Ask HN: Are you cutting back on subscription services?
With a recession looming and inflation already here, are you cutting back on any subscription services?
I have recently gotten rid of Spotify, Amazon Prime, my paid email service, Playstation Network.
I still have Google One (I use Photos, Mobile VPN, switched back to GMail, Google Calendar). I am currently on a trial of Youtube Premium (with Youtube Music) but I probably won't keep it.
I still have iCloud extra storage, Dropbox, GoPro cloud, Netflix and Disney+.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadAlso a proud owner of lifetime licenses to various software which is normally subscription based for those who can’t afford a lifetime one off purchase.
https://www.motor1.com/news/597376/bmw-heated-seats-subscrip...
I wonder how they're doing financially because in terms of brand the idea has sunk them for me completely.
For hosting I use GitHub pages. No vpn. Free Dropbox plan. YouTube for videos and music. Might buy a few months of Xbox Game Pass if there a bunch of games to play.
OTOH the amount I've lost via index funds this year outweighs the cost of all these subscriptions many times over, so you do you :P
Friend of mine got Netflix, Sky (for soccer), Audible and some more and comes out at almost ten times as much per month. I find that insane I don't even have time to consume so much stuff.
- Saving some money
- Reducing digital usage and increasing spending more time IRL/AFK
- Reducing media consumption, addiction and FOMO (movies, shows, albums)
- Reducing number of service I use and manage
- Reducing digital footprint, attack surface and shared personal data
- Other minimalism and anti-consumerism related reasons
In the last year I've gotten rid of Dropbox, Amazon Prime, Amazon Audible, Netflix, YouTube premium, Evernote, GitHub Pro, several Patreon pod/vodcasts, A VPS, WhiskyClub and a few other things.
I've kept: iCloud storage, Fastmail, Apple Music, BackBlaze, Overcast
I'm contemplating getting rid of: 1Password, Bear.
* JetBrains (IntelliJ/PyCharm IDEs), with an option to stop paying and still keep the last version you paid for - that integrity keeps me paying for it even though I don't technically need the latest version. Can be replaced with Sublime Text, other open-source alternatives or worst-case scenario, Vim with open-source plugins
* Office 365 (or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're calling it now), only ~2$/month for hosted email and 1TB OneDrive space so worth it, don't need anything else. Can be replaced with a self-hosted server if needed (I already run some for clients).
* Kagi Search, it's pretty good but I subscribe mostly for supporting them rather than any specific benefit - it it was purely about the money then I'd say DDG is good enough. Can be terminated if the value is no longer there or if it start smelling like "growth & engagement".
Any consumer product I don't bother or milk the free trials continuously - Spotify has this nasty habit of "personalizing" everything without an opt-out so I just create trial accounts every couple months to reset my profile and avoid getting into a filter bubble. I also have downloaded mixes from various YouTube/SoundCloud channels (via youtube-dl) that keep me going through the day, are available as local files and don't rely on a shitty, memory-intensive and network-dependent player to play.
For movies/series, the very few times I want to watch something, a friend usually has what I'm looking for, and worst case scenario, that friend can always be "the pirate bay". In hindsight I've got very little time to watch anything anyway and get most of my entertainment from free YouTube content (proxied via Invidious so no ads/etc). Patreon or ad-hoc donations take care of the "paying creators" aspect without giving any penny to Google who couldn't even be bothered to respect the GDPR until very recently so no bad feelings there.
Gaming wise, I still get plenty of value from my fully-paid-for copy of Battlefield 3 and am not interested in anything new if it involves subscriptions, microtransactions or having to grind for months before getting good weapons/ugprades as I don't have time for the latter anyway and would rather spend that time enjoying BF3 where I'm already fully leveled-up. Old copies of Minecraft (Beta 1.7.3 - the real Minecraft, self-hosted servers and friends) also provide tons of value.
Anything else, not only do I not see enough value in it nor am happy with the (usual) privacy concerns, but wouldn't want to commit anyway in fear that they'll alter the deal in the future or change the software to benefit "engagement" at my expense.
The current list of subscriptions above (which is all it is - I don't think I omitted anything) is alright for now but can and will be replaced should they alter the deals in a detrimental way.
Actually I guess Hello Fresh counts. Will probably keep that.
I only use YT for STEM and live music.
I wonder if media talking about recession and now seeing questions like this is intentional; get people to cut their spending, save, actually causing a recession, because people listened to the media and Fed.
Asset prices come down given less activity in the market. Average person can’t save much as it, and the rich buy up cheaper assets.
In no way do I see the media and Fed talking about these things as indicative of their ability to see the future. It’s people using their podium and claim of power to trigger behavioral modification.
They really do not want to raise wages: https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/26/the-statistic-fed-cha...
All moved to 1 medium size Hetzner VPS with various self hosted OSS services, crond and a custom Flask app.
Everything is so fast and cohesive now. I'm saving close to $2K/month
1x Hetzner CPX31 VPS: 4 VCPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB DISK (~$15/m)
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* Mailchimp ~95$/m
-> Listmonk + Mailgun (few $, pay as you go)
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* Retool ($20/m), Chargebee ($750/m)
-> Transitioned through Appsmith (0$), but decommissioned it in favour of a custom Flask app + local Postgres + Xero API (took 1 month) ($0/m)
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* Codacy ($36/m)
-> various linters in CI + deps security scanners (free)
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* Azure DevOps (private repo) ($86/m)
-> ditched Microsoft-hosted agent pool (many slow, expensive "cloud" agents w/ limited build hours) to 1 free, self-hosted agent (my VPS) $0/m. Planning to move to Circle CI Free account with up to 5 free self-hosted agents.
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* Zapier ($30/m)
-> N8N on my VPS ($0/m)
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* AWS RDS ($50/m)
-> Localhost Postgres ($0/m): this is so underrated. Hosting the DB on the same server with apps is faaaaast! Cron script to backup it all locally AND to S3 daily.
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* AWS Cloudfront (IDK, non free)
-> Cloudflare proxied DNS (free)
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Extra details
* Authentication to all hosted company services happens at the edge via Cloudflare Zero Trust (also free)
* All services are proxied by Cloudflare "DNS"
* Nginx allows HTTP access only from Cloudflare IP range (for security)
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FUTURE PLANS
* Hosted Wordpress ($29/m)
-> Cloudflare Pages (maybe some workers too) much faster & for free
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* AWS S3 (~$40/m)
-> Wasabi.com (IDK, much less)
That is, I unified the concepts of "customer portal" and back "office tooling". No more need for a Retool replacement.
And another reason: Appsmith is not as good as Retool (yet?) and is a memory hogging Java process. Good riddance, after all!
Thank you for trying Appsmith & apologies that you had a poor experience with the product.
Can I ask if you were pulling a lot of data from your databases to populate the UI? I'm asking because we definitely have our work cut out to handle larger amounts of data.
As you rightly said, Appsmith is written in Java which allocates 25% of available memory by default and expands to 75% memory. You can control this behaviour by adding APPSMITH_JAVA_HEAP_ARG="-Xmx2G" in the docker.env file.
Even after you explained it to me now, I still don't understand why the minimum allocated memory (at rest) should be fixed at 25% (or any percent) of all available memory. What happens if I run it on my 64GB M1 Macbook? 16GB for Appsmith? I don't think so. Why not skipping the Xmx option all together? How much performance difference can it ever cause?
Things will get looked much harder if lose my job or retire, but my employer has never had a layoff in nearly 40 years in business.
Budgeting is great, but a lot of people end up being penny wise and pound foolish. There are a lot of bigger, more frivolous expenses most of us can cut out of our lives before Netflix starts being a problem.
It's still annoying when every product wants me to subscribe to something. I'm old enough to remember when you could just buy Microsoft Word.
It really is a classic move that we see repeated over and over again. Your budget should be unique to you. Someone might look at those same services for $100 and say "to hell with it" and cancel them all, but I think a lot of people are on your side.
Personally, budgeting starts from the top down. Rent, car, food, utilities, etc.
Live in a modest place, own a used car, and cook your own meals are all basic ideas that can really cut costs. That's a very over simplified example, but generally, I think it's a good framework.
The value gain I get out of something like Netflix or a video game absolutely trounces the value of getting take out one night (for me).
Subscription models are good in general and better as seeing Ads all day. But I had prime, Disney, Netflix, Crunchyroll etc. It was to much and I’m just watching old series again. It’s not worthy.
I do recommend Redbox, however - $2 is the cheapest HD rental around, and I've been on Redbox time delay for years, watching movies a few months after they pass through theaters. They also sell discs for $4-6 (even their 4K discs) which is the cheapest I usually find.
I used to subscribe to Netflix, YT TV, YT Premium, Disney+ and HBO Max
Now its just YT Premium and HBO Max
I've had Spotify Premium for 12 years and will have it in the future too. The price and the content you get is more than fair and I'll be happy to pay it even if listen barely any music during some months.
Other than that and iCloud, I don't really use any streaming/subscription services.
Regarding video streaming I used to have Netflix, Amazon etc. but due to the endless fragmentation, continuously increasing prices and general decline in Hollywood quality where the focus of directors is in CGI, shoehorning woke-propaganda and hiring same boring overpaid and overused "top actors" to every single movie, it's just not worth it anymore.
I also don't want to invest into some paid service whose terms will likely screw me over whenever they change, when I could be investing into a service that I can control for years and doesn't require an account.