HN Explorer

Ask YC: What do you actually pay for, you, yourself?

32 points by swombat ↗ HN
Spawned off from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288231

It'd be interesting to know what people in the YCNews demographic actually pay for online. Which paying subscription services do you actually bother spending money on?

The question is open to you both as a consumer and as a business. If you are both, please split your answer into two parts, e.g.:

As a consumer, I pay for: Flickr

As a business, I pay for: Bug tracking software,...

Note 1: Please feel free to use specific product names.

Note 2: Please don't include things that everyone pays for online, e.g. Amazon books, electronic odds and ends, hosting - unless you feel your particular version is special.

Thanks for sharing!

81 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread
swombat
I'll start the ball rolling.

As a consumer, I've paid for: peepcode screencasts; a flickr pro account; an account to freshlymixed.com while it was still up; That's about it over the last couple of years. I'm not a prolific purchaser of consumer services.

As a business, I'm paying for: EngineYard hosting, Fogbugz, and we paid for Basecamp for a little while. That's it.

Almost everything else seems to be pretty much free.

tstegart
Flickr and blogging software (Typepad).
tstegart
I should add that I'm about to pay for Balsamiq's Mockups (for business).
terpua
I pay for: unfuddle, itunes
imp
Skype, Amazon MP3s. For web analytics I pay for GetClicky.com Even though there's Google Analytics, Clicky is well worth the money.
dhimes
Does it bother you that you can't host Clicky? I'm using Mint (thanks to a rec on #startups), but Clicky seems to have more data by far.
vaksel
Well you said no hosting, so besides that I'd say nothing really. I'm a cheap ass.
j2d2
I pay for hosting from linode.com. I freely host a project with google code (java chat client/server xkasperx.googlecode.com) so I don't need a pay service like github. With the $30 I pay a month to linode I can host and write most of the software I need. Google seems to have something for everything else.

I'm a cheap ass I like to call it being practical. :)

notauser
Are you sure?

I physically hand over money for hardware, and that's about it. Everything else I like is free...

...except that in return for some of that free stuff I give demographic information. Oh, and in return for some of the other free stuff I give coding/testing/bug fixes. And I guess some of the free stuff I pay for via being temped into buying their real-world/physical products. Then some of the rest I suppose I pay for by validating someone's ego through the mechanism of pushing up their numbers.

aichcon
I pay for Backpack and Basecamp, and will start paying for GoToMeeting once we have more use for it.
kapitti
Business: Freshbooks, Github, Vonage Consumer: iTunes, Peepcode
blogimus
For business and professional development, I pay for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, which includes a lot of material including a couple of online books selections: One large run by Books 24x7 and a somewhat limited subscription to Safari Books Online.
Lally
rsync.net (solid backup) .mac (hey, it has a few uses) motionbased itunes
asif
Fantasy football real-time stats on Yahoo!
hooande
I knew we could count on you, asif
mattmaroon
Interesting. Those are free on ESPN now. And, of course, Draftmix :)
asif
We've been using yahoo for 5 or 6 years now and we're just used to it. I think it costs about $10/season and given how seriously we take this thing, it doesn't feel like a lot of money.

Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
noodle
i pay for a slice at slicehost, and a pay for supportive subscriptions to some community-based forums/sites. oh, and skype.

thats it. i'd pay for other things if i had more disposable income and/or profitable startup, though. i'm making do with what i have, for now. i'm considering paying for something like an automatic cloud backup system, too, but am not currently.

LogicHoleFlaw
I'm going to limit myself to online services, as opposed to more mail-cataloguey applications.

Video Games: Xbox Live Gold Account, Xbox Live Arcade Games, download tracks for Rock Band, and FFXI (think WoW.)

Movies: Netflix

Hosting: In the very near future, Amazon Web Services

Finance: Credit score tracking

blender
Consumer: iTunes, Club Penguin (for my daughter)

Business: CVSDude (VCS hosting), Highrise

iamdave
Honestly? Nothing outside of the everyday stuff, but even Amazon I only buy books every now and then.
walesmd
Skype

I used to pay for the Zune Pass but the service became so utterly worthless plus my Internet connection times out quite often here in Kuwait that I just said forget it. Back to torrents, which will automatically resume the download, when my connection wakes back up (without locking up the entire system, might I add).

inovica
Flickr, iTunes, a backup service, host/server/domain monitoring
gsiener
consumer:

flickr

tasks (by Crowd Favorite)

business:

Highrise

Quickbooks online

scumola
Amazon S3 & UnBox. Google Adwords. Playstation Network. GoDaddy. Tivo.
bokonist
Skype, NetFlix, Rhapsody, Peapod

Used to pay for VirtualPBX, Experts Exchange, and Wall St. Journal

calvin
JungleDisk (for backup via S3), hosting (Dreamhost for shared, Slicehost for more power), Amazon MP3 for music. I've been trialing Pingdom for site monitoring and will probably sign up once trial is over. Netflix.
blender
I forgot, I too pay for Jungledisk
edw519
Amount spent personally = 0.

Amount spent through business = 0.

Amount that could have been earned if I had been billing instead of on hacker news > 0.

larrykubin
1. Freshbooks for time tracking and invoicing clients

2. Flickr Pro account for easy photo management

3. Dedicated server with LayeredTech for hosting projects

4. EasyNews account for newsgroups

5. Netflix for movie rentals and streaming

fallentimes
Things I pay for:

1. ESPN Insider

Things I would pay for (but are free):

1. Hacker News 2. Yodlee 3. Feedburner 4. Google Alerts

mattmaroon
Is ESPN's insider content that much better than what you get for free elsewhere? If so, that's really saying a lot, since the bar for sports content has risen faster than the price of gas over the last few years.
unexpected
yea, I seriously miss insider. It was pretty good, especially for the NBA draft. I miss all those mocks :( As an aside, ESPN basically has the lamest security ever. So we were splitting an insider subscription amongst 4 people. The $12 a year became $3. Woohoo!
fallentimes
Careful with that. I took it to the extreme and almost got permanently banned.
utnick
At least for the Rockets, the one team I follow religiously, the insider stories are stories just ripped from the Houston Chronicle.

It would be useful though if you care about a bunch of teams and don't have time to read the hometown newspapers of all your teams.

fallentimes
Yes it really is. People like John Hollinger and KC Joyner are must reads for my line of work. Chad Ford has gotten a ton better as well - he used to be a hack.
mattmaroon
There's been an all out bidding war for sports writers lately. I guess that must be why.