What are some things you are subscribed to that make a service worthwhile in keeping?
I only have a few I can say is worth-it but worth it in a more conserving sense, like pumping-the-brakes kind of deal. Not something you would want on all of the time.,
- Amazon Prime.
People may be split on Amazon for activist reasons or what have you, but I find it difficult to argue against what benefits that is brought from it. I sparingly use Prime and get it only when I have things I want to shop for that will be best used with it. I don’t personally use Video, Music or what have you.
- All Streaming Services (Only if you have a work-around)
Subscribing to any base streaming service plan with ads is worthless, but worth it if you use an HDMI cable from PC to TV or whatever configuration. Then watch through a browser that kills advertisements.
Worthless Subscriptions
Spotify
You’re only paying for the privilege to skip songs which should be a basic right of usage. Podcasts still aren’t exempt from advertisements. Features provided aren’t really that exciting to use.
Sirius XM
I just re-subscribed to this for $1 and might be personal taste, but I listen to the comedy channels. I don’t go anywhere else because I find that the music-based channels played things I don’t typically like or can vibe with.
Discord Nitro
You’re just paying for cosmetic junk which also all have separate price tags and other useless profile things that some of which, obstruct profiles so it is pointless. Only provides minor perks to video, audio and file capability. You also get to use emotes, that you can barely see anyways, in any server you’re in (unless mobile).
All news-based ones
Why pay for journalism that is all but dead and biased these days?
X-Box Game Pass
Bit 50/50 on this one. On one hand, trying out so many games is a perk, but, it also works against itself because you could be isolated by choice and what limit you have to work with.
Gym Memberships
Very parasitic and predatory. They all lock you into contracts and pretend that they’re like your car dealership or even your apartment landlord into these year-long subscription models. They prey on you not using their facility, they charge you annual fees and other fees you don’t know about. The only way out of them is to pay the remaining balance of the subscription or other scheming means. Very few out there actually let you cancel.
I try to minimize how many I have. I consider Internet/Phone utilities so not on the list.
Debrid service: Pirate VOD streaming for very cheap hooked to to Stremio which also gets me access to live TV broadcasts. I use Premiumize personally since RealDebrid revealed their true colours under legal threat. Slightly higher price but they’re a package deal with debrid, vpn, cloud storage, couple other things I don’t use.
Amazon: I use their free Prime trials to buy Zeolite cat litter (simply not available within Canada and I think it’s unfortunate because it’s the best and cheapest long term) and then cancel right away so it doesn’t renew. I try to buy from Canadian stores or at least non-USA as much as possible now. They offer free Prime trials aggressively to get people back on month subscriptions even if you cancel all the time. When Prime is active, I redeem all the free games giveaways on Prime Gaming. A shit ton BTW, way more than Epic gives out. Usually they’re keys for GOG and Epic. Some on Amazon’s own client. Heroic Launcher supports all 3. I’m not regularly subbed yet I’ve redeemed 443 games across those three, although that also includes Epic’s own giveaways from their own client which are separate from what Amazon gives away. Will I play any? Yes, a tiny % of them lol. Not a lot of shovelware either. Mainly however, it’s for cat litter :P
HelloFresh: Temporary, learning to cook /w my roommate and fix my shitty diet which caught up to me. Actually saving money because I ate take out and ordered delivery all the time before this. Bad habits. This has been going well.
That’s it. I have 3 but only a Debrid service is a regular.
I have the space for a home gym and built one with used hardware, I agree memberships are a negative experience when you go to cancel them at least where I live.
I don’t stream music besides from my Youtube playlist on ReVanced. Generally I either pirate via rutracker or buy music on Bandcamp as vinyl and/or digital. Buying vinyl gets you the digital release anyways as well quite often. I also stream internet radio. My main is CKUA and roadhome.fm
Also refused to pay for console online play memberships, with one exception where I played the crap out of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online for 3 months in a row once all the DLC track packs were out, then cancelled again. I stick to PC gaming generally. I don’t think it’s justified for corps to charge for online play and I’ve mostly stuck to my guns on that shit. I made that decision in response to Xbox 360 vs PS3.
Drug Science. A campaign to improve drug literacy and advocate for novel therapy, harm reduction, decriminalisation and legalisation via podcasts, mass meetings and seminars by experts in neuroscience, psychopharmakinetics, pharmacology and related fields.
Wikipedia, duh. It works because it’s free of advertising and corporate influence. That costs money and I am a happy subscriber.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. A campaign to defend our right to privacy and freedom from exploitation in the digital space.
Sustrans. A campaign to maintain, improve and extend the alternatives to using cars and make a humane and ecologically sustainable transport network.
Why pay for journalism that is all but dead and biased these days?
Have you though about why it’s dead? It has always been biased, it’s human nature.
Not worth it, but more or less needed:
- Rent (700€)
- Electricity (100€)
- Internet (60€)
- Hetzner Storage Box for Backups (25€)
- Domains (~10€)
- External IP addresses (16€)
- Donations to FOSS and content creators (idfk anymore)
German Train Ticket. Though the price increasing is horrendous
And News
While Spotify is the last service I would choose anymore for my music provider, it only lets you skip songs? Definitely not true. Like any major music service, it lets you build a library, listen to unabridged albums, make playlists, etc. Not sure where this point is coming from.
Music streaming from a provider that prides themselves on artist support like Deezer or Tidal also have all these features. Music streaming is one of the few services I struggle to imagine not paying for.
I personally use Apple Music since they actually pay relatively decent per stream and obviously integrates well.
You don’t need the subscription to do all that. At least not in the browser.
Looking at their site, doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Again, I agree with the Fuck Spotify sentiment. But there are still inaccurate points being made.
It will let you shuffle anything for free, but not let you play what you want, when you want.
Probably not supposed to work, but in a browser I have some of the premium features mentioned from playing whatever I want, changing the queue to creating playlists - all with a free account. I tried it with different browsers, different accounts and even without uBlock - just works. I still don’t understand why and how. If it is a bug, I hope that they don’t notice/fix it :D
You only read one line in before shilling apple? Lol
How are you gonna call someone an Apple shill when your first service listed as “worth it” is fucking Amazon? Lol.
?
I’m confused. I read the whole post. You also said podcasts aren’t exempt from ads and the features aren’t exciting to use. I don’t personally listen to podcasts. The service is still useful for streaming and downloading music. And what exciting features are there supposed to be?
I’m just confused at calling Spotify a “Worthless” subscription. While I admit that pirating or buying CDs is a preference for some, neither of those are as convenient as streaming.
As for shilling Apple Music, I said it’s what I personally use after mentioning both Tidal and Deezer and services that pride themselves on it, which my provided article supports. I just personally use it because I like the UI and iPhone integrations. None of what I said was an attack against the original post, just confused at the description of its features that weren’t factual.
Internet Service Provider and basic utilities. That’s pretty much it.
Look at this fat cat with an ISP sub. I do everything through mobile data.
Me too.
4G speeds are actually pretty good.
I’ll assume the gym membership part is some large chain US gym or something? I couldn’t disagree more.
I have a membership to a smaller gym and it’s a great deal in my opinion. Cancel anytime, no deals, no discounts, just a price and access to a facility. It’s one of the most pure and simple subscriptions I can think of.
Everyone has their own opinions here. Here’s my opinion on what’s worth it and not:
Streaming services: Only if you’re not getting ads bundled with your subscription and you’re getting a lot of use each month from it, more than just renting each movie.
Amazon Prime: Again, only if you really need the frequent free shipping. I don’t, so I’ll eat $30 in shipping costs per year when I need something more urgently instead of paying $140 to avoid that.
Discord Nitro: Obviously not worth it but it’s funny because I had it for a few months before their privacy policy shocker in 2023. I genuinely wanted to support them before then because it was feature rich but not as bloated and ad-free with a reasonable privacy policy before 2023.
News: High quality journalism deserve the support.
SiriusXM: Unless you’re road tripping into the middle of nowhere, internet radio is free and has many more options.
Xbox game pass: I never saw the appeal because I’m a patient gamer.
Gym membership: I tried to get one a Planet Fitness a few weeks ago just for a month because the closer gym was revamping itself and was shocked to find that it wanted a downpayment. It tripled the price of a month of membership so I noped out, I’m not paying $50 for 8 trips to the gym that doesn’t even have bench presses.
Worth it: the medication I need to live.
Not worth it: the medication I need to live.
Nebula is worth it. Youtube plus, or whatever it is now, is not.
Tidal is worth it. Qobuz may be more worth it? Spotify is not; but preferably buy from bandcamp whenever you can.
Other than that, just, nothing.
I guess with the gym it depends on whether you use it or not. The one I joined got a lot of complaints about not letting you out of your contract, but I never tried to get out of my contract and I used it all the time. For me it was definitely worth it. They never charged me a fee on top of what they disclosed at the very beginning. That would’ve been aggravating.
For journalism, I pay for 404 media because it’s journalist-owned, but it’s pretty niche in its scope.
My issue with Amazon Prime other than hating Bezos is that it was too good at all the things that drew me to it in the first place. Keeping track of everything I like to buy and free shipping and a speaker that I could just talk to and order stuff made shopping so convenient! It led to a lot of overconsumption. I would just browse my recommendations out of boredom and if something caught my eye I’d hit the one-click button and it would be on my porch in a day or two. I started to accumulate piles of crap I didn’t need and hardly ever used. I decided that spending money ought to be a bit inconvenient.
It’s a trick question. They’re basically never worth it.
VPN and a private email provider like Protonmail?
Here’s a good, free VPN https://riseup.net/en/vpn
Protonmail is already free, not sure why you would subscribe to it.
I hadn’t thought of those as subscriptions but I just use cheap VPS instead of a VPN vendor. Also I wouldn’t use Protonmail especially since the recent incident where they (temporarily) booted some journalist email accounts. But I’m happy with fastmail, which tbh is on the expensive side.
I also have a cheap MVNO cell phone plan and I guess that is worth it since I do use the phone. My home internet is definitely not worth it though, and I should get rid of it.
I consider anything with a reoccurring payment as a subscription, even if it’s technically just upkeep for a provider you use (domain renewal might be another example).
I haven’t tried fastmail, although I haven’t heard anything bad about it. How does it compare to proton?
Is my apartment rent a subscription? It dilutes the word enough that the question stops meaning anything.
I’ve never used Proton so I can’t directly compare it with Fastmail. I would say Proton used a lot of privacy hype in its marketing that didn’t hold up in reality, though I can’t say it was insincere when it started.
In a pure technical sense, Fastmail is not particularly extroardinary. They run mail servers with decent uptime, have a fancy webmail client with a calendar sort of like gmail, etc. I like that there are humans at the other end. I’ve emailed the devs with issues and gotten answered, support tickets for routine probs also get answered (not by engineers but still by humans), etc. So, I think it is worth it since I’m unwilling to use gmail/whatever and I’m not well enough organized to self-host something as critical as email. That said, I could probably survive using mxroute which is a lot cheaper.
I guess one way to narrow it down would be “reoccurring payments for digital services”, since that is much clearer.
I guess that makes sense for what Fastmail’s trying to achieve. Sounds like it could be a good option for others trying to migrate from “free” webmail providers that I’ll recommend in the future! :)
Thanks for your quick reply btw.
Well, maybe you’re right, though I had thought of subscriptions (in the sense of magazine subscriptions) as being for products, rather than services. That is, you pay them and in return you get access to a pile of bits that they generate, but the bits you get (video streams or whatever) are the same as what everyone else gets (minor personalization doesn’t count). So their business model is that they have a certain blob of data, and they sell access to it in dribs and drabs, and moreover, they charge you monthly whether you use it or not. Services like email are like paying someone else to mow your lawn, not the same.
I haven’t generally found that to be worth it, though I’ll occasionally make one-off purchases of data, such as books and CD’s.
Have you ever actually had a gym membership? Most gyms I’ve belonged to had reasonable membership terms. Only one tried to get me to pay for the remainder of my one-year contract. The loophole was you could leave if you said you were moving out of town. They just took my word for it and that was it. Others just needed 30-days notice.
I’m happy to be a direct supporter of creative people whose work I enjoy; think Patreon and similar setups.
I find that making small monthly payments to a handful of independent folks who do work I love and who directly appreciate my support to be far more satisfying and worth it than subscribing to a wealthy and powerful media conglomerate thing which feeds me a bunch of crap the majority of which I don’t care about.
