My Bitwarden renewal came through this morning. It’s still $10 per year. I was about to cancel, but I thought what the heck at $10, I’ll keep it on out of principle and to show support.
I also have a tutanota encrypted email, which costs little more than pocket change over the year. I hardly use it, but it’s there.
I wondered then, if this community had any little gems to share - services they pay for that are let’s say under $30 annually. I think we can exclude VPS, since lots of people will probably have them already.
I’m going to cross post at /r/opensource too.
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.
finally leaving Google Photos
What do you recommend for a photo hosting site? At the current time, I can’t really self host a photo album and I’m tired of emailing pictures to my family. I’d rather have something like google photos, where I can share a link to an album and they can see the pictures.
I know there’s flickr, but i don’t know if you can make albums sharable via link, without the need to have a flickr account.
For backup, I think I’ll use my backblaze account. I’ve had a backblaze account for years and mainly use it to backup my ebooks.
Bitwarden, Paid addy.io, protonmail paid via crypto, privacy.com virtual credit cards, MySudo voip numbers, a jmp.chat number or two.
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.
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
I switched from rclone to restic. Rclone is primarily built for file syncing, not backups. Whereas restic is always encrypted and supports incremental backups, chunk based deduplication, and snapshot history, diffs, and pruning. You can even use rclone as a backend for restic, should you so desire.
+1 for rclone. I’m backing up the important family data (~1 TB) to OneCloud and B2 with end-to-end encryption and it just works.
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.
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.
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.
Fastmail, LastPass and NordVPN
Once you try Bitwarden you will really ask yourself why’d have you paid for last pass. And their app on a phone works with self hosted instance as long as it is exposed to world. Last pass broke my mfa that totally borked webui and chrome extension for me. As soon as I got password export I deleted my last pass account. Took them 2 fix to fix it
Not vps but adjacent: I have a Dreamhost storage account to sync my Joplin notes. It’s so very very smol it barely costs anything. The notes are E2EE with a key I own.
I only pay for iCloud+ for mail
1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.
Wtf why YT Premium?!
mullvad is worth it for not having any data caps
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.
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
Google Photos. We pay for 2TB and have all the family member slots loaded up. It’s perfect because my parents and my in-laws all use Android phones.