I'll pay for Mullvad and Usenet/indexer
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Hetzner VPS and their Storage Box, that is, managed Nextcloud instance.
Mailbox.org email service.
Dr demento show. For 15.00 a month you get new and all old episodes.
This man has earned my money for all the years of entertainment and laughs he has provided.
Star trekkin across the universe!
YouTube Premium. No ads and the creators I watch get paid more.
Yes, I'm aware of all the apps out there that give you the Premium perks without actually paying for it. Here's the thing: the VAST majority of my watching is done on my TV via an Apple TV and I really CBA to go through all the hoops to make any of those apps work with my setup.
I don't watch any other streaming services and I don't watch cable / network TV. I'm okay paying for Premium to get the best experience.
I don’t like it, but YouTube family is by far the most bang for buck for our family in hours watched vs price.
And not having to watch any shitty ass ads on any YouTube client wherever I log in is amazing.
I pay for that too but I wouldn't say I'm HAPPY about paying for it. Because I remember when YouTube used to be free and had no ads.
It's still free and with no ads if you use Firefox + uBlock Origin on desktop, ReVanced on Android, SmartTube on Android TV.
They were not profitable though, you can only do that for so long before you fold and then no one gets anything.
Bit warden & Nabu Casa. Both great & they support really good OS projects
Mealime.
Meal planning app. Has a database of hundreds of easy to make, healthy, tasty recipes. Tell it how many people you want to cook for, for how many days. It builds a whole meal plan, adjusts the quantities of all the recipies, builds a shopping list for you, and will even forward the list to Instacart for you if you're into that.
It also builds the meal plan based on reducing food waste, so if you have one recipe that uses half an onion, it will automatically find another recipe that uses the other half. You can also define ingredients you don't like/allergic to and it will avoid recipes that use those.
MASSIVELY increased the amount of at-home cooking I do by getting rid of all the boring/annoying parts. Kinda like Blue Apron, but you just go buy your own groceries. Best $2 a month I spend.
is there an online service that eliminates capitalism?
YouTube Premium.
I pay for this, and two other family members pay for two other services. Theirs have each blocked the other 2 of us... So what was once 3 of us buying 3 family plans has become just me doing it. And the second YouTube blocks them, I'm canceling it.
Dreamhost.
More than a decade ago they had a big fuck up where they accidentally charged tons of users multiple times when their contracts weren't when finished. So one day I woke up and they'd taken a few hundred dollars from my account. That put me in the negatives.
When I called them, they verified my identity, and let me complain a little. (I'm not much of a complainer. But their customer service person was great.) They paid me back the charged amount, and asked how much I'd had in overdraft fees, and paid me that too. And they let my hosting plan date reset at that date for the year-long renewal. So they basically have me like 9 months on top of it.
Mind you, I wasn't using much at the time. Just a few blogs and a podcast. So it's not like they're not making free money off of me. But they handled it so damn well. Didn't even ask to see a bank statement about my overdraft fees. Just "and how much was that? Got it." I'm sure it was just a case of cost and smart business... But fuck yeah, reward smart business.
Proton - the whole suite. I use it all.
crabshack.ai - an easier, better version of openclaw/ personal ai agent.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket tho
Any tips for how to not end up doing this?
donations to soma.fm, listener supported free music streaming/internet radio out of San Francisco
My wife finally got me to give up my 20 year old tshirt I had from them. It was more hole than shirt. I should order another.
They are awesome! Feels like a little island of the old internet.
Email.
As someone who has been self hosting some stuff and generally aspires to work in IT, it is simply unfeasible to expect services like this for free
Would it cost me less to host such a server divided by x users? Yes
Do I have x users I can sustainably service without burning out? No.
So its either a managed server for like 15€ per month + a bunch of work or a paid email provider, in my case fastmail.
What does paid email offer over all the free options?
Email addresses, masked email addresses, folders and email rules for where to put Them, storage, etc
Services only or one time purchase apps too?
Imgur - $2/mo to get rid of ads. Ads are what causes the app to be crashy. No ads, no crashes. It's absolutely worth it to me for that price.
Ultimate Guitar. I got a lifetime membership for like 30 bucks over a decade ago and I use that shit all the time. Their pro-tabs are awesome.
Damn. Looks like they ended the lifetime sub in 2018. I just picked up my guitar for the first time in probably 15 years after retrieving it from my parents' basement. I remembered U-G pro tabs but it seemed so much more pervasive than before. But kinda seemed worth it. Idk about 30/yr at this time. I quickly remembered why my interest faded: my go-to music doesn't sound great on a single guitar.
Funny sequence, though. I was trying to find tabs for current interests. My recent stream has had more Slipknot than 2010. I'm used to lots of Drop-D tuning and don't enjoy adjusting. Turns out, between either Duality or Before I Forget and then The Devil In I, I got to enjoy detuning to Drop C and then Drop B. Didn't even know those existed. 5 strings 5 frets lower and 1 string down 7.
30 bucks a year seems a bit steep, I don’t know if it’d be worth it at that point over buying a tab book every now and then, or just using the free version. They still have a ton of great and accurate tabs and you can build your own library if you setup a free account.
I can see Slipknot sounding a bit incomplete on just guitar. Zoom makes some good multi effect processor pedals that can sample and do drum loops, but that gets a bit technical and sort of a whole thing in and of itself, I have a great time fucking around with mine, though. Not sure what your metal tastes are, but if you’re into any doom or sludge that stuff translates well to just guitar practice and playing, a lot of three piece bands with heavy guitar emphasis. Wizard Fight by Weedeater is a quick and fun song to learn, if you’re looking for something simple and heavy to get back into things with.
Also, C standard is king.
Proton and Signal. I think that's it.
My domain names and web/email server hosting.
Not having to worry about all the horrors one is subjected to when they depend on a free service for online presence, email, etc. is worth a great deal to me. Any free service can disappear or kick you off at a whim leaving you with nothing, social media sites and apps come and go (and/or enshittify) while as a consumer of a paid service you not only have a quality of service beyond freebies (privacy, no ads, what I want to put online is exactly what goes online unadulterated, people who want to find or contact me can always do so at my own site on my own terms) you also have consumer protections if things go wrong.
While I'm not self-hosting my web stuff on my own hardware, the host I use is a small business owned by an old friend and fellow hacker which means I'm not at the mercy of some faceless corporation's TOS either. My host and I see eye-to-eye on what's appropriate for me to put out there via her machinery, and she's also not extrajudicially sharing my private crap with fascist government forces like the big tech monoliths and most free services do.
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