A couple of days ago I was reading Kevin Quirk's blog, and I read his post about susbscriptions. I found it very interesting how wildly different our monthly subscriptions are.
As a pure futile exercise, I thought I would mention my monthly subscriptions, but mostly to use it as an occasion to advertise some of the services.
Technical
Most of my monthly costs are related to technical services I use:
- Monthly hosting cost: 9.43 EUR (Includes servers, backups and storage).
- Monthly B2 Storage cost: 6.68 USD (6.30 EUR). Here I have all my off-site backups for dekstops, servers etc. This cost changes every month, depending on amount and usage.
- Monthly Protonmail subscription: 7.99 EUR. I use Proton Ultimate which includes VPN access, 500GB Drive, custom domains, etc.
- Monthly Kagi.com subscription: 10 USD (9.34 EUR). Kagi is a fantastic search engine, and while it is expensive, I am happy to support it.
- Monthly Phone Subscription: 6.99 EUR. This includes a bunch of GB of traffic and unlimited calls/SMS nationally. I barely use it, but it's important to have it nevertheless.
Non-Technical
There are also a bunch of monthly costs which are not really technical nor forced:
- Monthly donation to the Signal foundation: 5 EUR.
- Monthly Liberapay donations: 13 EUR. The donations are for Mastodon hosts, podcast creators, etc.
I also randomly donate to Lichess, which is the best example for "how can a service be free, ad-free, sustainable and pay for the work of people?", but not on a monthly basis.
What is Missing?
The careful reader would have noticed that from this list are missing all the big names (Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, etc.). I have tried several times Netflix, and between the limitation of accessing only local content and the ridicolous catalog, I canceled the subscription both times I had a trial month. I have no problem to pay for services, but I refuse to pay as a matter of principle terrible companies (such as Amazon or Apple) and in general it bothers me the fact that I cannot buy to own stuff anymore. I used to be an avid DVD collector (>1000 DVDs), but the fact that now I need to pay N services to rent a digital copy of a file, it just doesn't sit right to me.
The Grand Total
In total, every month I end up spending ~58 EUR. It is actually less than what I planned. At the beginning of the year I decided to allocate at least 50 Euros monthly to donations and/or subscriptions to internet services (so not including things like hosting or the phone bill), and I am instead spending ~35. I will probably increase that amount in 2024, as I want to do my part to make sure that businesses not centered around data harvesting and advertising will thrive.