if you buy high volume low cost food you can combat this price increase; some people like to spend extra and add alcohol to their subscription, but i don't see the appeal unless its liquor shots like Apple sour or Baileys, because they taste good.
Mullvad.
Trade coffee. I enjoy trying new coffees. And it's easy to pause the service if I'm traveling a lot and picking up coffees on my own.
Proton - Mail, VPN, Calendar, Passwords, Notes
PBS - Gotta support public broadcasting.
The Satanic Temple - Helping support women's rights, religious rights, compassion.
Usenet - Cheaper and better content than streaming services
Inkarnate. It's a tool for making fantasy maps for those who haven't heard of it. I think they have an extremely reasonable price per year for it.
Amazon prime and all the million services that bundle with it.
Udio. There aren't yet any locally-runnable music generation tools like it, and even if they were they'd have to be pretty darned good to rival Udio's quality. I make a lot of use of it for tabletop roleplaying games, but also "just for fun." It's only $10 a month.
Marine Traffic - I live by the sea.
Proton Mail - trying to give up Gmail.
Bitwarden - had to stop using the same password for everything.
My Row Counter - for knitting, it's a fantastic app.
I don't subscribe to much as I try to avoid subscriptions
Bit warden subbed as soon as last pass went to shit Duolingo been studying Spanish every day Crunchyroll anime High-dive anime not on Crunchyroll
Real-Debrid. No more paying for compressed streaming services!
$50 a year to Starcraft Broodwar Patreon that casts Korean language games into English.
Whole home cleansing. They send a guy out quarterly who assesses each room and blows sage around hot spots. My home isn't very active but I sleep better at night knowing that there aren't dark energies in risk corridors.
Technically, none.
But I do regularly buy gift cards for my self to get Geoguessr, I just refuse the whole subscription model.
If companies offered a one year pass without a subscription attached I believe they would have more customers.
They could even make it a few € more expensive than the normal subscription price for that period and I believe it would work fine.
A few weeks ago I found that you can get a lifetime pass for Nebula and Curiosity Stream for a resonable cost (a few hundred USD IIRC) and I am seriously considering it.
Uber Meats. Nothing but gabagool on demand.
But seriously, a VPN.
Disney+
I'm learning a language as a hobby and Disney+ BY FAR is the most consistent in having dubs and subs available in a variety of languages. I haven't actually watched anything that didn't have it (for the language I'm learning). Whereas most things on other streaming sites don't tend to have it at all unless it's a foreign film and that's the original language.
For me, it's easily worth the money just for that
Spotify. I started paying because I got fed up with shuffling my mp3 files from one place to another.
80% of the time I'm not angry at them. This day and age that is a high score. Hey Spotify: if you want to improve your score fix your recommendations during Eurovision Song Contest. There is nothing in my playlists that suggests that I'll even be remotely interested.
Yes these are technically subscription services.
The rest of my subscriptions are hit-or-miss. Disney+ because my fiancee likes keeping it I guess technically qualifies.
I donate about $5/month to a bunch of nonprofits that I benefit from.
My career wouldn’t exist without these folks, so it’s the least I can do.
I have 1% of my income that goes to open source projects
The most righteous tithing.
Great selection. I feel if you have the means to do so, drop a few dollars their way each month. You'll likely spend more on a night out drinking anyway 😜.