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
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I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP
Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.
At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I’d prefer something Foss honestly might just have to write it myself at this point.
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
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.
Philosophical monthly support:
- Grapheneos
- Eff
- Tor
- Briar
- Molly
Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.
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.
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta.
Everyone’s mum’s only fans for online gaming
- 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.
I’ve been using sync.com for a couple of years now for my large music files storage and playback. Thinking of going all in on the unlimited plan to add on all my family files. Curious what your experience is with delayed syncing. Occasionally I find something just doesn’t sync to the cloud and I have to play about with PC on/off, connect to Mobile hotspot, clear cache etc to get it to work. Makes me wonder if that’s happening with files where I don’t realize it until it’s too late.
Basically, how robust is it for you?
Subscribe to?
None.
That is out of priciple to me, I refuse to have automatically renews subscriptions on my card.
I will however buy gift cards for services and buy new as I need them.
For that, I have one.
Geoguessr.
That game has helped me a shitload when I have been depressed, and now that I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can’t in the future.
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
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…
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.
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.
It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.
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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).
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.
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.
CGNAT should be illegal.
Yeah, I can set up a VPN pretty easily, it’s just annoying that I need to do it.
Namecheap supports ddns out of the box too, no additional service required. You just need a cron job that calls their API to update your IP periodically.
Ah perfect! Thanks for the additional info
- Bitwarden
- Racknerd VPS
- Backblaze B2
- PIA VPN
- Purelymail
- Usenet
- ChatGPT API
And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.
How do you all use ChatGPT API? Any tools that interface well with it?
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
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…
various integrations in documents, notes
Tell us about these integrations please
Nothing complicated. Nextcloud assistant with nextcloud office and generating emails in fairemail.
Spotify? Does that count? Literally the only thing I subscribe to for money.
100% it does. The right music makes the difference between a productive day and a total waste.
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.
From what I’ve heard self hosting your email though can be a big PITA so paying someone for email is not a terrible choice. Self hosting you need to carefully manage the system and reputation to make sure your email that you send actually gets delivered, and doesn’t arrive in spam.
Self hosting email has been a hard no for way over a decade at this point, maybe two. It’s a terrible idea.
I recently swapped over from Dashlane to Proton, and I don’t regret it at all. Plus I can decouple my stuff from Google, and use my own domain for my personal email, which I can then give out to individuals and hide behind aliases for companies/services. I rather like it. The VPN seems solid enough too, though I’ve nary a use for such things.
Yeah there are many great things about Proton. It’s just so damn expensive. Had it been like $7 per month (charged monthly) I’d already been a customer. I’m guessing the VPN carries the highest cost for Proton, so it’d be nice to have the option for the whole suite except the VPN.
Yeah. I don’t really feel like VPNs are that necessary, though I also sort of get having it as a product. For me it wasn’t really that tough a choice; I already paid $5 monthly for Dashlane, Proton Pass was a bit of an upgrade in terms of features (though they don’t seem to check haveibeenpwned like Dashlane), and it came with a bunch of other services I really could use.
All that said, I believe they have a free-tier for all of their services, so you could always dip your toes in, see how you feel about it, and decide later if you think it’s worth it or not?
As a complete aside, your username has me convinced to buy some plopp. It is Saturday after all.
Oh I use a VPN 24/7 and wouldn’t have it any other way (even though I also don’t think it’s strictly necessary), but I already have a provider that I trust, is fast and cost only like <$3/month I think.
I’m thinking of trying Proton Pass for free which I think you can do, but the main attraction is to get away from the Google suite and incorporate a more privacy focused one. Having a calendar, generating unlimited email aliases to store in the password manager etc.
Go have some lördagsplopp!
Yeah, I don’t think Proton would be my go-to choice for VPN when it comes to privacy. I’ve heard stuff about them actually keeping logs. In that case I’d be more interested in Mullvad since they just run their service on RAM. I did give the Proton VPN a spin, and at least as far as speeds go, it’s pretty fast. They give you a notice if you use the “Secure Core” feature, stating that the connection speed might end up being a bit slow, but it still seems to reach the cap of my wifi (500mbit) so it honestly isn’t that bad. So for streaming region locked stuff it seems to do the job. “Secure Core” as far as I can tell, just tunnels your connection through several nodes, I’m not well versed enough on networking to know how that could possibly improve security, because to me it sounds like adding more points of failure.
I do really like the email service and the password manager, and I’m sure I’ll get some use from the drive as well at some point. When signing up for things, the password manager automatically suggests masking your email. Would’ve killed for something like that ten years ago; my gmail account is flooded with useless BS that it’s nice to finally move away from it.
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- Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
- A Domain name provider for my web domain
That’s it. I don’t quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.
