Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

81 points by matteomosca ↗ HN
I'll start: Co-working $300/month Bubble.io $150/month (6 apps in production) Descript.com $30/month

How about you?

113 comments

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Coffee $120/year

Filters $5/year

I assume you're a tea drinker then :-)
1 coffee every 3 days means 5 teas every days to get things done :D
Beans I buy are pretty strong
Just out of curiosity, which beans?
If we’re talkiing regular monthly expenses:

- Health Insurance for family of four: €118 - Accountant: €99 - Apple One Subscription: €19.95

Sounds like he means related to productivity or software development
Yes monthly subscriptions.

Ah yeah, I pay €120/month for my accountant too. I should have add that in the list as well

> Health Insurance for family of four: €118

That is a bit cheaper than my $2,400/mo for a family of 3 (of which my employer pays 50%).

I miss the UK health system.

In fairness, it is the additional private health insurance on top of the French government’s public care. It’s not the most expensive option but we rarely pay out of pocket for anything medical (the odd non-compulsory baby vaccine, for example, might sting us 80 euros or so). Of course, a part of my business and personal tax goes to support the public side of the healthcare, but nothing like $2400 per month.
Wow, that's pretty good value. in Germany it's a lot higher unfortunately. I'm on the public health insurance which costs around €800 p.m - my company pays half.
Is that income based?
Servers at DigitalOcean $2500 per month. Paypal: Our last transfer to our bank account cost $1000 because PayPal takes a currency conversion fee of 3% from USD to SEK (that's in addition to the transaction fee) Intercom.io: ~$200 for the support package. Using the messaging automation would be ~$3000 per month...
Have you considered Wise. You get a “US” account that you could route (or wire money) into from PayPal. Wise only charges 40-50bps to convert to SEK.
+1, I've saved thousands by using Wise.
Are you still doing this? For us Paypal added a 3% transfer fee on USD to USD transfers. We’d really like to get this fixed, it’s killing us.
We have Wise and used this as a workaround like you described. However, Paypal recently ”fixed” this loophole by charging 3% on USD to USD transfers. It’s insane.
Take a look at Wise.com for currency
We have Wise and used this as a workaround like you described. However, Paypal recently ”fixed” this loophole by charging 3% on USD to USD transfers. It’s insane. Have you found a way around this?
Do you need Paypal? Wise offer bank accounts in different currencies.
No and yes. We have a couple of thousand subscription customers using Paypal, which is a pain to switch. It's forcing us to look into other payment providers (like Stripe, which so far, doesn't appear to be evil like Paypal)
1. Amazon Ec2 $60/year

2. Domain names $50/year

3. Lenovo yoga c920 $400/year

My employer provides a MSDN subscription and a seemingly complete set of Jetbrains products.

We're a very cloud-skeptic company making chips and associated software, so the rest of our stuff - Jira, Artifactory, Gerrit, Confluence etc - is all on-prem.

Obsidian publish and sync ($144/year), IntelliJ pack (£119/year), Dropbox (~£80/year)

Possibly another (£200/year) in misc stuff (sr.ht, newsblur, bitwarden, todoist, fastmail, etc)

EDIT: I'm only including "work-related" expenses and not things that are pretty common, ISP, utilities, etc. It is debatable if I should include pet insurance, since I WFH and my cats are essential for my work environment :)

most expensive: a tool used for regulating exposure to local environmental weather conditions & providing access to fresh water, multiple energy sources (usage billed separately), waste disposal, storage, some degree of sound isolation, privacy and physical security. very handy. costs around AUD 10k annual subscription. don't leave home without one!
I assume that's a house? Technically you can't "leave home" if you don't have one so it does work out.
1: required health insurance: €120/month but I get 100 euro from the government so €20/month 2: a server at DigitalOcean: €5/month and domain names at TransIP €3.65/month 3: prepaid phone bill (€10 to €15)/year

In general I just don't like subscriptions. I prefer to pay only for things I use.

I got my phone bill to almost zero/year by using what's app calls.
1. Hetzner servers ~€40/month

2. Zapier $30/month

3. Probably Airtable ($24/month), though I'm slowly moving away.

Am I wasting time by not using zapier?
I mean, it depends. I primarily use to glue services together because I'm too lazy to keep scripts up to date.

They're pricey, but from what I've seen online they're a bit less shady than IFTTT.

Why moving away from AirTable? Pricing or feature set?
Mostly pricing. I like it as a product, it's just expensive. I've played around with Seatable (self-hosted clone) and it serves my purpose just fine.
1. Linode VPS 12.5$/month

2. domains around 100$ year

3. Backblaze personal backup 60$ year.

Working on 2011 Mac Mini in Macvim, cheap and works perfectly fine.

I mentioned fun part, and will skip mentioning health insurance, car etc.

1. AWS 5000/mo 2. Datadog 1500/mo 3. Papertrail 800/mo

Datadog is expensive and slow to improve - but there wern't any much-better alternatives when we deployed.

Apart from living, my digital expenses are:

1.) DigitalOcean Droplet with backup, 15CHF/month (hosts my cloud, several small containers)

2.) IDE (Intellij), 14 CHF/month

2.) Mindmapping tool (miro.com), 14CHF/month

3.) Webhosting (cyon.ch), 12CHF/month

4.) Budgeting (ynab.com), 6CHF/month

5.) Backup Storage (wasabi.com), 5 CHF/month

Do you mind asking me what kind of cloud you are storing?

I've tried deploying a Nextcloud instance via Docker-Compose to a Free Tier EC2 on AWS and found the CPU to spike randomly to 100% and require a machine restart to free up.

I'm a noob at docker, so it might be a configuration issue on my part, but it's pretty bare and I can't figure out if it's a docker thing or a machine performance thing.

If it's a machine performance thing, I'd be willing to pay to scale up, but I was wondering if I could have your thoughts on this. Thank you.

I am running a pretty vanilla setup using a docker compose file for each deployment:

- traefik as reverse proxy and for https termination

- nextcloud (the apache based container)

- statping

- matomo

- small things if needed

This runs on a 10$/month basic droplet + backup

We live and cruise on a 12m sailboat.

Annually (last year): Boat maintenance/upgrades €2547, Food €2333, Marina fees (mostly in winter) €1335, Fuel €900, Cruising fees €664, Shorepower €350, Entertainment €240, theoldreader.com subscription €17.

Details vary a lot depending on where we are every year and what exactly breaks on the boat or gets upgraded. That year we anchored in Greece for the summer and spent winter in a Sicilian marina with a good discount.

Starlink is made for ye!
Actually not at all, you have to be stationary for Starlink
Due to temporary limitations as the constellation is still incomplete. Otherwise, it will be perfect for boats.
They'll also have to fix power consumption. Now the antenna uses 3-4X the daily power consumption of _everything_ on my cruising boat.
I don’t think power consumption on Dishy is coming down considering it’s throwing bits to low earth orbits constantly with microwaves.

I have enough solar and batteries on my boat to continually power the ground station, but if I didn’t I’d operate it only when actively using the Internet.

God I'd love to live on a boat and code remotely.

I watched the sv delos video and was like... how do I make this my life?

https://svdelos.com/

Also how I started! I highly recommend Sailing Zatara and Gone with the Wynns as well.
There are a lot of people who live aboard a boat but don't travel too far, or only move a few times a year.
Zero! Monthly subscriptions are waste of money, and whole SaaS is IMHO wrong step in human evolution. I prefer to have my stuff for free or own stuff.

My free stack:

- Comms: Free "work" phone with unlimited everything, and free unlimited LTE/5G "work" modem.

- Music: Free Tidal from work + my own ripped MP3s.

- Software hacking: free virtual machines running at Oracle Cloud(and some services at IBM cloud).

- IDE: IntelliJ Community Edition and NetBeans 12

Only real monthly "subscription" is:

- 15$ monthly "membership fee" for my political party.

Getting something free from work technically counts; at the same time I guess you’re earning less or missing out on other perks (other jobs might offer different perks or higher salary); the SAAS company still gets paid by your employer, so you might be still indirectly supporting them.
Out of all the things you mentioned, a political party membership is the only one I wouldn't pay for. May I ask what value you get out of being a paid member?
>what value you get out of being a paid member?

- More money from fees = better political campaigns = more voters = larger representation in Parliament/Congress = ability to change the Law(country, county or City wide). This is very rewarding - and much better than just moaning about politicians!

- Large "instant" social network of people who shares the same values as you do! (We have a lot of internal messaging tools and forums.)

- There is a lot of members who are lawyers, doctors, accountants, barbers etc. - so its easy to get some occasional help for free or with discount.

- You can literally change the world. For example you start some loose discussion on Discord or Slack let's say about homeless people: and half year later, after various meetings and internal votes our senators/MPs can actually make such proposal to Parliment/Congress. It is VERY rewarding.

- A lot of introverts inside of party, as it attracts mostly high IQ people, so it is possible to find company to play chess, computers games, board games or real life sports etc.

- You can actually TALK to politicians that you see in TV. Or have beer with them.

- You can argue, or give your own ideas about something - at it WILL be taken in account(internal voting even at lowest levels).

- You can say: "At least I tried to DO something!"

I take it back. That sounds worth it.

May I ask what the country is? I am guessing that is somewhere in Northern Europe.

Central/Northern Europe. One of post soviet states with deep distrust towards political parties...
The "free stack" you are using is partly only free because someone else is paying for it (your employer/IBM...) - so they actually are subscriptions in my eyes. (slightly off topic: Germany tax authorities would see it similarly: The benefits you get from work could be called "monetary benefits" in Germany and the value added to your income for taxing purposes.)
$8500+ a month for Google Map API, we opted for developing our own local places database now
fuck that's insane
We have a similar problem.

Care to explain how you replaced Google?

Yeah I'd be curious what both your and parent's use cases are that could possibly be covered by other smaller, existing maps services, or if there is some market that remains underserved.
Basically we want to show a bunch of pois around a real estate (like the nearest super market, airport and so on).

We build a service calculating those but have trouble getting the data.

It is more of a nice gimmick for us. Since the pricing changes using Google maps apis is just prohibitively expensive.

There are other companies providing the data but those too are somewhat costly.

Maybe we should use open street map as a data source.

Yeah osm definitely has some of that data. Email is in my bio if you want to chat more.
3. VPS at bahnhof.se 2. IntelliJ Ultimate 1. Cocaine
Car: fully paid, but still 1500 €/year for insurance, 500 €/year in taxes and ~2500 €/year for gas. But I love it, it's a necessity to go to work, but also a pleasure to drive.

Electricity: 85 €/month

Internet access: 27.5 €/month

You must live in Scandinavia?!?!

1500 / year in insurance! 500 / year in taxes! Wow ...

I pay $12 / month in car insurance, and $130 / year for registration (taxes).

This doesn't sound egregious to me.

I'm 27 and to insure a hypothetical 2019 Honda Civic it would cost me $280/mo in NYC.

It was ~$110 to get my license so presumably registration would be similarly very high. It was closer to ~$30 in New Jersey.

I guess this makes sense. I have a relative in Boston who pays $900 / month for a PARKING SPOT.
Newer cars have higher insurance as well. I don't see how car insurance can cost only $12/mo. What does that cover?
Legal minimums :D

My truck is 20 years, though.

Levelized cost per mile over 15 years of ownership, my 2005 Volvo XC90 cost $1/mi.
Converted to USD, approx:

1. Health insurance 440 USD/mo

2. 280 USD/mo for the membership at barbelllogic online coaching

3. root server 70 USD/mo

Hello there fellow BLOC-family member :)
What is this root server you speak of?
Probably means a dedicated server not a VPS. Sometimes they’re called root servers cause you have root on the metal. 70 sounds about right for that
WeWork private office with parking: $550/mo

Cellular family plan: $200/mo

Gigabit Internet at home: $100/mo

1. $4k - Graphic design service (they're worth every penny)

2. $2.5k - WeWork private office

3. $250 - CircleCI

The only tech related one I have is a subscription for internet service for $50/mo
Child care is thousands of dollars a month, everything else pales in comparison....
For anyone reading, my vasectomy was fully covered by insurance. No kids.
thank god it lasts only a few years, then it's disguised as 'real estate tax' (for public schools)
It’s not disguised. People who care about their schools openly look for high quality schools and know what it costs.

You are free of course to watch your own children yourself. It is after all, your responsibility.