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
  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    7 months ago

    I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.

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

    • Sagar Acharya@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      7 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.

    • Sagar Acharya@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      7 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.

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago
    • Bitwarden
    • Racknerd VPS
    • Backblaze B2
    • PIA VPN
    • Purelymail
    • Usenet
    • ChatGPT API

    And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.

      • RonSijm@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        I assume they’re talking about this api

        Any tools that interface well with it?

        Lots of tools, but it depends on where you want to use it. For example, inside Obsidian you can use it as a text generator

        Inside VSCode you can use something like AI Genie

        If you just want to use it raw, you can use postman

      • darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        My main use is chatgptbox with my instance of searxng. Also comes in handy when looking for a shell command or script with ai-shell.

        Then there’s the various integrations in documents, notes, etc…

  • viking@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    7 months ago
    • 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.

  • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Manalith@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 months ago

      The phone app has it’s problems at times, things like resetting to the main page, and other little nuisances, but I really like Nebula, went so far as to pay for their lifetime deal.

    • dmtalon@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      Was Google one (including yt premium) a limited time deal? I don’t see them connected right now.

      • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 months ago

        You know? That might have been the case. I was an old Google Music subscriber, and I think when that rolled over to YT Music the subscription package bundled in YouTube premium. Later when I bit on the Google One subscription later, I think it was on a promotional offer. I remember it was about $100 at the time, and it aligned with some storage needs U had so why not?

        I just looked and it seems the Google 1 and YT sub’s are billed separately. It was a while ago and my memory is hazy, but I’m into Google services for about $30 a month these days, and that’s what I pay for.

    • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      100% it does. The right music makes the difference between a productive day and a total waste.

  • Plopp@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    7 months ago

    Only a 3.50€ VPS on OVH. Gets the job done. For music I just use firehawk52’s Deezer ARLs to download the music. For TV shows/movies the obvious is piracy. The whole subscription model drives me away from services.

    • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      Do you off-site backup as well? I don’t have the kind of money necessary to self host an on network and an off-site backup of my data…

      • thorbot@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 months ago

        I used wasabi BackUp service years ago, it was about $50 a month for my 7 TB, and it took over a month to upload the initial back up. Now, I have about five times that much storage used up and there’s no way I would pay $250 a month for that. All stuff I’ve downloaded from Torrents, so if something bad happened I could get it back again. I save all my torrent files so I could re-download them fairly easily. I also run a raid 6 configuration so I can tolerate up to two drives failing before I lose data.

        • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          7 months ago

          RAID is not a backup, NAS is not a backup. Obviously there is no reason to backup readily available torrents but it doesn’t sound like you’re backing up at all. Self hosting data integrity is a much harder task than implied.

          • thorbot@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            7 months ago

            It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      7 months ago

      Do you have any decent options for routing a DNS name to a local machine behind NAT? I usually do this with a VPS, but I really don’t like the terms at a lot of VPS services (forced arbitration everywhere).

      • thorbot@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        I paid namecheap for a domain, it was $50 for 8 years. So I guess I lied, I did pay for that ages ago. Then, I use my UniFi Dream Machine firewall to route traffic to my Plex and game servers within my network. It’s great because I have Minecraft.mydomain.com, files.mydomain.com and palworld.mydomain.com that people use to access things. Do note that this requires a static IP from your ISP unless you want to get a dynamic dns service running which isn’t too bad.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 months ago

          Yeah, I don’t have access to dynamic DNS because I’m behind a NAT (ISP gives me a 10.x.x.x address). I can pay for a static IP, but I’d really rather not.

          I was hoping there was something like Tailscale where I could forward ports over a VPN and use the VPN host’s IP for my DNS. I can kinda get there with Tailscale’s public DNS, but I can’t use my own (well, I could use a CNAME, but I’d use their certs).

          Anyway, it’s a temporary thing since I should be getting a new municipal fiber connection soon.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list