My subscriptions: What I pay for and why!
A lot of subscriptions try to hit the 'price of a cup of coffee' price point. So I thought I'd list my monthly subscriptions, and talk about the value that they provide to me. If I pay a dollar amount, then I've converted them to GBP, as that is what I actually pay.
My Annual & Monthly subscription prices
Bear blog hosting: £4/$5 /mo
This blog is hosted by bearblog, and I pay them £4/mo to host it. Bargain. Privacy-focussed to boot. I get the blog hosting, I also get to appear on the 'discovery' tab when I publish a post, and that brings some visitors to my blog, so I don't feel exactly like I'm talking into a total void. It also comes with analytics, which on the whole is not bad at all, and it's privacy focussed to boot. It also allows me to personalise my blog through themes, and I can also configure them how I want. I'm not a big fan of css, but bearblog has my css logically laid-out, so it's quite easy to amend this to suit my needs. On the whole I'm happy with Bear blog, and I'll certainly keep using it for the foreseeable future.
Ghost blog hosting: £11 /mo
I've not used this very much so far. My idea is to start a genealogy blog on ghost.io, it seems to have the tools that I would like it to have (newsletters etc). This is something that I need to start using to get my monies-worth otherwise I need to make a decision to postpone this idea, save myself £11/mo, and pick it up at a later date.
Apple One: £36 /mo
This is perhaps my biggest monthly cost. I pay for the family pack, so members of my family get to benefit from this too. I get Apple Arcade, 2Tb iCloud disk space, Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple News. I use Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple News the most, out of all these offerings.
Kagi search including AI access: £24/$30 /mo
Oh Kagi, I do love you, but I love you a little bit less now that you have increased your prices by adding VAT (aka. sales tax) to your monthly subscription fees. I have the Ultimate plan which used to cost 20% less, until they added VAT (sales Tax) to their subscription. I would have liked that Kagi absorbed some of these costs, rather than passing them 100% onto their customers. But ho-hum here we are. I get access to unlimited Kagi searches (currently hovers around the 500+ a month), and unlimited access to 9 AI LLMs (ChatGPT, Anthropic, Mistral, and Google Gemini) and their corresponding versions e.g Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. I use this all day and every day, but I preferred the price point being under £20/mo. I'm now considering writing my own interfaces using portkey as an interface to multiple AI LLMs, using just a single API interface. Seeing through as I have zero experience of using CSS, Python, Svelte, or Falcon Framework, this might take me a while. But if I can pull it off (don't hold your breath), I should be good to go, moving forward.
omg.lol: £1.80 /mo ($40 p.a)
Perhaps the most underrated website on the internet. The community is both welcoming and awesome, and I feel like I get total value for my money. I've now bought the chilli emoji domain, too, which is a vanity thing. So I have 2 omg.lol addresses.
Migadu Email Hosting: £6/$7.50 /mo ($90 p.a.)
I've used migadu for at least 5 years. They're not the flashiest, or the most modern, but they certainly know what they're doing and do a good job of it. I could reduce my email hosting fees, by moving to fastmail, but I'll likely save about £1 a month. Yes, fastmail has calendars included - which migadu.com don't - but I don't think that I'll use that functionality as I have everything in my apple calendar anyway. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's potentially a solution looking for a problem - unless I've misunderstood something?
tinylytics: £4/$5 /mo ($60 p.a.)
I use them as I want a privacy-focussed analytics solution. I could use Unami.com as they have a free-tier. I went with tinylytics as they're a small company, and I like what they're doing. I could also link my genealogy ghost.io blog to it, and have it included in the price. It pretty much matches what I already have in bearblog analytics, but I now get to have flags at the bottom of my blog posts, of which countries people have visited this blog from. Deal-breaker to me.
Temporary subscriptions:
These are subs that I will stop paying for, once I no longer use them. They have a finite life.
Disney +: £9.99 /mo
Unsubbed from Netflix, until they get some new sci-fi shows that I want to watch. So, I'm currently binge-watching Star Wars spin-offs, and some Marvel series. The monthly sub is also cheaper than Netflix so that's a bonus.
Hayu streaming: £6.99 /mo
I'm ashamed to say that I only have this subscription so that I can watch the latest season of Below Deck! Honestly, Below Deck is so bad it's good. I can't not watch it - lols. Once this season is over, then I'll unsubscribe. Until the next season.
GeForce Now: £10.00 /mo
This is a new subscription for me. GeForce Now is a subscription service which gives you access to a GeForce Nvidia card (I think a 4080?), and allows you access to use it to play games on. It streams the games to your pc, it's pretty impressive, but after a months subscription I don't think I'm going to keep it going. I don't simply play enough games to justify it each month. The good thing is if you have your games already bought in say steam, you can use them, so you don't need to buy them all again.
So if my maths is correct, then I currently spend £113.78 a month on various subscriptions. Which could be reduced by £16.99 once I unsubscribe from hayu, and GeForce Now. In hind site that feels like quite a lot! But, I think in today's digital age, subscriptions have become an integral part of our lives, which offer a wide range of services that cater to our various needs and interests. The Subscription model is not going anywhere for now, I think.