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.worldEnglish
    12·
    3 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.xyzEnglish
      72·
      3 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.xyzEnglish
      12·
      3 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.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 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.

  • muntedcrocodile@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    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

    • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • muntedcrocodile@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Yeah I been looking for a frontend that can use an agent style preferably written in langchain capable of such things. I just been using Sydney but its been lab optimised to far and Microsoft are fuckers.

        • OofN@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          I don’t know if it will meet your needs, but I’ve recently picked up a license to TypingMind and I use the OpenAI API - it’s a very good tool IMO.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      How do I use the API? I’d be willing to pay for ChatGPT pro if it was cheaper, especially if it was pay per use instead of pay per month

      • muntedcrocodile@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I use better chatgpt its a git repo that Github will host for free for you then google opening api and get urself an api key. Its pay per use u get gpt3.5 as well as gpt4. I still use gpt3.5turbo for most things this cos its way cheaper than 4.

        • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Thanks, I’ll look into that! I also recently found an easy way to run local LLMs on my computer, so I can mix and match.

  • darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    3 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.devEnglish
        1·
        3 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.comEnglish
        1·
        3 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.pubEnglish
    6·
    3 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.worldEnglish
    51·
    3 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.socialEnglish
      3·
      3 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.pubEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

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

      • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 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.

    • Quexotic@infosec.pubEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

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

  • Plopp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 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.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 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.worksEnglish
      1·
      3 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.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 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.worksEnglish
          12·
          3 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.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 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.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 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.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 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.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 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.zipEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

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