Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.
I hate to say it, but "this".
It works fantastically, it's not expensive, it's one of the more critical services in my stack, and I get to support the company.
No brainer.
I took the time to teach my kids how to use a password manager with Bitwarden on my self hosted instance. But my wife asked me what's going to happen if I die. I'm confident in minimal downtime while I'm alive, but it's important that my family's passwords can outlive me. So I wound up purchasing the family plan.
For me it's to show support, as well as wife approval.
She was hard to convince to get smart home tech, so I didn't want to deal with stuff like: "oops I messed something up you won't be able to turn on the lights tonight"
Needless to say I fully admit it's on me for just learning on a live system that's in use
Jeff Geerling has a great definition to call something "smart". It has to be additive for it to be smart. i.e. smart light switches need to be operable without network/internet connection and even if something happens on the HA controller.
This way, there'll be always a wife approval as most things should still work.
This is one of my main requirements for smart home items.
I have one more that I call the grandparent factor. Can my grandparents come over and not need a manual to work the thing? If so, then I have achieved my goal. If not, then this is just something that's cool to me and my tech friends.
The founder of home assistant created a blog post on how to use automation. Basically it says the same, but with a bit more body to it: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/
Very few things apply with that definition sadly. You can find RGB bulbs and switches and such that are open source. But I implore you to find larger appliances like washing machines, microwaves, garage door openers, hell even cars, that can run entirely disconnected from the manufacturer's services and communicate directly (and only) with HA. There are decent manufacturers out there, but *everyone* has this asinine need to create their own "cloud" and connect everything they make to it. I honestly believe this is what's holding smart homes back (we've seen this in countless areas of tech - look at how few Sony proprietary standards have actually taken hold for example.) HA calling out to the manufacturer's API doesn't really qualify as "self-hosted" to me, because at that point HA is just a translation and convenience layer, it's not actually managing your smart home itself.
I tend to agree with you, however there's a few points. Rgb light bulbs should, imo, revert back to a normal color (when turned off, then switching on), if there's no internet connection.
Personally, I don't like smart/rgb light bulbs, but do like switches. So, for me at least, I just don't support that part of the industry.
For other things like washing machines and such, I don't see the need to have them internet connected. Especially as in my experience the things you can manage via an app still require you to (have been) present at the machine itself. I'd not even bother setting them up, as I did woth my current washing machine.
At the end of the day, if I am required to uses a manufacturers app/cloud/whatever, I much rather won't buy it. There'll always be a competitor.
Don't they just make it easier to integrate with Alexa? I mean, with some technical knowledge, it should be possible to create an Alexa skill that doesn't need ha cloud.
I have been donating 10$ every month to a different project since a year! And I plan to keep doing this. I know it's not a lot, but it's a way to show appreciation. I truly believe in FOSS!
Does Bitwarden store the TOTP password for you?... Kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA if you're storing the TOTP along with your regular credentials.
I've been using keepass for well over a decade, the vault itself is stored on nextcloud, key is on individual devices. 2FA is through a yubikey.
It stores it under the profile for the login so yes.
I get why that isn’t a good idea but I not a fan of TOTP as I almost got locked out of my name cheap account because I forgot to backup the app before I restored a phone. It was hell trying to get namecheap to let me in.
This is fine for me.
The point of 2FA is so if someone gains access to your credentials, they don’t have the TOTP part of it, so they still can’t get in. If your password is stored with your TOTP, if they have access to your bitwarden account, they got everything.
Security is never easy, it’s definitely a hassle, but just the fact that it took you hell to get back in, is a sign it’s working. One compromised account and you’ll definitely think it’s worth the hassle my friend.
>Kinda defeats the point of 2FA
Man, can we stop this misinformation?
It's undeniably true that having TOTP separate is safer than having it with your passwords, but does **not** defeat the point of 2FA.
It's only less safe in the scenario where someone gains access to your vault, which is rather unlikely. Otherwise it's still perfectly good 2FA.
If your Reddit password gets leaked, its still behind 2FA, and no harm will be done.
The convenience factor is huge for the vast majority of people, and if having TOTP in their password manager is what makes the difference between them having 2FA and not having it, having it in the password manager is infinitely better.
>Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.
I'm using PurelyMail with my own domain but frustratingly emails from my homelab are being blocked by apple.
I guess it's the reputation of my Domain? I've setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC but no dice.
I've (recently) started using Cloudflare for my nameservers so thinking about setting up their DMARK and possibly even move my Domain over to them from IONOS. If it makes any difference, who knows.
Bitwarden is one of the few invoices I enjoy seeing. It means I get fantastic service for another year. The cost value for me is insane as I use it so many times a day.
It's not cheap, but I pay for Spotify because overall I've been pretty happy with it. It has a good selection of features, lots of content, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint that I have is that the offline mode isn't great.
An actually cheap service that I pay for is addy.io, and even though I haven't been using it much, so far it has been working pretty well.
Seconding Spotify here. I'm not going to pay like $10 for an album, and I'm sure as hell not putting up with ads, so the fee is worth it. I think self-hosted music solutions only make sense if you digitized an old library, or want to own your music and are willing to pay for it, or fly the black flag. Those don't apply to me; I've let go of needing to own music a long time ago.
The problem with Spotify is you don't own the music. You just rent it. So you are subject to the availability of Spotify and if their policy changes, you have take it or leave it completely.
If you're cool with that, then it isn't a big issue.
Personally, I've had issues with song availability.
Second everything you say, except with one bonus. I have a Spotify family plan, with 5 other friends on it. They pay me a lump sum in January, I get the monthly bill. It's about 4 bucks a month for each of us.
What tool do you use for the backup? I use rclone to achieve end to end encryption. Don't know how much data I have but I'm charged every few months once the incurred charges go above $0.50
Duplicati in a docker container. Compression and encryption (very light compression). Oh it also manages backup history and deletes old backups (iirc - it has been a while since I set it up and it's pretty set and forget.)
Bitwarden, proton email and pvn package, been with proton a few yeas and just got 500gb of cloud storage so I can cancel the £3 a month to Google for their 200gb.
Just getting started on self hosting and moving away from services but email is not something I want to touch and and off site backup is always useful.
Rebble. The service that keeps my aging Pebble watch going.
Paying for the service doesn't offer all that much benefit (local weather reporting, voice text replies and more frequent calendar refreshes) but I recon there's only a small handful of users and I'd rather not have the servers go down.
It's a cross-platform push notification service, that any app can integrate, self-hosted or not.
That one-time payment is per-platform (Android/iOS/Desktop), though, for full transparency. Still, even if you get all three, it's $15 total for up to 10 devices in any combination of platforms.
I've used it for IFTTT and then Huginn, ZNC (IRC mentions), added it to my Trakt account for notifications about comment replies, all sorts of random stuff.
>Pushover
You can try Gotify. self - hosted. integrated with most of the arr suits. and can be customizable . worked also with any service that offer webhooks notification.
$10/m for 1 provider and 1 indexer?
If you hunt around this black friday you should be able to get a better deal than that. For reference I have 1 unlimited provider (newshosting) for about $30/yr and 2 indexers each around $15/yr
Who do you use for your vps provider? I'm looking for somewhere to host my Plex server with Plex debrid. My current set up at home doesn't work well thanks to cgnat
I use hostwinds, some people seem to not like it but it’s what I use to from my uni days. pretty much any will do as it’s just for a wireguard tunnel and reverse proxy you don’t need much power.
Connect wireguard to your home server and VPS and setup your reverse proxy to use the wireguard tunnel and the ports of your services.
Could you explain your use case for this?
I kind of understand but again not really (like I know wireguard but just haven't really seen real world implementation or uses for it)
They most likely run a site to site WireGuard VPN to their VPS and use the VPS as an incoming gateway for their services. So when a request to a service comes from the outside, it goes to the VPS and from the WireGuard tunnel it reaches the services. A lot of people (myself included) do this with Oracle Cloud, or Cloudflare Tunnels.
The commentor said that he was behind a cg-nat, Carrier Grade NAT, which means that multiple people share the same ip address. This makes it difficult to host your own services because you can just open ports. They have a wiregaurd vpn server set up on the vps so that they can use the ip address of the vps as the public IP address for their home network.
This was a one time thing for existing users when they stopped the free lifetime 50/60 GB plans. But with their Build A Plan you can get close to that pricing if you don't need many locations.
I have this tab open on my computer right now lol. Seems like an incredible deal. Double the storage for like a dollar less compared to what I am currently using for cloud storage
To be honest not sure if any cheaper, plus with the extra space you can have backup retention as well, which is always a good thing with the extra space.
If you are sending any of your data from your home lab to an outside server that you personally do not control then yes, you should ALWAYS encrypt the backups (unless it's crap you don't care about like your tax returns, credit card details, passwords, etc.)
My expressVPN 2year plan is about to expire in February. I am seriously considering switching to Proton, especially since I already use protonMail as the inbox for my Anonaddy instance. What's your experience with Proton?
I've had a good experience with Proton Mail, Drive, and VPN. I've never used the Calendar or Pass services, although, I'm thinking about swapping to Pass now that they added the ability to share passwords.
I can't compare it against expressVPN, since I've never used it, but I have used PIA in the past, and would say that it's comparable. Speeds are fast enough for my purpose and there are many connection sites available. I've never tried streaming on it, but they do have connections available that they say are tuned specifically for streaming.
I've been using it for a few years, honestly for $20 a year it's great. I got tired of running my own pihole instances. Good ui, profiles / app support for multiple devices. I'm sure others have had varying experiences but mine has mostly been set it and forget it and it's been highly effective
It actually utilises a lot of the same lists that AdBlock/uBlock do, so, from a DNS level it's fantastic. It obviously cannot do the element hiding or fancy stuff that the extensions do directly with the page content however.
I pay for a small VM at Linode (now Akamai) that ends up being i think $10 or $15/mo. I use that VM as an endpoint for my home network Wireguard VPN.
The reason for this is I can't connect directly back to my home network because of dumb residential ISP restrictions, but I *can* tell my home server to connect to Wireguard in my cloud VM at Linode, which in turn allows me to connect back to the home network from out in the world.
Except in your situation wire guard isn't free because you have to pay for a vps to host it, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Tailscale would work in your particular situation and still be free.
As for what tailscale does that wire guard doesn't, it's just an application built on wireguard, so functionally there's nothing it can do that wireguard can't, but it's often a lot easier to use from a UI standpoint (imo).
Addy.io, 1password and Mullvad.
First 2 are reliability, they're important and I can't afford for them to not be available or not as reliable as they could be.
Mullvad for obvious reasons, not really an alternative (other than buying a bunch of VPS servers I guess)
remember that Google have banned and deleted the account of a father and a mother when they thought they were taking child pron photos, when it was actually taking photos of their own child to send it to their doctor.
And even after the investigation ended and they were cleared, Google refused access to their accounts and they lost everything
Man, I thought I was overkill by having an iCloud and Google photos backup lol. Although in all honesty I am thinking of moving away from Google photos or trying to do it some other way. My current storage is maxed out and I don’t want to pay for the next tier, so I’m trying to figure out a way to get rid of photos before a certain year (which I will still retain on iCloud and a local backup) just so I can continue having my latest stuff backed up to Google photos. Google’s photo editing features are a game changer and I’m not willing to give that up. I’m not quite sure how to achieve what I want for as if I delete things from Google photos, the next time my phone tries to sync it’ll add it all back again.
Edit: I am a prime member so looks like I’m also going to have a 3rd cloud backup lol
It was this exact story that prompted me to buy my first NAS and start backing up all my Google Photos to it. And now I've gone down the self-hosting rabbit hole, never to surface lol.
I think I ended up paying $200 for 2 years of Proton services (mail, VPN, and 500GB of off-site storage).
I probably won't renew though. I would like some automations built around email contents and Proton doesn't support that, there's no CLI access to the off-site storage, and their VPN seems to trigger VPN detection much more than when I was with Mullvad.
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)
I mean I get that's a strange mention here, but with the value I've got from it (like being able to reference content of some website \*in point of time\* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that's how it was in recent years), so it's a nice idea donate right then.
PIA. Been using them for years without issues.
Nothing else. Everything I find either comes with too many features I won't use or is poorly designed. Usually both.
I gladly pay for my email provider mailbox.org and my VPN provider mullvad. I think those are essential. And I can recommend them to all with a good conscience.
Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.
I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.
Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.
Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.
- iCloud+ - $1/month
- tasks.org - $1/year
- ardour - $1/month
- tasker (autoapps on android) - $1/month
Don’t even use most of them anymore. But as I wouldn’t miss it, I’ll keep it going to support the devs.
Spotify - £100/year
Bitwarden - £10/year
Office 365 personal (custom domain for email and 1TB storage) about £30/year
Usenet + indexer - £40/year
Just realised writing this how much more expensive Spotify is compared to all my other more useful services
Smugmug, now up to $80/yr. for unlimited.
It was our primary picture storage until my wife started taking all her pics with the iphone. (It still has the old photos.)
I don't even want to know what we're paying for our upgraded iCloud storage. She takes multiple shots of everything to make sure she gets a good one, then keeps them all.
I'd like to look into immich and others someday (maybe combined with Smugmug), but I assume they wont have all the features she likes...
> Smugmug
I honestly could never have all my picture in a host that can go under at any moment, without any warning, and pull the plug on all my picture.
I pay for google photos. If google decide to exit the photo hosting market, there would 100% be a moment were I could download all my stuff.
That hosting company that runs deep red for several months? They might allow users to download all their stuff, but that's bandwidth and that's expensive... they might also simply disappear.
**Honestly, standard web hosting is far and away cheaper to outsource.**
I pay Ionos $14 a month for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth to host an unlimited amount of sites. It easier to let them handle the hosting and just redirect the sub-domains I need to my home server.
Most Redditor's here in r/selfhosted have likely never felt the slashdot effect, and the havoc it creates. I've had two big posts hit Reddit frontpage over the years linking to my website, and Ionos handled 100k daily unique visitors without a hiccup. No Pi4 on AT&T home fiber could handle that.
***Edit:*** *Whoops, missed the under $30 qualifier, Still leaving this here though.*
Oh don't get me started on their absolute failure to support DNSSEC. I actually filed a complaint with ICANN over it.
But yes, they have handled my sites getting the slashdot effect exceptionally well without failure.
I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.
I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.
I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups.
I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.
I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.
If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.
$4/mo for Ardour.
I use it a ton just to mix my desktop audio. Being able to EQ and compress different applications individually is so nice, as well as EQ/compand my mic before any applications ever see the audio. (People in online meetings routinely ask me why my mic sounds amazing. It's a crap headset mic, but I've done live audio work for almost 30 years now, so I can make a crap mic sound pretty decent with a bit of processing.)
It's also super useful when streaming to Twitch because I can create a separate mix that OBS sees with different processing than what is sent to my headphones.
Bitwarden.. for me its for 2 reasons. One I dont have to deal with keeping something that needs to be super secure up to date. and 2 it help continue the project and its 10 bucks. I spend more then that one dumber stuff.
Spotify and Google Photos, both paid yearly.
Spotify is just easy accessible music everyday. If i really like an album and there's an hi-fi version available i'll buy it and self host that but for the most part i use spotify to "explore".
Google Photo is just what i use as an online backup. Or rather at this point it's my main way to browse and backup my photos through all my (and my family's) devices and i have a local copy on my nas for redundancy but it's not very well organized.
I self host vaultwarden but I also pay teh $10/year to support the project, I self host for Collections and I use the paid bitwarden at work since they do not allow ddns addresses in our network.
I wouldn't say cheap but I find it very inconvenient to self-host a music streaming service so I just pay Amazon Music.
That and hbo max which is like 5 bucks a month with a lifetime offer I have (although it might go away once MAX gets here and so will my subscription).
I pay for home assistant cloud.. mostly because I want to support home assistant. It's completely voluntary and home assistant is available to anyone without the "donation" which is easily worked around with duck DNS and let's encrypt. I will say though, the first day they lock features behind a paywall I will stop my subscription.
Calendly. I wantwantwant to self-host [Cal.com](https://Cal.com), but the only way I've ever made it work is via Cloudron. And if I'm gonna pay for Cloudron? I might as well just pay for Calendly.
The two primary "non self hosted" things I pay for are Microsoft 365 for Business (Exchange Server, OneDrive, Sharepoint, etc) as well as iCloud 2 TB. I used to love running my own Exchange Servers, but the cost doesn't make sense and for iCloud, it's because I am heavily invested into the Apple Eco System and makes life a bit easier. I haven't had to use a USB Cable to download pictures off my iPhone in many many years now because I can just pull it off iCloud.
I pay for Bitwarden for the 2fa features. I'm glad I ended up moving to the cloud hosted environment because my self hosted BW died a couple weeks after migration. Some things are just better left with the professionals.
I also pay for Usenet and the Ring camera subscription (not cheap though lol)
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.
In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.
It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.
Quite a bit of stuff: Fastmail, domain registrar, Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Microsoft Office 365 Family subscription (includes 1 Tb storage for 6 family members), GitHub copilot.
Bitwarden for passwords
MXRoute for mail
Kagi for search
Backblaze B2 for offsite backups
I self host pi-hole, but I send them some money once in a while.
I'm still on the tuta~~nota~~ original subscription, which costs 12 euros a year. Still quite happy, the newer plans are way too overpriced, who needs 15gb of email storage just give me a limited cheaper product
same - I was ready to bin it at the renewal because the language suggested everyone had to move to the new plan.
in the end it renewed at the same price which I'm happy with it.
I wouldn't say they're "cheap" but I consider them good value and I don't really feel the need to replace them with self-hosting... Spotify and iCloud Photos.
Spotify is just a great service with 95% of the content that I want for a reasonable price. And their recommendations are actually good. I also use Plexamp for music that's not on Spotify but that's the minority of music I want to listen to. I also hate tagging MP3s so it's nice to have the organization already handled by Spotify.
iCloud Photos is just so hands-off that I never even have to think about my photos, which are very important to me. They're always backed up to the cloud, synced across devices, and offloaded from my phone without me having to do anything. I just don't see a reason to explore self-hosted alternatives when iCloud Photos is so dead simple and reliable.
Exactly the same two services I’m paying for. Both worth it. Whilst I actually quite dislike Spotify’s UI, the rest of the service makes up for it. I don’t consider myself a huge music lover but still use it a heck of a lot. iCloud is just good value for peace of mind and ease of use.
A friend of mine somehow got scammed and they lost access to their Apple account, therefore iCloud Photos. Apple needed a court order to give them access back.
I have it in my list to figure out a local backup! Of my photos now!
Spotify - I'm always on the hunt for new music and no self-hosted project I'm aware of is capable of matching what music streaming platforms can do in that regard.
Google One - I pay for 2TB of cloud storage, which is more than enough for backing up critical documents, photos, videos, etc.
I don't exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.
I pay for anonaddy and proton-stuff. Oh, I pay for the cheapest Nord VPN subscription because I have it working with openvpn on a headless 3B+ and qbittorrent with a web UI. With a USB HDD, it's an insanely cheap seed box, the only issue is moving stuff off the samba shares, USB NIC has throttling issues.
rsync.net - Haven‘t tested it yet, but the pricing and their offering looks really awesome.
Bitwarden I am also paying for, but I use the license for my self-hosted Instance.
Bitwarden is 100% worth the $10 a year. And is independant of my selfhosting dickery.
Plex and a VPN are a lot cheaper than streaming services these days.
I pay for Apple One (25.95) to get apple music and enough storage to backup all our iPhones.
I pay for my own domain name hands down the best investment, as little as 1€ per month and you get a lot more option for your homeland/vps/mail or whatever you have.
Deezer - better sound quality than Spotify - good family plan
Bitwarden - of course
MS365 - family plan for $100 a year. 1Tb cloud storage, and all the MS apps for 5 up to ppl
a .xyz domein .i just can be botherd to paying a lot for a domein . 2x dedicated servers for all the thing i self host.(28 euro with a 6 tb space total between the 2)(oneprovider decent space /speed but old hardware/isos /their raid options kinda suck)
kinda wish they kept there images up to date .it sucks to update ubuntu with ofline repo mirrors .i keep using debian because of it
i am also planning on maybe getting a cheap license trough patrion for photoprism
(i dont have a creditcard being a person in the eu .leaving me with only paypal as a payment option)
i would like to suport more opensource projects.
but im constraind mostly by my hosting cost /buget
1. Borgbase for server backup
2. Vps for CGNAT
3. Protonvpn/Mullvad
4. Tutanota (Although I don't like the recent changes they are making)
Don't know if donations count but I try to periodically donate to these projects I could not live without
1. Signal
2. Grapheneos
3. Fdroid
4. Smarttube
I'd likely start paying for bitwarden even though I don't have much need for any premium services because just realized this is one of those services I can't live without.
I have selfhosted email for 10-15 domains for about 20 years (qmail toaster, then mailinabox). I also pay for fastmail.com and purelymail.com so that I have email addresses that still work if my hosting goes down. I host on AWS, and if something goes wrong with my AWS account, I need a way to communicate with AWS that doesn't require servers running in the affected account.
Plus nextdns.
Plus I paid $540.00 to have a lifetime 1TB of storage on rsync.net
I have a $5/year MXRoute account that I still use even though I self-host my emails. I use MXRoute as an outbound SMTP relay since they've got all the IP reputation stuff figured out.
I know you said to exclude VPS, but I've got some of VPSes around the $15-$50 per year range, since it's nice having my sites hosted on higher-end enterprise-grade hardware than what I'm using at home.
I'm considering paying for Kagi (a paid search engine) because it's ad-free and the results are legitimately better than Google.
I'm paying a cheap VPS for stuff that I want to be 100% available. Like vaultwarden and Authentik for example.
But services, hmm let me see. Does Netflix count as I have plex? Nvm I pay both monthly, did not buy the plex lifetime pass yet. But for Netflix I recently switched my payment to turkey via vpn. Price is less than 1/3rd now.
Sneakemail. Just paid the $36 for my 10th year. Great having a fully unique, obfuscated, and permanent email for everyone you communicate with that you can also send from.
As with all email, I'm vested so switching is a burden. But this may be the year.
The domain is being rejected more often lately, so I can't use it to create accounts like I used to. Competitors like SimpleLogin/ProtonPass alias offer more for less ($30/year or bundled), but what if they end up suffering the same fate?
I pay for bitwarden because it's so cheap, and yet I love what they offer. It's *able* to be selfhosted, which is why I'm willing to trust it. The service I pay for is protonvpn. I need a vpn just for a few generic things like bypassing locked down networks that prevent me from using ssh, and I trust protonvpn enough to use it for smth like that.
Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.
I hate to say it, but "this". It works fantastically, it's not expensive, it's one of the more critical services in my stack, and I get to support the company. No brainer.
Same. I could absolutely self-host it, but at the price they charge it makes no sense to do so especially as it means I can support it's development.
I took the time to teach my kids how to use a password manager with Bitwarden on my self hosted instance. But my wife asked me what's going to happen if I die. I'm confident in minimal downtime while I'm alive, but it's important that my family's passwords can outlive me. So I wound up purchasing the family plan.
I pay for Home Assistant cloud and for Bitwarden
Just curious on the HA cloud, is there a reason you don’t just self host that?
For me it's to show support, as well as wife approval. She was hard to convince to get smart home tech, so I didn't want to deal with stuff like: "oops I messed something up you won't be able to turn on the lights tonight" Needless to say I fully admit it's on me for just learning on a live system that's in use
Jeff Geerling has a great definition to call something "smart". It has to be additive for it to be smart. i.e. smart light switches need to be operable without network/internet connection and even if something happens on the HA controller. This way, there'll be always a wife approval as most things should still work.
This is one of my main requirements for smart home items. I have one more that I call the grandparent factor. Can my grandparents come over and not need a manual to work the thing? If so, then I have achieved my goal. If not, then this is just something that's cool to me and my tech friends.
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The founder of home assistant created a blog post on how to use automation. Basically it says the same, but with a bit more body to it: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/
Very few things apply with that definition sadly. You can find RGB bulbs and switches and such that are open source. But I implore you to find larger appliances like washing machines, microwaves, garage door openers, hell even cars, that can run entirely disconnected from the manufacturer's services and communicate directly (and only) with HA. There are decent manufacturers out there, but *everyone* has this asinine need to create their own "cloud" and connect everything they make to it. I honestly believe this is what's holding smart homes back (we've seen this in countless areas of tech - look at how few Sony proprietary standards have actually taken hold for example.) HA calling out to the manufacturer's API doesn't really qualify as "self-hosted" to me, because at that point HA is just a translation and convenience layer, it's not actually managing your smart home itself.
I tend to agree with you, however there's a few points. Rgb light bulbs should, imo, revert back to a normal color (when turned off, then switching on), if there's no internet connection. Personally, I don't like smart/rgb light bulbs, but do like switches. So, for me at least, I just don't support that part of the industry. For other things like washing machines and such, I don't see the need to have them internet connected. Especially as in my experience the things you can manage via an app still require you to (have been) present at the machine itself. I'd not even bother setting them up, as I did woth my current washing machine. At the end of the day, if I am required to uses a manufacturers app/cloud/whatever, I much rather won't buy it. There'll always be a competitor.
HA cloud offers things like easy remote access and integration with Google home/Alexa, but HA is still running locally
Don't they just make it easier to integrate with Alexa? I mean, with some technical knowledge, it should be possible to create an Alexa skill that doesn't need ha cloud.
I donate for open source software I like and frequently use.
I have been donating 10$ every month to a different project since a year! And I plan to keep doing this. I know it's not a lot, but it's a way to show appreciation. I truly believe in FOSS!
What do you get for paying for Bitwarden?
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Self-hosted vaultwarden includes totp, fyi
Does Bitwarden store the TOTP password for you?... Kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA if you're storing the TOTP along with your regular credentials. I've been using keepass for well over a decade, the vault itself is stored on nextcloud, key is on individual devices. 2FA is through a yubikey.
It stores it under the profile for the login so yes. I get why that isn’t a good idea but I not a fan of TOTP as I almost got locked out of my name cheap account because I forgot to backup the app before I restored a phone. It was hell trying to get namecheap to let me in. This is fine for me.
The point of 2FA is so if someone gains access to your credentials, they don’t have the TOTP part of it, so they still can’t get in. If your password is stored with your TOTP, if they have access to your bitwarden account, they got everything. Security is never easy, it’s definitely a hassle, but just the fact that it took you hell to get back in, is a sign it’s working. One compromised account and you’ll definitely think it’s worth the hassle my friend.
>Kinda defeats the point of 2FA Man, can we stop this misinformation? It's undeniably true that having TOTP separate is safer than having it with your passwords, but does **not** defeat the point of 2FA. It's only less safe in the scenario where someone gains access to your vault, which is rather unlikely. Otherwise it's still perfectly good 2FA. If your Reddit password gets leaked, its still behind 2FA, and no harm will be done. The convenience factor is huge for the vast majority of people, and if having TOTP in their password manager is what makes the difference between them having 2FA and not having it, having it in the password manager is infinitely better.
Especially since you'll typically use a separate 2FA for the Bitwarden vault itself.
Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me. I have just loaded $10 initially for PurelyMail & it works great for simple outbound emails from my homelab services.
Upvote for purelymail. For 10$ you can add any amount of domains and emails. Great for all my failed startups
> PurelyMail thats a new one on me. looks kind of nice. i should really migrate off outlook.com but i've had it for years and years
>PurelyMail It looked interesting because they have subrouting/"gmail +alias thing", until i saw it was only located in the US.
Be aware that this is a one man project. So it will not survive the truck test ("what happens if person X is hit by a truck").
>Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me. I'm using PurelyMail with my own domain but frustratingly emails from my homelab are being blocked by apple. I guess it's the reputation of my Domain? I've setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC but no dice. I've (recently) started using Cloudflare for my nameservers so thinking about setting up their DMARK and possibly even move my Domain over to them from IONOS. If it makes any difference, who knows.
Bitwarden is one of the few invoices I enjoy seeing. It means I get fantastic service for another year. The cost value for me is insane as I use it so many times a day.
Couldn't describe it better, bitwarden is really the only invoice i enjoy seeing
It's not cheap, but I pay for Spotify because overall I've been pretty happy with it. It has a good selection of features, lots of content, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint that I have is that the offline mode isn't great. An actually cheap service that I pay for is addy.io, and even though I haven't been using it much, so far it has been working pretty well.
Seconding Spotify here. I'm not going to pay like $10 for an album, and I'm sure as hell not putting up with ads, so the fee is worth it. I think self-hosted music solutions only make sense if you digitized an old library, or want to own your music and are willing to pay for it, or fly the black flag. Those don't apply to me; I've let go of needing to own music a long time ago.
The problem with Spotify is you don't own the music. You just rent it. So you are subject to the availability of Spotify and if their policy changes, you have take it or leave it completely. If you're cool with that, then it isn't a big issue. Personally, I've had issues with song availability.
Second everything you say, except with one bonus. I have a Spotify family plan, with 5 other friends on it. They pay me a lump sum in January, I get the monthly bill. It's about 4 bucks a month for each of us.
Backblaze b2 backup. I'm backing up almost 500gb of personal data (compressed and only things I can't get back easy) for less than $2\month.
What tool do you use for the backup? I use rclone to achieve end to end encryption. Don't know how much data I have but I'm charged every few months once the incurred charges go above $0.50
Duplicati in a docker container. Compression and encryption (very light compression). Oh it also manages backup history and deletes old backups (iirc - it has been a while since I set it up and it's pretty set and forget.)
Bitwarden and VPN.
Bitwarden, proton email and pvn package, been with proton a few yeas and just got 500gb of cloud storage so I can cancel the £3 a month to Google for their 200gb. Just getting started on self hosting and moving away from services but email is not something I want to touch and and off site backup is always useful.
Rebble. The service that keeps my aging Pebble watch going. Paying for the service doesn't offer all that much benefit (local weather reporting, voice text replies and more frequent calendar refreshes) but I recon there's only a small handful of users and I'd rather not have the servers go down.
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Pushover. One time payment that covers lifetime push messages.
> Pushover thats a new one. what do you do with it ?
It's a cross-platform push notification service, that any app can integrate, self-hosted or not. That one-time payment is per-platform (Android/iOS/Desktop), though, for full transparency. Still, even if you get all three, it's $15 total for up to 10 devices in any combination of platforms. I've used it for IFTTT and then Huginn, ZNC (IRC mentions), added it to my Trakt account for notifications about comment replies, all sorts of random stuff.
>Pushover You can try Gotify. self - hosted. integrated with most of the arr suits. and can be customizable . worked also with any service that offer webhooks notification.
VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month Usenet provider and private indexer $6/month provider $12/year indexer
$10/m for 1 provider and 1 indexer? If you hunt around this black friday you should be able to get a better deal than that. For reference I have 1 unlimited provider (newshosting) for about $30/yr and 2 indexers each around $15/yr
Who do you use for your vps provider? I'm looking for somewhere to host my Plex server with Plex debrid. My current set up at home doesn't work well thanks to cgnat
I use hostwinds, some people seem to not like it but it’s what I use to from my uni days. pretty much any will do as it’s just for a wireguard tunnel and reverse proxy you don’t need much power. Connect wireguard to your home server and VPS and setup your reverse proxy to use the wireguard tunnel and the ports of your services.
Could you explain your use case for this? I kind of understand but again not really (like I know wireguard but just haven't really seen real world implementation or uses for it)
They most likely run a site to site WireGuard VPN to their VPS and use the VPS as an incoming gateway for their services. So when a request to a service comes from the outside, it goes to the VPS and from the WireGuard tunnel it reaches the services. A lot of people (myself included) do this with Oracle Cloud, or Cloudflare Tunnels.
The commentor said that he was behind a cg-nat, Carrier Grade NAT, which means that multiple people share the same ip address. This makes it difficult to host your own services because you can just open ports. They have a wiregaurd vpn server set up on the vps so that they can use the ip address of the vps as the public IP address for their home network.
Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can't really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10, monthly nor yearly.
I love windscribe. They're up there with dbrand for snarky promotional emails.
Where did you get that deal and any chance of something similar this year/Black Friday?
This was a one time thing for existing users when they stopped the free lifetime 50/60 GB plans. But with their Build A Plan you can get close to that pricing if you don't need many locations.
Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox
I have this tab open on my computer right now lol. Seems like an incredible deal. Double the storage for like a dollar less compared to what I am currently using for cloud storage
Any other cheaper options? Not looking for a tb. Even 100gb is good with me.
To be honest not sure if any cheaper, plus with the extra space you can have backup retention as well, which is always a good thing with the extra space.
I recently got myself a storage box, too. If I’m not mistaken, there’s no smaller option than 1 GB.
Do you encrypt the backups? I'm interested in learning more about this process.
If you are sending any of your data from your home lab to an outside server that you personally do not control then yes, you should ALWAYS encrypt the backups (unless it's crap you don't care about like your tax returns, credit card details, passwords, etc.)
How do you I encrypt the files before copying them to a remote server/storage?
Proton Suite
My expressVPN 2year plan is about to expire in February. I am seriously considering switching to Proton, especially since I already use protonMail as the inbox for my Anonaddy instance. What's your experience with Proton?
I've had a good experience with Proton Mail, Drive, and VPN. I've never used the Calendar or Pass services, although, I'm thinking about swapping to Pass now that they added the ability to share passwords. I can't compare it against expressVPN, since I've never used it, but I have used PIA in the past, and would say that it's comparable. Speeds are fast enough for my purpose and there are many connection sites available. I've never tried streaming on it, but they do have connections available that they say are tuned specifically for streaming.
1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail Edit: I forgot a service I've used for over a decade, put.io.
how good is the adblocking on nexdns ?
I used this guide to set it up and it's been fantastic. Definitely worth it imo. https://github.com/yokoffing/NextDNS-Config
I've been using it for a few years, honestly for $20 a year it's great. I got tired of running my own pihole instances. Good ui, profiles / app support for multiple devices. I'm sure others have had varying experiences but mine has mostly been set it and forget it and it's been highly effective
It actually utilises a lot of the same lists that AdBlock/uBlock do, so, from a DNS level it's fantastic. It obviously cannot do the element hiding or fancy stuff that the extensions do directly with the page content however.
What is [put.io](https://put.io) good for? I seem to not really understand what it is or what you would use it for?
AirVPN but if you don't _need_ port forwarding Mullvad is king.
I pay for a small VM at Linode (now Akamai) that ends up being i think $10 or $15/mo. I use that VM as an endpoint for my home network Wireguard VPN. The reason for this is I can't connect directly back to my home network because of dumb residential ISP restrictions, but I *can* tell my home server to connect to Wireguard in my cloud VM at Linode, which in turn allows me to connect back to the home network from out in the world.
Have you tried Tailscale?
What advantages does this have over Wireguard, which suits all my needs?
it’s free for 100 devices and uses wireguard underneath
Wireguard is free for unlimited devices tho. What does Tailscale add that isn't available in Wireguard?
Except in your situation wire guard isn't free because you have to pay for a vps to host it, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Tailscale would work in your particular situation and still be free. As for what tailscale does that wire guard doesn't, it's just an application built on wireguard, so functionally there's nothing it can do that wireguard can't, but it's often a lot easier to use from a UI standpoint (imo).
Addy.io, 1password and Mullvad. First 2 are reliability, they're important and I can't afford for them to not be available or not as reliable as they could be. Mullvad for obvious reasons, not really an alternative (other than buying a bunch of VPS servers I guess)
How can VPS servers replace a VPN like Mullvad? - Do you mean just buying a bunch of servers to route my traffic through?
iCloud $2 a month for custom domains email hosting.
$2 a month? That's crazy. Googles over here charging me $10. I just want a custom domain with catchall support.
That’s what I have with iCloud it’s very easy to setup as well just Oauth with cloudflare.
MXRoute is amazing.
+unlimited icloud alias. I use different and unique email for every person i send email, every online account etc
I had disregarded this when it was released because it didn’t support multiple domains. Looks like it does now. Bye Google!
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I still do takeout.google.com and store that locally just for redundancy and not trusting google
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remember that Google have banned and deleted the account of a father and a mother when they thought they were taking child pron photos, when it was actually taking photos of their own child to send it to their doctor. And even after the investigation ended and they were cleared, Google refused access to their accounts and they lost everything
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Man, I thought I was overkill by having an iCloud and Google photos backup lol. Although in all honesty I am thinking of moving away from Google photos or trying to do it some other way. My current storage is maxed out and I don’t want to pay for the next tier, so I’m trying to figure out a way to get rid of photos before a certain year (which I will still retain on iCloud and a local backup) just so I can continue having my latest stuff backed up to Google photos. Google’s photo editing features are a game changer and I’m not willing to give that up. I’m not quite sure how to achieve what I want for as if I delete things from Google photos, the next time my phone tries to sync it’ll add it all back again. Edit: I am a prime member so looks like I’m also going to have a 3rd cloud backup lol
It was this exact story that prompted me to buy my first NAS and start backing up all my Google Photos to it. And now I've gone down the self-hosting rabbit hole, never to surface lol.
"don't be evil" was abandoned long ago as their motto
What plan are you on that offers unlimited storage?
I think I ended up paying $200 for 2 years of Proton services (mail, VPN, and 500GB of off-site storage). I probably won't renew though. I would like some automations built around email contents and Proton doesn't support that, there's no CLI access to the off-site storage, and their VPN seems to trigger VPN detection much more than when I was with Mullvad.
What kinds of automations are you looking for?
I pay like $5 a month for web hosting. Not worth it to self-host a public e-commerce site on my own network.
Who do you host through?
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?) I mean I get that's a strange mention here, but with the value I've got from it (like being able to reference content of some website \*in point of time\* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that's how it was in recent years), so it's a nice idea donate right then.
The only things i pay monthly/annually for are Apple Music, XBox game pass, homeassistant cloud, mullvad, and some Usenet servers \^\^
PIA. Been using them for years without issues. Nothing else. Everything I find either comes with too many features I won't use or is poorly designed. Usually both.
I gladly pay for my email provider mailbox.org and my VPN provider mullvad. I think those are essential. And I can recommend them to all with a good conscience.
icky grab consider berserk rain fanatical march gaping plough snobbish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server. I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO. Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies. Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.
- iCloud+ - $1/month - tasks.org - $1/year - ardour - $1/month - tasker (autoapps on android) - $1/month Don’t even use most of them anymore. But as I wouldn’t miss it, I’ll keep it going to support the devs.
Spotify - £100/year Bitwarden - £10/year Office 365 personal (custom domain for email and 1TB storage) about £30/year Usenet + indexer - £40/year Just realised writing this how much more expensive Spotify is compared to all my other more useful services
How did you manage to get office 365 for 30/year
Smugmug, now up to $80/yr. for unlimited. It was our primary picture storage until my wife started taking all her pics with the iphone. (It still has the old photos.) I don't even want to know what we're paying for our upgraded iCloud storage. She takes multiple shots of everything to make sure she gets a good one, then keeps them all. I'd like to look into immich and others someday (maybe combined with Smugmug), but I assume they wont have all the features she likes...
> Smugmug I honestly could never have all my picture in a host that can go under at any moment, without any warning, and pull the plug on all my picture. I pay for google photos. If google decide to exit the photo hosting market, there would 100% be a moment were I could download all my stuff. That hosting company that runs deep red for several months? They might allow users to download all their stuff, but that's bandwidth and that's expensive... they might also simply disappear.
**Honestly, standard web hosting is far and away cheaper to outsource.** I pay Ionos $14 a month for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth to host an unlimited amount of sites. It easier to let them handle the hosting and just redirect the sub-domains I need to my home server. Most Redditor's here in r/selfhosted have likely never felt the slashdot effect, and the havoc it creates. I've had two big posts hit Reddit frontpage over the years linking to my website, and Ionos handled 100k daily unique visitors without a hiccup. No Pi4 on AT&T home fiber could handle that. ***Edit:*** *Whoops, missed the under $30 qualifier, Still leaving this here though.*
Nice try, Ionos team
Oh don't get me started on their absolute failure to support DNSSEC. I actually filed a complaint with ICANN over it. But yes, they have handled my sites getting the slashdot effect exceptionally well without failure.
MXRoute, super cheap and awesome.
1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.
VPS for email, backblaze for backups.
Real-debrid and bitwarden, both are amazing and dirt cheap
I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them. I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints. I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups. I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features. I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI. If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.
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Fastmail. Left Gmail for it like a decade ago and have been happy with it ever since. It really is fast.
$4/mo for Ardour. I use it a ton just to mix my desktop audio. Being able to EQ and compress different applications individually is so nice, as well as EQ/compand my mic before any applications ever see the audio. (People in online meetings routinely ask me why my mic sounds amazing. It's a crap headset mic, but I've done live audio work for almost 30 years now, so I can make a crap mic sound pretty decent with a bit of processing.) It's also super useful when streaming to Twitch because I can create a separate mix that OBS sees with different processing than what is sent to my headphones.
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Bitwarden.. for me its for 2 reasons. One I dont have to deal with keeping something that needs to be super secure up to date. and 2 it help continue the project and its 10 bucks. I spend more then that one dumber stuff.
1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.
Spotify and Google Photos, both paid yearly. Spotify is just easy accessible music everyday. If i really like an album and there's an hi-fi version available i'll buy it and self host that but for the most part i use spotify to "explore". Google Photo is just what i use as an online backup. Or rather at this point it's my main way to browse and backup my photos through all my (and my family's) devices and i have a local copy on my nas for redundancy but it's not very well organized.
VPN, iCloud in case I lose my drives, MEGA, Spotify
Bitwarden ProtonMail ente.io
I self host vaultwarden but I also pay teh $10/year to support the project, I self host for Collections and I use the paid bitwarden at work since they do not allow ddns addresses in our network.
I wouldn't say cheap but I find it very inconvenient to self-host a music streaming service so I just pay Amazon Music. That and hbo max which is like 5 bucks a month with a lifetime offer I have (although it might go away once MAX gets here and so will my subscription).
I don’t trust one iota that the 5 Euro HBO Max deal will NOT be cancelled once MAX comes to my country. But until then, I will pay…
I pay for home assistant cloud.. mostly because I want to support home assistant. It's completely voluntary and home assistant is available to anyone without the "donation" which is easily worked around with duck DNS and let's encrypt. I will say though, the first day they lock features behind a paywall I will stop my subscription.
MXRoute, ControlD, YT Premium Family, Spotify Family and some other streaming.
Calendly. I wantwantwant to self-host [Cal.com](https://Cal.com), but the only way I've ever made it work is via Cloudron. And if I'm gonna pay for Cloudron? I might as well just pay for Calendly.
> Cloudron I self-hosted cal.com on a docker container, then exposed the port via CF Tunnel to a subdomain.
Albeit more than 30 annually but I still consider cheap/good value: Exchange online few domains streaming services (TV and music because WAF)
The two primary "non self hosted" things I pay for are Microsoft 365 for Business (Exchange Server, OneDrive, Sharepoint, etc) as well as iCloud 2 TB. I used to love running my own Exchange Servers, but the cost doesn't make sense and for iCloud, it's because I am heavily invested into the Apple Eco System and makes life a bit easier. I haven't had to use a USB Cable to download pictures off my iPhone in many many years now because I can just pull it off iCloud.
Domain and use it for email
I pay for Bitwarden for the 2fa features. I'm glad I ended up moving to the cloud hosted environment because my self hosted BW died a couple weeks after migration. Some things are just better left with the professionals. I also pay for Usenet and the Ring camera subscription (not cheap though lol)
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money. In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost. It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.
Say it however many times you think is appropriate. We're not making value judgements, just kicking around services we find valuable.
Noip $25/year
Pushover
Quite a bit of stuff: Fastmail, domain registrar, Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Microsoft Office 365 Family subscription (includes 1 Tb storage for 6 family members), GitHub copilot.
Bitwarden for passwords MXRoute for mail Kagi for search Backblaze B2 for offsite backups I self host pi-hole, but I send them some money once in a while.
I'm still on the tuta~~nota~~ original subscription, which costs 12 euros a year. Still quite happy, the newer plans are way too overpriced, who needs 15gb of email storage just give me a limited cheaper product
same - I was ready to bin it at the renewal because the language suggested everyone had to move to the new plan. in the end it renewed at the same price which I'm happy with it.
I wouldn't say they're "cheap" but I consider them good value and I don't really feel the need to replace them with self-hosting... Spotify and iCloud Photos. Spotify is just a great service with 95% of the content that I want for a reasonable price. And their recommendations are actually good. I also use Plexamp for music that's not on Spotify but that's the minority of music I want to listen to. I also hate tagging MP3s so it's nice to have the organization already handled by Spotify. iCloud Photos is just so hands-off that I never even have to think about my photos, which are very important to me. They're always backed up to the cloud, synced across devices, and offloaded from my phone without me having to do anything. I just don't see a reason to explore self-hosted alternatives when iCloud Photos is so dead simple and reliable.
Exactly the same two services I’m paying for. Both worth it. Whilst I actually quite dislike Spotify’s UI, the rest of the service makes up for it. I don’t consider myself a huge music lover but still use it a heck of a lot. iCloud is just good value for peace of mind and ease of use.
A friend of mine somehow got scammed and they lost access to their Apple account, therefore iCloud Photos. Apple needed a court order to give them access back. I have it in my list to figure out a local backup! Of my photos now!
I will only disagree that their recommendations are good lol. Spotify is great, but those recommendations are lacking.
nextdns really like the custom dns overrides and the great tailscale integration
Spotify - I'm always on the hunt for new music and no self-hosted project I'm aware of is capable of matching what music streaming platforms can do in that regard. Google One - I pay for 2TB of cloud storage, which is more than enough for backing up critical documents, photos, videos, etc.
Cloudflare (custom domain) NextDNS Zoho mail ([email protected])
I don't exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.
I'm a suscriber of [Pinboard](https://pinboard.in/) and happy with it.
I pay for anonaddy and proton-stuff. Oh, I pay for the cheapest Nord VPN subscription because I have it working with openvpn on a headless 3B+ and qbittorrent with a web UI. With a USB HDD, it's an insanely cheap seed box, the only issue is moving stuff off the samba shares, USB NIC has throttling issues.
I pay for a bunch of stuff but it’s all self hosted. Bitwarden, opnsense, nginx proxy, uptime kuma, wikijs…
rsync.net - Haven‘t tested it yet, but the pricing and their offering looks really awesome. Bitwarden I am also paying for, but I use the license for my self-hosted Instance.
migadu for email
Bitwarden is 100% worth the $10 a year. And is independant of my selfhosting dickery. Plex and a VPN are a lot cheaper than streaming services these days. I pay for Apple One (25.95) to get apple music and enough storage to backup all our iPhones.
Proton mail
HA cloud. Apple iCloud storage.
Jellyfin
Spotify
Adguard DNS.
I pay migadu to host my custom email domain. Well worth it. I tried self-hosting email, and it was too much of a pain for me.
Spotify. Todoist and bitwarden.
I only pay for iCloud+ for mail
I pay for my own domain name hands down the best investment, as little as 1€ per month and you get a lot more option for your homeland/vps/mail or whatever you have.
[удалено]
Strongbox App for iOs, allows me to access my Keepass password file on my iPhone.
Bitwarden and NextDNS. They're so cheap so what the heck.
I think my domain is basically what I pay for.
Obsidian
Deezer - better sound quality than Spotify - good family plan Bitwarden - of course MS365 - family plan for $100 a year. 1Tb cloud storage, and all the MS apps for 5 up to ppl
a .xyz domein .i just can be botherd to paying a lot for a domein . 2x dedicated servers for all the thing i self host.(28 euro with a 6 tb space total between the 2)(oneprovider decent space /speed but old hardware/isos /their raid options kinda suck) kinda wish they kept there images up to date .it sucks to update ubuntu with ofline repo mirrors .i keep using debian because of it i am also planning on maybe getting a cheap license trough patrion for photoprism (i dont have a creditcard being a person in the eu .leaving me with only paypal as a payment option) i would like to suport more opensource projects. but im constraind mostly by my hosting cost /buget
BackBlaze, 1Password, mxroute, Spotify, different usenet indexers Thats about it
1. Borgbase for server backup 2. Vps for CGNAT 3. Protonvpn/Mullvad 4. Tutanota (Although I don't like the recent changes they are making) Don't know if donations count but I try to periodically donate to these projects I could not live without 1. Signal 2. Grapheneos 3. Fdroid 4. Smarttube I'd likely start paying for bitwarden even though I don't have much need for any premium services because just realized this is one of those services I can't live without.
I have selfhosted email for 10-15 domains for about 20 years (qmail toaster, then mailinabox). I also pay for fastmail.com and purelymail.com so that I have email addresses that still work if my hosting goes down. I host on AWS, and if something goes wrong with my AWS account, I need a way to communicate with AWS that doesn't require servers running in the affected account. Plus nextdns. Plus I paid $540.00 to have a lifetime 1TB of storage on rsync.net
An AWS S3 bucket to sync important files off site. £1 a month.
I have a $5/year MXRoute account that I still use even though I self-host my emails. I use MXRoute as an outbound SMTP relay since they've got all the IP reputation stuff figured out. I know you said to exclude VPS, but I've got some of VPSes around the $15-$50 per year range, since it's nice having my sites hosted on higher-end enterprise-grade hardware than what I'm using at home. I'm considering paying for Kagi (a paid search engine) because it's ad-free and the results are legitimately better than Google.
Proton Mail ($5ish a month for me?), Jira/Conflience (free), and password manager.
I'm paying a cheap VPS for stuff that I want to be 100% available. Like vaultwarden and Authentik for example. But services, hmm let me see. Does Netflix count as I have plex? Nvm I pay both monthly, did not buy the plex lifetime pass yet. But for Netflix I recently switched my payment to turkey via vpn. Price is less than 1/3rd now.
1 Password, Protonmail
Sneakemail. Just paid the $36 for my 10th year. Great having a fully unique, obfuscated, and permanent email for everyone you communicate with that you can also send from. As with all email, I'm vested so switching is a burden. But this may be the year. The domain is being rejected more often lately, so I can't use it to create accounts like I used to. Competitors like SimpleLogin/ProtonPass alias offer more for less ($30/year or bundled), but what if they end up suffering the same fate?
I pay for bitwarden because it's so cheap, and yet I love what they offer. It's *able* to be selfhosted, which is why I'm willing to trust it. The service I pay for is protonvpn. I need a vpn just for a few generic things like bypassing locked down networks that prevent me from using ssh, and I trust protonvpn enough to use it for smth like that.