pull down to refresh

More and more businesses adopt the subscription service approach. From a company's perspective, of course, it makes sense. It gives you a little bit more certainty on what income to expect for the next few months. However, as a customer, each subscription adds up. Even though it is only the price of a cup of coffee to sign up for this streaming service, or to support this creator, it quickly adds up.
I've recently gone through my bills to see which services I am paying for monthly, and cut out all the ones that seemed useless. These are the 4 ones I for now cannot or don't want to cut out.
  • Dropbox: ~120 Dollars/year. Paid by my employer, so for now, I don't care, but if I ever leave this employer, I might have to drastically clean up data as this would be a significant cost.
  • Google One: ~20 Dollars/year. Own pocket.
  • Coupang premium (Korean Amazon-style shop): ~4 Dollars/month. Own pocket. Not that expensive, and much better service. Hard to avoid.
  • ChatGPT: ~20 Dollars/month. Own pocket. Expensive, but quite worth it. Thinking of cutting it or finding a cheaper solution, but got used to it in my current workflow.
Got rid of Spotify, and a few other low-profile services I wasn't using anymore. Netflix, I'm lucky to have someone else paying for it. No other streaming services. Hard to get rid of Dropbox and Google One storage without having to spend days cleaning up and filtering through old data and pictures. Kinda stuck there.
How about you?
  • What service is worth it?
  • What service isn't, but you can't avoid paying for it?
  • What services have you cut out?
Bonus question: Do you think we'll have subscription services soon with Lightning once the technicals allow for it? Or do you think this is a fiat cancer?
this territory is moderated
I don't subscribe to any services, not because I think they're bad, but because I don't feel the need to use them.
reply
Same here. Most of what they do is available for free anyway.
reply
110 sats \ 4 replies \ @gnilma 4 Mar
I use YouTube Premium, primarily for audiobooks and YouTube music, but not having to watch ads when I do watch videos is a nice plus. I also have Kindle Unlimited, mostly being used by my kids, as they read a lot. I still use it to read every now and then, but I have many paper books to work through as well, so the Kindle books got put in lower priority.
I used to have Netflix and Disney Plus, but have gotten rid of both about 2 or 3 years ago, as I don't have as much time to watch movies or series and didn't find it worthwhile to keep paying for those services.
I believe subscription model will continue to exist where it makes sense and will become easier, more flexible, and have less friction when implemented over Lightning. I think it will be a mix option of pay per use at a higher price or subscription at a lower price. I already pay a subscription via Lightning to the nostr.wine relay and also on chain for my VPN service.
reply
Yes, YouTube premium kills all the ads and it's great. All other subs I can live without
reply
I like using https://yewtu.be for free, or any of the other instances.
reply
Brave, no YT ads...
reply
Which VPN service do you use?
reply
110 sats \ 2 replies \ @BTCFC 4 Mar
I have two things I'm currently subscribed to which are the Whoop, and a football (soccer) simulator for the Meta Quest called Be Your Best Pro. Both are annual subscriptions and I'll most likely continue to use them moving forward as both have been very helpful.
I was actually thinking about subscribing to ChatGPT. What aspects do you like about it and what have you found the most helpful and useful?
For storage I started to store things offline on external hard drives and flash drives. The one below I honestly love!
reply
I'll probably wait for my job to change to tackle the storage issues. I definitely want to stop giving my money to Dropbox and Google, but they got me by the balls for now. Also, I'm lazy and it's very convenient.
ChatGPT, I did write a post on that a while ago. Make sure to check out the comments, there was some pretty good input there.
Hadn't heard of the Whoop. Checked the website, kinda wants me to start looking into it.
Made me realize I am also paying for Zwift. It's a yearly fee so haven't had to decide yet if I want to make it recurring, but as I enjoy it very much these first weeks, I might do. It's expensive though :(
reply
Gotcha gotcha! And I feel your pain with storage...
Awesome I will check your previous post and the comments out, thanks!
Yeah, for someone like me who's obsessed with tools that help with improving health and athletic performance, the Whoop has been a solid investment. Highly recommend, especially since they have a free month trial.
Never heard of Zwift, but if it's something that brings you value and joy maybe it's worth the price.
reply
Why use Dropbox when there's nextcloud? Buy a $40 raspberry pi and a hard drive and enjoy practically limitless storage forever.
reply
I still have my rPi from when I was running my LN node. Let me look into Nextcloud. I probably should have two then in case of hardware failure. Thanks for the tip!
reply
One of the reasons I use Dropbox is that the data I store is scattered among 2M+ files. Even Dropbox indexing and syncing have a hard time dealing with that many files, I never looked into self-hosted solutions thinking it'd be even trickier.
reply
What is different between Dropbox and Google storage?
reply
I can’t speak to the complexity of hosting your own file storage service like this, first hand. However, I can say that one of the things you’re paying for with a service like Dropbox is for someone else to worry about handling hardware failure, maintaining availability and uptime, data redundancy, etc. These things are not simple to solve. IMO, anyone looking to self host their own cloud storage solution for critical data should carefully consider how to handle these issues before “going live.”
reply
15 sats \ 0 replies \ @Karlm 4 Mar
Cut Dropbox and continue with the others
reply
deleted by author
reply
Ah ok, thanks for the clarification, I haven't followed the technicals for that.
SN territory just draws from my current balance in my custodial SN wallet...
How are others doing it? Can a service ask my self-hosted LN node for a recurring payment?
reply
100 sats \ 1 reply \ @sdf 4 Mar
deleted by author
reply
I probably should have included my SN recurring fee for my territory... somehow still a mental separation between my Bitcoin stack and my fiat stack.
For now, I see this monthly fee more as a way to support SN, far from breaking even :)
reply