Ask HN: Which paid apps and services do you use?

89 points by asaddhamani ↗ HN
Can be exclusively paid apps/services or ones with a free tier available. Examples could be Pinboard, Instapaper, Zapier, PostHaven, Lastpass, anything really.

90 comments

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FastMail, NewsBlur and Amazon Prime video.
Basecamp (2 accounts, soon to be 3), Base CRM, Google Apps, Lastpass, Instapaper, Google Apps (multiple), Quickbooks Online (multiple), an entirely disposable time billing program that plugs into Quickbooks that I won't name because I don't want to be sued for libel, Evernote, Crashplan. Edit: Feedly.

Some of these will not survive the earthquake.

I use Sublime Text (and occasionally TextMate). It saves me time so I'm sure it's payed for itself already.

I also use AWS for some personal hosting.

Adobe Creative Suite, OmniGraffle, PaintCode, Sublime Text, Airfoil, Transmit, OfficeTime, GitHub, Rdio, Basecamp, Skype.
Netflix, GitHub, Sublime Text, Amazon Prime + Music cloud, and Adobe Photoshop
Spotify, TimeDoctor, Google Ads, Reddit Ads, AWS, Guitar Tuner App
Photoshop, Amazon Prime, Pixiv, Eijiro (an online Japanese dictionary), GitHub, Feedly, Blender Cloud (more of donation than service...) Google Music All-Access, Crunchyroll
Cinch, 1Password, Rdio, AWS, Hipchat, Zendesk
Off the top of my head--

Services:

Fastmail.fm (for personal email), Office365 (for more legitimate email), Evernote (had a paid account for a few years, although I never use it), 500px (for non-professional photos), DigitalOcean for VPS, Netflix (not sure if you mean consumer services), Amazon Prime (I only use it for the shipping), Hulu+

Apps (a subsection at least):

Mathematica (I'm happy to pay for the Home version), 1Password (although I've stopped using it since iCloud Keychain Sync), Pixelmator, Capture One, NI Maschine, NI Tracktor, Pretty much every audio app for iOS (iMaschine, Figure, iKaossilator, iMS-20, SampleWiz, Lemur, Vogel CMI Pro, Animoog, Scape)

You actually use iCloud Keychain? It's great for syncing Wi-Fi networks but it seems kind of clunky for anything else
I do and I've found it to work fine.

It can autofill credit card numbers and passwords on my iPhone/iPad.

If I remember correctly even Steve Gibson, who sang praises of the Apple security apparatus saw the iCloud as a weak link in iOS security in his three part series (sn 446 through 448) on TWiT.

Thoughts?

https://twit.cachefly.net/video/sn/sn0446/sn0446_h264m_1280x...

https://twit.cachefly.net/video/sn/sn0447/sn0447_h264m_1280x...

https://twit.cachefly.net/video/sn/sn0448/sn0448_h264m_1280x...

I think products like 1Password, Keypass, Lastpass, etc. are a good idea, in that they're making it much easier to encourage a culture of strong, unique passwords for every application and website. Of those, I favor 1Password, because the people making it have a good track record of making generally good security implementations, and being receptive of feedback when issues are discovered. They've been good about updating the apps when an issue is discovered, and haven't made it a super regular occurrence.

They also allow flexibility of storing the password database, which I prefer over the services that store your passwords with them, as you are now reliant on their own security implementations. If you want to, you can store it in dropbox, so that you can access the web-based version anywhere you can log into the Dropbox website. You're now putting an awful lot of faith in the security of Dropbox, but it's an option at least.

But fundamentally, this is a problem which should be solved by the ecosystem providers. Windows, Mac OS X, Firefox syncing, Chrome (I assume Chrome has a way to sync passwords to wherever you're logged into, I don't use Chrome).

I'm comfortable enough trusting Apple to secure all my login credentials that I'm willing to use the built-in functionality. Much like how I use "Reading List" instead of any of the "article saver applications". It works fairly well, I don't have to mess with it, I don't have to give my data to some other company, it just shows up in all my browsers on all of my devices.

Yeah, for whatever reason I was constantly having the following problem in 1Password:

->Whenever I auto-generated a password in the browser extension, and submitted it, 1Password would occasionally (like 1 in 20 times, but often enough to be infuriating) lose the new password into the ether. Like it wouldn't be saved in the "recently-generated passwords" field in 1Password, or update the password field under the "Logins" entry.

So when I got a new laptop, like a month ago, I didn't even install 1Password, but the first time I'd go to any site, I'd manually look up and copy the password out of my backed-up 1Password web page, and then let Safari save the login in the keychain. Over time, I migrated all of my passwords into the Keychain, and now I also have access to them from within Safari on my iPhone and iPad (which having to previously open the 1Password app, unlock it, copy the password from the login, and then switch back to Safari and paste it in), was a pretty big win.

So I'm really happy with iCloud Keychain so far. It restricts my ability to log in to only Apple devices (which for now at least, isn't an issue for me), but I've found it a much better experience than using 1Password.

LastPass, Spotify, DigitalOcean, GitHub, Netflix, Amazon Prime
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Evernote Premium, and that's pretty much it.

It has its flaws, but it's made a big difference as a catch-all brain bin for me.

Yes, Evernote Premium was the very first thing to come to mind.

I also use RescueTime and OmniFocus. There are plenty of paid apps on my phone / tablet / computer, but those are ones that I would struggle to replace.

The paid app I would love to get rid of: Quickbooks.

It's interesting how so many people on here are instantly thinking "Evernote" when they think of paid online services. I think it's one of the few things that people are actually happy to pay for.
Have you found the paid experience with RescueTime to be worth it? I've been using it for free for a bit, and I feel like I get just enough data; it's hard to see what else I'd want from it.
I have alerts set up to notify me when I have goofed off too much for one day. That feature alone is worth the premium fee for RescueTime.
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What don't you like about Quickbooks? Why not switch to something else?
Quickbooks seems to be moving away from being about managing financial books and more about offering services that integrate with a company's books (payroll, invoicing, etc).

I run a business without Accounts Receivable and just need a reliable way to keep books. However, it is not a simple business. We have multiple revenue centers (departments or classes), multiple bank accounts, and multiple cash accounts. Intuit seems to be moving away from companies like mine (oh, and I use a Mac).

I was really excited when they moved Quickbooks Online to a more modern interface. Unfortunately they made some frequent tasks (browsing our chart of accounts) much more difficult that it used to be. Invoicing is much more prominent though.

irccloud.com - For running a few open source projects, I find an always-on connection and getting instant mobile notifications to be totally worth the $5/month.

Otherwise, for fun non-worky-type stuff: Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime are the most prominent ones coming to mind.

The ones I actually use are AppCode, IntelliJ, Textastic, Medialoot, Creative Market, Sketch 2, Sketch 3.

I'm still evaluating crash reporting/analytics services for iOS apps.

off the top of my head: backblaze, rackspace email, ynab, mailmate, linode, todoist, divvy, jazzradio.com, amazon s3, 1password, alfred, newsblur, instapaper
Github,Posthaven,Pinboard,Flickr and Dropbox
GitHub. I think I pay them the princely sum of $7/month for a few private repositories.

And somehow I forgot Netflix, Xbox music and Xbox Live. Guess they just fade into the background.

Have you tried giving Bitbucket a try? They provide unlimited private repositories for free. Its not as easy to use as GitHub but it does the job.
For work: Office365, Adobe Suite, GitHub, Deploy, Digital Ocean VPS, Treehouse, Evernote, Nozbe, Basecamp, Team Gantt, Skype, WP Engine, Dropbox Business

Non-work: Rdio, Amazon Prime, Dropbox Personal, Lastpass

I have a Ramnode VPS. Also xbox live, I didn't think about that until someone mentioned it here. I share a netflix account with my roommate. I buy books from amazon and google for my android tablet. I don't own a smartphone, the plans are too expensive.
Freshbooks, Github, PhpStorm, Sublime Text (for those quick python/node js applications), AWS

Thinking if I should probably get Intellij since I've been doing a lot of Java these past few weeks.

note taking in the browser: evernote

chat with phone notifications: irccloud.com

hosting personal projects / testing things: digitalocean

music: spotify (seriously, how I lived before spotify is a mystery)

Instapaper and Amazon Prime are primarily what comes to mind; though also will end up paying for Dropbox soon. Personally, Spotify, as well as Netflix.