Ask HN: Your [paid]Subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Your [paid]Subscriptions

17 pointssujayk_3319 comments

Which magazines, blogs, and premium services have you subscribed to that you think are worthy of spending money for?

I’d pay for jetbrains if it wasn’t paid by my employer. And thinking about moving to paid alternatives of gmail and dropbox.

That’s it.

I don’t understand why people pay for news media when you can find same news but even less biased for free everywhere.

And all “added value” of media is nothing but snake oil, that they spend millions trying to market and confuse your common sense.

Also I don’t understand why people pay for blogs or newsletters that were made with tge goal of making money of you.

Virtually all real niche experts I know either share knowledge for free or don’t share at all.

And most of the general wisdom and knowledge you can get is already there in public domain sources.

  - Le Monde (a French newspaper that is not bad and relatively neutral on most topics, but not about everything)
  - CanardPC (a French videogames newspaper for not young people. Reading their video games tests is more entertaining for me than playing most games).
  - ChatGPT Plus
  - GitHub Copilot
  - Google Photos (they take care of the storage, I had enough with failing hard drives).
  - Strava
  - iRacing (online racing video game with humans trying to race clean).

What I should cancel or I have cancelled recently:

  - Microsoft Game Pass: too many disappointing big games in a row, and not many good games. I can save money by buying the games I really want to play instead of having a subscription.
  - F1 TV: I tried but I'm bored with Verstappen always winning. I think at this point he is bored too.
  - Kagi: nice filtered and sorted results but too expensive for a metasearch engine that mostly scraps other free search engines.
  - MidJourney: ChatGPT with Dall.e 3 gives better results. They are not photorealistic but that can be fixed using StableDiffusion.

I'm in a similar position - accuracy of MJ v5.2 is leagues behind DALL-E 3, and I throw a controlnet on SDXL with DALLE images and can get MJ quality. Will probably cancel MJ sub soon.

We've recently tried Game Pass and it's been saving us money, though not in the way that it's usually framed. We've been using it to demo games that we were thinking about buying. Multiple massive disappointments have probably saved us £150 on the games we will NOT be buying and I suspect it will save us twice that amount by the time we've gone through the catalogue and cancelled our account.

May I ask whats is your use for ChatGPT Plus ?

ChatGPT is no doubt amazing but so far I havent found a use case for paying Premium.

I still value my subscription to The Economist, and Financial Times. A bit pricy but I feel caught up and the content is minimal compared to something like WSJ that is overwhelming with content I do not want to look at. I look at the price premium as freeing up my time searching and reading other material.

I also recommend the Financial Times. It's not perfect and definitely still has its own viewpoint, but the quality and matter-of-factness of the articles is miles beyond the omnipresent biases of the NYT, WSJ, and most other papers I've read. The business news is also (as you'd expect) excellent.

Economic History Review: https://ehs.org.uk

I pay for Netflix, a local gym, a maintenance contract for my boiler and a membership in my local public library

Jetbrains IDE, Spotify for the great community playlists, Google One for the storage, 1Password, Geforce Now.

Share some family plans for streaming services, forget which ones though.

I also subscribe to my dentist's in-house plan rather than dental insurance.

I have far too many subscriptions, and I should probably cancel some of those. I'm only going to list the ones I like and regularly in this comment.

Git Tower. I don't like git and I don't like interacting with it from the command line. Most of the time, I use either Tower or Magit to dull the pain a bit.

Spotify. All streaming services are more or less the same. IME, Spotify is the least bad of them all in terms of UI, performance, app quality, responsiveness, and compatibility. It's also the main streaming service everyone uses in my circles, so not having an account means I don't get to see my friends' playlists.

YouTube Premium. I don't like ads, but I also don't like playing what-a-mole with Google. It helps that Premium costs only $16/year in India.

Readwise Reader. It's an RSS reader, read-later service, and email newsletter inbox all rolled into one. It also lets you highlight parts of what you read, and surfaces them using a spaced-repetition algorithm. Worth every last rupee if you read a lot online.

Fastmail. Gotta have email, and I don't like Google.

Switch Online. I only have this for cloud backups of my saved games.

I don't mind subscribing to apps and services. It often ends up being cheaper than buying something upfront. My only issue with subscriptions is that there's no central place where I can manage all of them, so I'm forced to use external tools to keep track of them.

- 1Password (couldn't live without it, but to be fair, the company pays for it)

- Spotify (tried to switch to Apple music, but keep coming back to Spotify)

- Textexpander (I'm also a long-time user here and it's a true time saver for me)

- Tower (makes using Git much easier, so I'm happy to pay for it)

- Kaleidoscope (use it together with Tower, it's a great combination)

- Dropbox (this one I should really cancel)

- Apple One (because i use all the services, including the custom domains)

- Netflix (combined with Apple TV Plus and Youtube it's basically our TV time)

- ProtonVPN (I always like to have a VPN just in case, i got a good deal last year on Black Friday)

- X (It's still my mostly used Social Network for the good and for the Bad. So far it's in part worth it the price i pay for the service).

- Ivory (I used Mastodon constantly for around 6 months and Ivory subscription was totally worth.)

- Amazon Prime (We use it to buy lots of stuff during the year, so far its worth it for the amount of services Amazon provides. Could be a better value as it once was)

I think about subscribing to Youtube Premium and eventually when it's worth it ChatGPT Plus.

- Netflix

- Spotify

- ProtonMail

- Obsidian Sync

- ChatGPT Plus

- DigitalOcean VPS

- Namecheap (yearly)

- Bitwarden (yearly)

I used to pay for Readwise, Raindrop, and Todoist, but I haven't found them useful enough to continue paying for them.

-ChatGPT Plus -Otter -Zoom -LinkedIn Business

Without all of them, it's hard to imagine my productive activity

  - JetBrains PyCharm and RustRover
  - FastMail
  - Youtube
  - A few Twitch channels
  - ChatGPT
  - MidJourney

(Replying to the dead comment here)

It's a natural continuation of the Rust plugin that is available with PyCharm and CLion etc. Anecdotally, I've found it fixes the performance problems and crashes I experienced with the Rust plugin. A major downside is being unable to use code introspection with C and C++ while using it: I think a combined RustRover/Clion IDE would be a better move than rust only.

1Password, Google One. I'd never pay for blogs or magazines...

- Pycharm

- iCloud stuff

- ChatGPT Plus

- Noteplan

- GitHub Copilot

- 1Password

- Netflix

- YouTube

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