VPN
Your own email domain + an account at a privacy respecting email service is more than worth it. Avoids the privacy nightmare that is using Google/Microsoft for your email, and gives you the flexibility to change email providers on a whim if your current one starts doing anything you don’t like.
Electricity has been a pretty good subscription. Zero sales or promos ever though.
What? We get sales, like every night.
Kagi, next DNS, mullvad
If you’re using mullvad, why not also use their DNS? Just curious
Dropout is one I enjoy and they do profit sharing internally, which is nice to see.
Library membership
Email to avoid email providers from companies like Google or Microsoft.
It’s a great deal too! My own domain was 50€ for 10 years, and Purelymail hosting is 10 bucks per year.
I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.
If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?
Your email is the root of your digital identity, and pretty much everything in your digital life is tied to it. If your email is provided by Big Email, they own your digital identity and it exists at their whim, with no recourse if it gets taken away, compromised, or abused.
If you own your domain and pay for mail hosting, you can at least move your email between providers if something goes wrong, and have some recourse with those providers since you’re a customer instead of a product.
They get access to all emails used for banking, shopping, social media accounts, etc. Depends on if you are fine with them being able to build a detailed profile off your emails.
Ads is like the least problematic aspect.
You have zero privacy and also generate power for them to do the things they do, which is gargle trump’s sharty grey scrote and thus empower trump
Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.
YouTube family subscription. It’s YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn’t changed in several years.
Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.
Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.
Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I’ll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won’t change.
Online backup. Because it will happen, eventually.
The worst advice IMHO. You can’t cancel that types of subscription anytime, otherwise you lost your data. will you pay for it for the rest of your life? Will your grandchildren pay for it to keep granny’s photos?
I think the idea is to use paid online backup as another layer of safety. You still keep your data on your devices, but in case your entire house burns down, you have the online backup.
Online backups should be an absolute last resort in the case of something catastrophic like a house fire, not your only copy of important data. Losing them should just mean a little less redundancy in that regard.
You still can push your backups to another provider, it’ll take a bit of time depending on this size but it’s perfectly doable. It’s not easy to have backups in separate locations otherwise.
Columbia House.
A good VPN that values privacy is a pretty easy answer
Random one, but I get a lot of use out of a boardgamesarena premium membership. I’ve got a few mates that I can’t see IRL as much any more, so it’s nice to be able to jump on a video call and play some board games. Only one in the group needs a membership to unlock all the games and it’s about £30 for the year. Easily better value than a few hours in a pub
I have other subscriptions I find varying levels of useful for me, but hard to argue for many of them being particularly good value.
Subscription-based services are in general worth the money, if
- you can cancel the subscription any time
- you use it, because you actually want it
- you know exactly what you get out of it
E.g. it doesn’t matter shit how much content on Netflix is terrible, if I use it for one month precisely for that one new show, a new season or a few movies I’m interested - just about anything that makes up an actual reason to starting the subscription.
I’m happy to give Qobuz my money for providing an excellent music library and be the best paying streaming service for the musicians that I listen to.
Nebula is pretty cool, though I have the lifetime pass. Or patreon.
Nebula really is great.
For those (like me) who didn’t know what it was, Nebula is a creator-owned and operated video streaming service.
NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you’ll unlock a fun new mni game: DNS White List Tuning.
Pihole
- wireguard
That works too. I’ve had a pihole for years, and that was great as long as you’re on wifi. Also, it required a little bit of admin work, which I usually forgot to do. On the other hand, it’s really good if you want to know exactly what’s going on. Recently, I came to realize, I don’t really mind outsourcing this service to the pros.
If you’re scrolling while waiting on a bus stop or while sitting on a train, you need to use something else. I guess you could connect to your pi from anywhere, maybe even set up your VPN and all that. I’m sure there’s a away around that problem, but that would obviously require some reading, setting up, tinkering and admin work. Technically doable, but I just didn’t feel like doing all that. I’m definitely not an IT pro, which means that I end up screwing things up in hilarious ways all the time.
Also, opening up my pi to the whole internet is a scary thought. If I set up my pi like that, that would definitely require quite a bit of reading. That’s what ultimately lead me to pay for this service.
