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Comment by st1x7 | Hacker News Reader

Many of these are either optional or compete with one or more of the other services. Podcasts are either completely free or they should go under Spotify/Patreon. Twitch/Youtube subscriptions and Patreon are entirely optional. And I don't see how you can justify both Youtube Premium and Spotify at the same time or all three of Netflix/Disney+/Prime - I just wouldn't have the time to make any use of all these subscriptions in a month.

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We subscribe to all of those things. Netflix as the primary streaming service. Disney+ because the kids love Frozen. Youtube so the kids don't get blasted by ads on their iPads. Spotify because it's the only real music streaming option. And Amazon Prime, not for entertainment but 2-day shipping and free grocery delivery.

You're talking about $52 a month. For easily 20+ hours of entertainment (or time savings in terms of Amazon Prime). In terms of quality of life, it's much more impactful than say upgrading from a Subaru to a Mercedes. Despite costing an order of magnitude less.

Yes, I think you're right. Having all of them doesn't feel redundant when we're talking about a whole family and the cost isn't that high.

If you get a pihole you can stop the ads for the kids and save a few bucks.

Yeah, that's a great point. I have a raspberry pi that I've been meaning to setup for a while now.

Though the other advantage with Youtube Premium is that you can cache videos offline in the kids app. That's super-helpful for long trips. (Not that there's been many in 2020.)

Can pihole really block YouTube ads? A quick googling suggests not.

Regrettably, it can't.

Or use YouTube Vanced.

Individual podcast creators might be via Patreon, but larger podcast networks can and do have their own donation systems. Same principle and probably a similar amount of money, they just aggregate it between multiple shows and don't want to pay a cut to Patreon.

I know Relay.fm and Radiotopia are both set up for that, presumably there are others.

All of them are optional as you don't need any of those. The thing is that at the end you have to choose, of course some combinations are better/make more sense than others, I'm not saying you should have any.

By optional I meant that you can use the service with or without paying. (Example: donating to Patreon or subbing on Twitch is optional; paying for Netflix isn't optional since you have to pay in order to watch anything on Netflix). Obviously using any of them in the first place is optional too.

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