I donate $5 quarterly to Wikipedia. It's not much but I figure every bit helps

Kagi.com - excellent search engine. Yes, it shouldn't be needed, but in this day and age it clearly is. Excellent slop filter, and it let's you downrank and uprank certain sites in your search results. And I just found out you can see the most popular sites for each category, so it's fast and easy to see which sites probably are and aren't worth having in your results at all. It makes internet search feel like it did 20 years ago.

Namecheap.com - It's where I have my domain names. Mostly because they aren't godaddy.

EDIT: Forgot to mention hetzner.

What I pay for:

• Mullvad
• Addy.io
• Tutamail

What I "pay" for (through donations, if that counts):

• The EFF
• Wikipedia
• GrapheneOS
• Asahi Linux
• Python

I don't really subscribe to much, but I'm definitely looking to expand the latter list, so I'll probably start donating to the maintainers of ad blocker filter lists and seek out more organizations fighting the good fight.

Nebula. There are only a handful of creators on there that I watch regularly, but even then, it's worth it for the price.

Dropout.tv

The only streaming service I won’t pirate.

Does the VPS provider that runs part of my self-hosted infrastructure count? I've happily paid one of them for almost 14 years now.

I honestly think that's my last online service other than a couple Patreons for music.

my personal economy is hanging by a thread so no expenses that are not strictly necessary.

Kagi. https://kagi.com/

Best search engine I've ever used.

YouTube Premium. No ads and the creators I watch get paid more.

Yes, I'm aware of all the apps out there that give you the Premium perks without actually paying for it. Here's the thing: the VAST majority of my watching is done on my TV via an Apple TV and I really CBA to go through all the hoops to make any of those apps work with my setup.

I don't watch any other streaming services and I don't watch cable / network TV. I'm okay paying for Premium to get the best experience.

Privacy.com. I pay 10 bucks a month and never have to expose my debit or credit card numbers, I just use virtual ones. Plus, I get about $10 cash back each month, so really, it pays for itself.

Kagi Search, it's such a small thing but it radically de-sloppifies your browsing experience

• Mullvad
• Bitwarden
• Zotero
• Addy.io
• Mailbox.org
• Dropout.tv

Hetzner VPS and their Storage Box, that is, managed Nextcloud instance.

Mailbox.org email service.

Mullvad
Mailbox.org
I used to pay for a lot more until the last election and I found out how many companies backed fascism. Not with my dollar you wont!

edit: $5 a month for PBS also.

PBS Passport for $5/month is so worth it.

donations to soma.fm, listener supported free music streaming/internet radio out of San Francisco

A seedbox

Email.

As someone who has been self hosting some stuff and generally aspires to work in IT, it is simply unfeasible to expect services like this for free

Would it cost me less to host such a server divided by x users? Yes

Do I have x users I can sustainably service without burning out? No.

So its either a managed server for like 15€ per month + a bunch of work or a paid email provider, in my case fastmail.

A few bucks a month for https://piefed.social/

Keep your software evolving and instances running!

I'll pay for Mullvad and Usenet/indexer

Steam games/Valve.
I dont know if this counts/its a hot take.
It really depends on the game tbh(some regret some dont)
I appreciate their work on Proton.
And Steam is the only website I can really buy video games from.

Currently, Mullvadvpn.

I've paid for Proton Unlimited but I'm letting that expire and moving to alternatives.

bitwarden, wikipedia

also, not really paying for patreon, but I'm using it to pay DJPeachCobbler for his amazing videos on history

Ultimate Guitar. I got a lifetime membership for like 30 bucks over a decade ago and I use that shit all the time. Their pro-tabs are awesome.

Right now the only thing I have a subscription for, as a college student fortunate enough to be living at home, is Proton. Don't like the whole Lumo AI thing and don't really trust they ain't scraping all my data for it, but I still have months before my subscription ends.

The VPN is nice enough and the attached email is kinda cool, I guess. Definitely been making use of both, so no complaints for now.

https://www.fullhost.com/

I switched away from NameCheap to a Canadian domain registrar after swearing off American software where possible. They've been great. It's a smaller company so I've gotten really quick responses on tickets I've put in

RackNerd for my VPSs (3 of them right now)
Mullvad VPN
NextDNS

A domain.

There's a lot of stuff I wouldn't mind sending money for, such as WMF, Internet Archives, AO3, and varying creators, and/or, of course, Lemmy, but as I don't like using credit cards and online payments, I'm hindered.

I wonder if there's some card (preferably paper instead of plastic) that I could buy at the store for $10, $20, or like, and use the number as payment. I've thought of sending cash by mail to the WMF, but I'm not sure if they would take it. I sent cash to Miraheze a few years ago, and they said they got it, but they don't seem to have put it in their reports (I hope they used it for Miraheze).

• posteo.de for Mail (1€/month)
• addy.io for mail aliases with custom domain (1€/month)
• 2 domains at gandi.net (DNSSEC, U2F, 🇫🇷)
• 2 small VPS + 1TB Storagebox at Hetzner
• 1TB Seedbox @ hostingby.design 🇩🇰
• Encrypted Notes with nice, fast editor @ notesnook.com (Essential Plan - 1,73 €/month)

... and my employer pays my Kagi.com account 😁

NextDNS, Kagi.

Mealime.

Meal planning app. Has a database of hundreds of easy to make, healthy, tasty recipes. Tell it how many people you want to cook for, for how many days. It builds a whole meal plan, adjusts the quantities of all the recipies, builds a shopping list for you, and will even forward the list to Instacart for you if you're into that.

It also builds the meal plan based on reducing food waste, so if you have one recipe that uses half an onion, it will automatically find another recipe that uses the other half. You can also define ingredients you don't like/allergic to and it will avoid recipes that use those.

MASSIVELY increased the amount of at-home cooking I do by getting rid of all the boring/annoying parts. Kinda like Blue Apron, but you just go buy your own groceries. Best $2 a month I spend.

• Netcup (I switched from hetzner a few months ago because I found a better deal)
• Infomaniak for domain names
• Purelymail, a really cheap email host (I don't want to deal with self-hosting it)
• Exoscale as an object storage provider, which I use for Lemmy and self-hosted Ente (which I chose over Immich because it supports S3 as a storage option, I don't have enough storage on my netcup server or my homelab for image backups and I'd rather not deal with the stress of a potential loss of data caused by drive failure or something) for my family
• Threema (not really a service because it's a one time purchase, but now that we're shilling I thought I'd include it), which I also managed to get my family to buy.

Proton - the whole suite. I use it all.

crabshack.ai - an easier, better version of openclaw/ personal ai agent.

• Purelymail ($10/y)
• Proton VPN ($30/y on sale)
• Porkbun domains ($40/y)
• Hetzner VPS ($60/y for now)

Covers almost everything I need online

My DNS root. Good mail hosting.

Currently, I'm paying for a vps where I run a test environment for my homelab. I also pay for mail and vpn services, support some FOSS projects and buys music a couple times a month. 

• Tidal for music
• Tuta for e-mail
• SimpleLogin for mail aliases
• Mullvad for VPN

I spent a few minutes on going through my "invoices" directory in my mail, but I couldn't find anything else. These four are all my online subscriptions. Everything else is IRL (water, electricity, rent, etc).

I give monthly to my Mastodon instance.

• Ad free music, especially if most of it goes to the artist
• Ad free content creation, especially is most of it goes to the artist
• Ad free games, especially if most of it….
• lichess.org
• Activity pub development and hosting
• ability to pay my bills online
• central platforms to buy goods and services that I want (clothing, furniture, car parts, etc) mostly eBay nowadays as I try not to support Amazon and had a terrible experience on Mercari
• ad free podcasts that like to listen to
• direct from manufacturer car…..soon-ish

Imgur - $2/mo to get rid of ads. Ads are what causes the app to be crashy. No ads, no crashes. It's absolutely worth it to me for that price.

Namecheap

Proton for mail hosting and VPN

Used to do a couple podcast subs and let them expire. Should pay for more, this thread might be the social pressure to throw $10 at like 8 different things.

Joplin cloud. I use the shit out of it and it's a great project.

"Happily" rules out most streaming services I do pay for, but Nebula is still a valid answer.

A Hetzner box i use for offloading hobby crap calculations to.

Various patreons and patreon-like things for people who make things I enjoy and/or strongly believe should exist: Garbage Brain University, Octavius King, Pivot To AI, Master Hellish, and a few more but I forget.

Chess.com. Its totally worth it for the game review which is the part of it I'd consider a "service", but there's other good stuff in there if you like to play.

I knowww it's shit on, and I hate that the price went up. But I can't get rid of Spotify. I don't love it, but it's definitely the best music app I've used. I do love that it shows local concerts based on the music I listen to.

Bit warden & Nabu Casa. Both great & they support really good OS projects

Crunchyroll is fairly inexpensive for how much I use it. Been keeping up with current running seasons a lot more than when I yarhar'd everything (though I keep a small stash of my favorites on one hard drive).

I've gladly donated to some of my favorite YouTubers (Legends of Avantris, MinMaxedRPG, and others).

I don't actually pay for this, because the free tier is good enough for my personal needs, but Tailscale is amazing and has totally changed my relationship with self-hosting and web services.

I know that you can roll your own VPN WAN using wireguard or whatever, but honestly Tailscale makes it pretty foolproof, and that's allowed me to access all of my self-hosted stuff from anywhere with minimal screwing around. The first time I logged into my Jellyfin and Finamp from outside the house, I was pretty much hooked. If I could easily and safely host public game servers for my wider group of friends I would be even more into it and would definitely pay for a higher tier.

Various Patreons and also Dropout. I also regularly donate to the xkit lady for her work making Tumblr usable. Oh! and Dominion.games.

https://online-go.com/

To get AI analysis on my games.

Services only or one time purchase apps too?

• My VPS providers. Ramnode and Contabo.
• Kagi Search
• Wikipedia (donation)
• Newsgroup Ninja and NZBGeek.
• Bitwarden
• Tossable Digits - hold and virtually use my US number while I live abroad

Online collectives like riseup and disroot, providing privacy focused services, are doing the lords work. I gladly support them.

is there an online service that eliminates capitalism?

Youtube red, not only for the removal of ads but because it pays the youtubers I watch way more then ads do.

None.

Roll20. I play D&D twice a week, and the paid features (increased storage & dynamic lighting) are absolutely worth it. It's not even super expensive; just $60/year. Totally worth it for how often I use it!

My domain names and web/email server hosting.

Not having to worry about all the horrors one is subjected to when they depend on a free service for online presence, email, etc. is worth a great deal to me. Any free service can disappear or kick you off at a whim leaving you with nothing, social media sites and apps come and go (and/or enshittify) while as a consumer of a paid service you not only have a quality of service beyond freebies (privacy, no ads, what I want to put online is exactly what goes online unadulterated, people who want to find or contact me can always do so at my own site on my own terms) you also have consumer protections if things go wrong.

While I'm not self-hosting my web stuff on my own hardware, the host I use is a small business owned by an old friend and fellow hacker which means I'm not at the mercy of some faceless corporation's TOS either. My host and I see eye-to-eye on what's appropriate for me to put out there via her machinery, and she's also not extrajudicially sharing my private crap with fascist government forces like the big tech monoliths and most free services do.

Dr demento show. For 15.00 a month you get new and all old episodes.

This man has earned my money for all the years of entertainment and laughs he has provided.

Star trekkin across the universe!

Real-debrid

VPN

NextDNS. $20/year for basically no ads on any device.

There are three that I've happily subscribed to for years:

Adguard Kagi Mega

I use all three daily and they all more than make up for their price.

Proton and Signal. I think that's it.

ProBoxTV is a YouTube channel with boxing. 4 shows in the next month. Next one is in a few hours. It’s free but you can donate to their channel.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JPkSAbh3aRg

My hyperlocal newspaper.

• Dropout.tv 
• VPN + email
• Music streaming

Email.

Bunch of open source projects.

Vultr vpn for Rustdesk server and Wireguard.

Hello deanonymising AI 👋

Nebula

It supports independent creators and I get to watch Jet Lag a week early

The service needed to get online in the first place.

• Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/
• Fastmail - https://fastmail.com/

• Real Debrid.
• VPN (if needed).

That’s about it, I think.

Currently Proton Duo and Humble Choice. Considering dropping Humble.

I use YNAB for budgeting. There is a version of a related software you can self-host and you can subscribe to a bank-info-linking service on your own as well, but I don't want to have to administer something as boring as budgeting.

The support is also pretty good!

The one bad thing is price. About $100 a year :<

Dashlane password manager. Just worth it.

YouTube Premium.

I pay for this, and two other family members pay for two other services. Theirs have each blocked the other 2 of us... So what was once 3 of us buying 3 family plans has become just me doing it. And the second YouTube blocks them, I'm canceling it.

Dreamhost.

More than a decade ago they had a big fuck up where they accidentally charged tons of users multiple times when their contracts weren't when finished. So one day I woke up and they'd taken a few hundred dollars from my account. That put me in the negatives.

When I called them, they verified my identity, and let me complain a little. (I'm not much of a complainer. But their customer service person was great.) They paid me back the charged amount, and asked how much I'd had in overdraft fees, and paid me that too. And they let my hosting plan date reset at that date for the year-long renewal. So they basically have me like 9 months on top of it.

Mind you, I wasn't using much at the time. Just a few blogs and a podcast. So it's not like they're not making free money off of me. But they handled it so damn well. Didn't even ask to see a bank statement about my overdraft fees. Just "and how much was that? Got it." I'm sure it was just a case of cost and smart business... But fuck yeah, reward smart business.

Incogni

Probably saily if I start travelling again.

Proton stuff.

I’m going to be switching all my nord stuff to proton I think as I’m finding nord getting incredibly unstable on their marketing. One moment they have meshnet. Then nope. Next moment yes. Oh but now incogni is no longer included. Probably because nord is unstable.

Torguard.com VPN. Going on 8 years of use, many terabytes of data transfer, no complaints.

mullvad vpn.

i be sailing them seas with no abandon.

My email provider (and domains), Bitwarden and Obsidian.

Less happy:
Spotify and Spotify Premium (If I could I'd get rid of the YT music part)

Hetzner for my VPS Mullvad for my privacy

Proton for email Signal for messaging (donations) Bitwarden for passwords Currently trailing Kagi for search after the comments on this post Random donations to my instance

PocketTube and DeArrow.

SomaFM

Backblaze B2

Windscribe VPN

Filen cloud storage

iCloud 50gb plan (ok I don’t happily pay for this, but I need this)

Apple One Premier bundle and YouTube Premium are the two subscriptions I deem essential in my life. I wouldn’t say I shill for them, but I definitely do think they’re essential for me.

Apple One Premier has:

Apple TV (I use a lot)

Apple Music (I use a lot)

Apple Fitness+ (I use moderately)

Apple News+ (I use a lot)

Apple Arcade (I use moderately)

2TB of iCloud Storage (I use a lot)

Optional Peacock reduced subscription fee (I don’t use)

All of it is sharable with 5-6 Apple family members too.

YouTube Premium

Did you know that when you start to skip forward on in-video sponsor messages it gives to a button that skips ahead to the end of the message?

976-HOT-MILF

Edit: Downvoters probably don't know to ask for Missy