I have Spotify Premium Duo for son & I, Youtube Premium Family (I pay for son and I & got 4 of my friends to join so we split the cost), Voxa - audiobooks for son, NovelAI for son (some story writing tool I guess, to be honest I don’t really know what this one does exactly). No movie / TV show streaming services cause I have Filelist (torrents) and the world wide web.
I’m trying to avoid most subscriptions. So I rent a small VServer and a VPS and run a little Proxmox server in my home. That is around 13€/month, including electricity for the Proxmox server. I could combine them and save a little bit of money, but currently I avoid the hassle of doing that.
But that gives me E-Mail, Nextcloud, offsite backup, a website, HomeAutomatization with HomeAssistant, a PlexServer to stream music and movies, paperless and more. So: Say no to expensive subscriptions, do it yourself.
Just a vpn
Would you consider yourself a highly technical person? And do you use your VPN for security or region lock evasion?
Yes but there is always something to learn and always someone who knows more. I use that particular VPN for appearing like I’m in a certain country and on another connection the server is always changing like the sea.
None. I whitelist and log all so never ads and exploits have as hard of a time escaping as my bad code and scripts. I only watch science YT, and keep a few playlists on VLC. I choose to go down with the thrash metal through post grunge (millenni)boomer ship before I will ever simp and goon for streaming ads with miserly music seasoning in between. Music artists need a union to pay for their own streaming platform and venue booking services setup as an arts nonprofit while making revenue from performances.
Geoguessr, though it is not a subscription, I buy giftcards for myself every year to avoid the subscription.
YouTube premium, Amazon prime, Microsoft 365, Nintendo switch online, virtual ups mailbox (to receive mail with my name on it without involving family), Twitch turbo, Neocities.org. I don’t watch TV or movies, only user generated content. Spotify is unusable without premium and after being subject to five ads in a row, one being an obnoxious gen z vape addicted minor tiktok “satisfying” asmr one, I will never use them. I don’t understand the appeal of a subscription or an obnoxiously ad-ridden service for a thing you download for free or buy once. I only wanted to listen to one fucking podcast. One.
A few yearly payments for domains and that’s it
Spotify, a virtual server and I used to have a Netflix subscription. (Plus a mobile phone and internet at home.)
I’m curious why you pirate movies but not music. Seems an odd line to draw?
Ironically enough I do the reverse. I pay for Netflix and pirate music. My reasoning is there are some Netflix programs that are hard to find on the high seas. (Asian films) If they were easy to pirate I would not pay a cent.
For me it’s because I want to listen to any song that comes to mind on demand, even if I haven’t predownloaded it.
Music streaming doesn’t have regional limits, or at least haven’t ever run into any. On the other hand Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. have different libraries per country & our country’s lacks, and the movies / TV shows are too fragmented between services. Plus unlimited music on demand on the go makes way more sense than movies / TV shows - which are more of a sit down and take it in experience. It just makes way more sense to download any movie / TV show I want from torrent straight to USB, plug the USB into the TV sit back and watch, no buffering or stuff like that.
Right now The Atlantic, plus a national online newspaper here in Europe. Nothing else.
PSA: if you value your personal freedoms, then you need to at least consider paying for journalism. Democracy cannot survive without an independent media.
Can I up vote this more than once? Quality print journalism is absolutely vital and it will die without the support of its readers.
I find it so frustrating. The hate journalism gets is such a misdirection. This is a vital profession whose business model has been all but destroyed by the internet. The numbers of journalists have been in freefall for decades now. Their pay has never been lower, their jobs never less secure. Their desperate managers are pushing them to stop the bleeding by going for clicks and views. Predictably, they then get abused for being attention whores. Or, worse, part of some institutional conspiracy. And yet without professional journalists, bound by an ethics code, we’re absolutely gonna be lost in a sea of junk and fakery and manipulation. It’s going to be so much worse even than what it is already. And yet this could all be avoided if people were prepared to pay even a fraction of what they fork out to Netflix or Amazon. To be clear, I am not a journalist.
I get YouTube Premium and YouTube music free with my Google Fi phone plan, so I don’t know if those count as subscriptions.
I actively subscribe to NordVPN to hide my piracy habits from my ISP.
I pirate pretty much everything else.Sling for live TV and Max for John Oliver, that’s pretty much it. Oh, and a Disney+ gift subscription for my sister. Comcast gave me a free subscription to Peacock, but frankly I never watched it and I’m not on Comcast anymore so I don’t know if it’s still active or not.
My WIFE might have a problem though… She does Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+/Hulu, AppleTV, Spotify, I think there might be others I’m not aware of.
Proton mail unlimited - prob gonna drop or downgrade when the sub is up, a couple of domains, mullvad, some patrons, and that’s it. Everything else I self host.
I have monthly recurring donations to several charities, I guess you could count those as subscriptions of a sort:
Subscription to rainforests: Coalition for Rainforest Nations (the operate globally with indigenous and local communities to do everything possible to protect rainforests and reforest areas)
Independent journalism subscription: ProPublica (no paywall investigative news organization that has really hard hitting reporting that holds corporations accountable)
Subscription to science-based political advocacy: Union of Concerned Scientists
Subscription to open information: Wikipedia
Subscriptions to a healthy community: Local food bank, urban green space advocates, and housing support orgs
Disney plus. Which I’m seriously considering dropping.
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