I try and keep subscriptions down to a minimum, although there are several that I think are essential to my workflow. I'm interest to know what everyone's essential subscriptions are.
- rsync.net for backup (although I took their lifetime subscription offer so I no longer actively pay them).
- Self-hosting related costs (rented servers and domain names).
- Buttondown for sending out blog updates. (I was generously gifted a lifetime subscription, but had I not been I would likely have paid for it eventually anyway.)
- The Economist for moderately-biased news spanning the entire world.
I also pay for Spotify, though I increasingly doubt whether it is giving me more value than purchasing the music I want directly. I suppose I do it out of convenience rather than economic gain.
This feels like a very HN set of subscriptions...
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Things I don't pay for:
- Excalidraw: I didn't even know that was possible.
- Google Photos: it keeps bugging me to, and I keep intending to exchange it for Immich.
- YouTube: I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but NewPipe and adblocker goes a long way.
- LLMs: I find API credits to be better value.
- VPN: I run OpenVPN on the closet server. That said, I have moved and I don't trust the new home ISP as much so this might change.
- Password manager: KeePassXC and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Notes: Org and Orzly and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Cloud storage: SyncThing and a closet server is sufficient.
Agreed - There certainly are other apps that provide better discovery, but nothing that is as seamlessly integrated to where I'm already listening to music.
YouTube subscription is great but very overpriced. Streaming services are much cheaper and they produce original content. I just can’t justify double the price of Apple TV so I can watch content Google hasn’t produced.
Yeah I begrudgingly paid increase when it went from $19 to $29 NZD a month. My friend in Aus just got an email saying they were putting his up to $39 from $29 a month… it’s not worth that to me. If anything it’s a great excuse to watch less on there.
If you're using a Samsung device then you can use Screen Curtain within Samsung's Good Guardians application on the Galaxy Store, which allows you to play media with the screen turned off.
Agentic stuff is probably the exemption to this because it chews tokens like nobody's business. For average prompting, API is the way to go. I've spent an average of around $7.50/mo between OAI and Claude, and that's using o3 and Opus for most queries.
Personally nothing - a one off payment for software is fine.
Subscription based software - it's what I do for a day job but I'm not interested in any more monthly money drains than the bare minimum - ie mortgage, rates and utilities.
Same, I even have a "pay as you go" phone deal which means I have a working mobile phone that can receive calls for €5 every 6 months (If I pay less than that it will be disconnected)
People are commenting services as well, guess I'm adding to it. These are the only services I pay for.
Google One. Google photos is just magic, cheaper storage elsewhere just doesn't cut it. Also why I won't be switching to ios anytime soon. First party solutions always feel better.
I dont use icloud for photos and never get nagged about it. I do pay the 99 cents/month for extended icloud for general stuff. I never have to open google photos to sync, it just happens.
I subscribe to all three products from the Wallaby team.
- Console Ninja. Inspect runtime values on any line of TS/JS code by putting breakpoints on the source. Inspect values, errors, and stacktraces next to their corresponding lines without leaving VSCode/Cursor. This works well with frontend or backend TS/JS, so in a NextJS app I can inspect anything without leaving the editor. No more checking console logs in Chrome dev tools. I found this tool invaluable when I switched to React and wanted insight into what data the components contained between renders. Also has a MCP server so Cursor can have access to all these runtime values and errors too. https://console-ninja.com/
- WallabyJS. Similar, but a test runner that runs tests as you type, and can display values and test failures inline. Also with a MCP server to give tools like Cursor feedback on runtime values and test failures inline data for quick iterations. https://wallabyjs.com/blog/wallaby-mcp.html
- Quokka. Similar concept, but a TS/JS playground for prototyping code. Can temporarily install and later discard NPM dependencies for trying out libraries. Snaps allow fenced blocks of prototype code to be immediately evaluated inside existing codebases, then discarded when not needed. https://quokkajs.com/
I think Console Ninja and Quokka also have free versions with some Pro features missing.
Those who have been around here for a while might remember Bret Victor presentations and the kickstarter for the LightTable IDE. To me, the Wallaby tools are effectively that. Runtime insight, inline as you develop.
Curious about GitKraken, I've tried it around ~2018 and couldn't see why i'd pay for it. I has nice "visualisations" but nothing that actually helped my workflow.
With one fee I can disable all ads for my whole family from every single device we use.
IMO worth it vs. having to figure out why some video isn't working. Or being forced to watch a shitty 2 minute interstitial ad when watching Youtube from my Apple TV.
I think the family plan has great value if you have family members that wouldn't otherwise pay for it. Gifting others with less ads in their lives is a significant win.
Outside Magazine. I know it's strange to include a magazine subscription here, but they keep buying software companies and giving their subscribers complementary access. I enjoy planning hikes with their Gaia GPS app.
Essentials: my own domain for emails, Fastmail, Bitwarden, Google for 100GB of storage.
Less essential: Obsidian, Kagi (this one may be bumped to the "essentials" at some point), a few VPS on Hetzner to run some projects, domain names for said projects.
Just because I like them and want to support them: Signal
- Claude Code as a programming aid.
- Fastmail for email.
- FacileThings as a personal management system.
- Obsidian with a personal knowledge system (you need to subscribe if you want your notes synced across all your devices).
- Office 365, even if it's just to sync all your files with OneDrive.
- Apple Music.
FreeFileSync: https://freefilesync.org/ (free, but I got the supporter edition because comfy software)
In those cases, the free alternatives are just worse than the paid tools.
Aside from that, mostly just VPSes (Hetzner, maybe Contabo if really on a budget) and domains (used to use NameCheap, Porkbun was kinda better, moved over to INWX cause EU option) which are good enough to run whatever FOSS I need instead of subscriptions, like Gitea and Drone CI/Woodpecker CI instead of other forges, Nextcloud instead of Dropbox, Sonatype Nexus instead of Docker Hub, Uptime Kuma and Zabbix and Matomo and Skywalking/GlitchTip instead of similar observability solutions, Grav instead of managed Wordpress for blogging, Kanboard/OpenProject instead of cloud Jira, RustDesk instead of RealVNC and so on. E-mail is a mixed bag: the free cloud ones are good enough for personal usage and self-hosted Docker mail server is better for no rate limits, e.g. alerts from my monitoring to my own address.
Recently, some of the AI cloud subscriptions because getting my own GPUs in my homelab is beyond my means (maybe once Intel Arc Pro B60 are available): primarily Google's Gemini model or Claude's Sonnet although lower cost options would also be quite nice, maybe ERNIE-4.5 or Qwen3-Coder or whatever. I actually used to pay for GitHub Copilot but am also looking in the direction of just using the APIs of the various providers (or OpenRouter) directly to avoid fixes fees and have more lenient rate limits.
Kagi, PurelyMail, and a VPS of your choice to host everything else you might need (I’ve settled on SSDNodes [1], good performance and pretty cheap). Probably also something for backups (Backblaze B2 or rsync.net seem decent).
Fantastical - I came full circle to Google Calendar
I've bought quite a few useful mac and ios apps on one time payment. I'm interested in rsync.net and maybe setup a self hosting with my friends and family.
nord/mullvad, bitwarden, claude code (max), openai, youtube music, google drive (for the storage space).
Got a few lifetime payments too for various desktop utility apps
I pay for other ones on an as needed basis, but my tools change based on what i'm working on. Usually always have a render and supabase plan going for various hosted toy apps.
I get why people like to charge a subscription, but I will not pay a subscription for something that doesn't have ongoing operation cost by the vendor. If he needs to pay for a storage/servers/compute monthly it's reasonable to ask for a subscription.
However a subscription for a screenshot app? Really? It's on my computer, charge me once or I won't pay the "just 10$/month" == 120$/year for a screenshot app is waaay overpriced.
- Kagi for search and translation.
- rsync.net for backup (although I took their lifetime subscription offer so I no longer actively pay them).
- Self-hosting related costs (rented servers and domain names).
- Buttondown for sending out blog updates. (I was generously gifted a lifetime subscription, but had I not been I would likely have paid for it eventually anyway.)
- The Economist for moderately-biased news spanning the entire world.
I also pay for Spotify, though I increasingly doubt whether it is giving me more value than purchasing the music I want directly. I suppose I do it out of convenience rather than economic gain.
This feels like a very HN set of subscriptions...
-----
Things I don't pay for:
- Excalidraw: I didn't even know that was possible.
- Google Photos: it keeps bugging me to, and I keep intending to exchange it for Immich.
- YouTube: I'm not a heavy YouTube user, but NewPipe and adblocker goes a long way.
- LLMs: I find API credits to be better value.
- VPN: I run OpenVPN on the closet server. That said, I have moved and I don't trust the new home ISP as much so this might change.
- Password manager: KeePassXC and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Notes: Org and Orzly and SyncThing is sufficient.
- Cloud storage: SyncThing and a closet server is sufficient.