In the world of music production Reaper is an insanely good deal with a fantastically refreshing licensing system.
I haven’t used Reaper in a while, but you can technically use it for free with full features by perpetually using it in trial version mode right?
Yes!
The developer is pretty insistent on saying that Reaper is NOT free but also that stupid licensing schemes for other DAWs like the horrid iLok and others only punish people who actually buy the software, which is self-defeating since the pirates are unaffected by the ways in which the tool is made worse for people who actually bought the tool legally.
I bought it simply because of how incredibly refreshing this was, free open source DAWs have gotten better since I did but there used to be barely any accessible, lowcost ones that were fully featured enough to be useful. Now there are open source options like Muse and LMMS but the thing about Reaper is it isn't a budget/hobbyist DAW, in many ways it is an industry leading software so even with good FOSS DAWs out there Reaper is still well worth it.
In specific, a lot of people use Reaper for live performance of software instruments as Reaper is an efficient beast at running complex chains of software effects efficiently.. and yet a lot of people also use Reaper for mixing and production because it has such high quality audio processing capabilities. Reaper is a behemoth.
Reaper can do more than 99.9999% of people are capable of using it for.
Kagi. Search that actually works, with no ads. Worth every penny.
Another happy Kagi user here, and I also hate sounding like a shill but I’m really so glad I use their product. Not having to parse through ads and AI slop when I’m busy and looking for info is so helpful when I’m trying to work.
Why do I always see so many down votes when Kagi is mentioned?
I think it might be one or both of:
In both cases, meh. I’m answering the OP question with my opinion, and hopefully somebody finds it useful.
Some people don't like the Dev also.
I didn't downvote, but probably because they're a young USA-based search engine that requires login to use - which is usually a huge red flag for privacy, and their privacy of user searches is claimed but has never been verified by any kind of audit - another significant red flag.
Why trust another for-profit Palo-Alto search company with your search data, assist their (potential) tracking by logging in, and pay for it in the process?
Bitwarden. It's free and open source, but you can pay for a subscription ~~if you don't want to self host for synchronisation between devices. It's very cheap and no doubt worth it.~~
Also Aseprite, for pixel art and custom format exports.
Edit: looks like both these programs are just straight up fully featured and freely available now.
For real, I had been using Bitwarden for a couple of years for free and it never once had to show an ad to ask me to buy it's subscription. I just realized that it was giving me tons of value, and that prompted me to buy the (fairly priced) subscription. That's a gold standard imo.
TeraCopy if you move lots of data around.
However, even with a pro license, I still got an ad notification in my task area recently pushing their other software. Fucking hate advertisements that go out of their way to interrupt you.
Fucking hate advertisements ~~that go out of their way to interrupt you.~~
The rest of that sentence literally defines the procedure of advertising.
mullvad vpn
I paid for a copy of the Torque app on android. It lets you use bluetooth OBD2 adapters to connect to your car's ECU for reading live engine data and trouble codes. The pro paid version unlocks a lot more customization for data logging screens, allows you to save live data logs to your phone, and enables a wider range of readable codes... Makes a huge difference diagnosing weird engine issues in cars 1996 and newer.
+1 for Torque, pay once and it does exactly what it's supposed to do and doesn't bother you with anything else.
Games. Nothing else. Functional software should be open source.
Why are games the exception? Just curious why FOSS is required for non-entertainment but if you're being entertained it's OK for a studio to get profit?
If I'm reliant on software in order to do something (backups, accounting, etc.) I don't want that software working to be up to the whims of some company.
Games I'm fine with because they're art and the creators should be able to earn money from them.
Games I'm fine with because they're art and the creators should be able to earn money from them.
Then remember to only buy indie or well unionised studio because the artists certainly don't earn much money from big studio games.
Open source != Free
If someone develops software they have a right to earn money on it.
DaVinci Resolve.
The software is free but not FOSS and on Linux paying for the h.264 support is nice.
Keen live is a good alternative but it feels like an advanced form of movie maker to me and lacks polish. If you learn it KDEN Live can be powerful.
Balatro on me iPhone
BeyondCompare. I've used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.
It’s FOSS software but I use it so much I donate to support it. FreeCAD. Yeah its interface isn’t the best. But compared to Fusion for my workflow it’s so much bettwr
Linux, KDE, Firefox, etc... we are ALL supposed to "pay" somehow for it, whatever our means and however we can.
When we consider free and open source software NOT paid software, we are sabotaging the very things we love.
Moonreader Pro. It's an ebook readers for Android. The Pro/paid version has any feature you could ask for:
Any feature, I wish an ebook reader would have - moon reader delivered (but finding these features is not intuitive).
donate the money to somebody who runs a fediverse server. running servers costs money every month, and that can't be eliminated either because hardware can't be optimized out of existence.
Kagi search. It made cutting Google out of my life easy. I’d rather not pay for search but none of the free alternatives really worked like I needed. I tried out Kagi on a whim and haven’t looked back.
I do not use MacOS anymore but when I did I have bought Pixelmator, it's really good. Atleast when I have used it, the company behind it was bought by Apple since then.
Wish there would be something similar for Linux :( Gimp is like the opposite of intuitive.
mine was voicemeeter. so much nicer manipulating audio on windows with voicemeeter and never looking at windows settings again.
wish it worked with Linux tbh, but I'm making due
I know many would not agree, but for me it's 1Password. I use it dozens of times a day - not just for passwords, but also for credit cards, social security numbers, notes, and maybe the most useful, SSH keys. My whole family is covered for $5/month, a laughably low sum.
Photoshop used to be worth the money. The move to subscription based comes at a time when alternatives are starting to catch up though, so that time (of being worth it) may be coming to an end.
Total Commander on Windows. It can be used for free with the nag dialog, but I paid for it since I was using it every day.
Automate on Android: it's an automation tool with its own programming ‘language’ like Tasker, except visual. Tasker has some weird and cumbersome idioms, while Automate is mostly regular programming mapped onto its visual blocks. Plus it doesn't require buying more apps for additional functionality like Tasker. Alas, it can't do custom dialogs or onscreen buttons, so I might still need Tasker for that.
Unified Remote on Android: nice remote control for the desktop machine, with the ability to add custom controls programmed in Lua (iirc).
Magic Dosbox on Android: it allows adding custom onscreen controls tailored to each game.
Functional Ear Trainer and Perfect Ear on Android: nice training for hearing notes and rhythm, though I can't say they did much for my lazy ass.
Sunvox on Android: a music tracker with modular synths. Seems to be the only full-blown tracker on Android. Alas, doesn't seem to be very good with samples, the workflow is a bit cumbersome, but I need to properly try that yet. The app has been around for ages, I've seen it twenty years ago for Palm and Windows CE. There are also desktop versions, which are free iirc. (Also, the author can't currently receive payments from Google Play since he's in Russia. It's better to write to him and arrange payment via bitcoin or such, afaik he's happy to provide the full app that way.)
On Mac, there are many open-source utils for tweaking the interface, but paid Bartender and Hazeover are better than alternatives. One hides extra menu icons, the other dims background windows.
Alfred on Mac, a launcher: you call it up with a hotkey, and type a few letters to run an app or, crucially, a custom action. It's unmatched by alternatives, especially on Windows and Linux. Typing a couple letters into Alfred is often quicker than cmd-tabbing to an app. And it's way better for frequent actions than mousing around.
I'm also planning to buy Renoise, the cross-platform music tracker. It does about everything the big DAWs do, but with the keyboard-centric workflow. Pretty cheap too.
I paid for Ardour, but it is also free.
Personally: Synergy (a formerly OSS software KVM). GlassWire.
Professionally: IntelliJ. Datadog.
Just a teensy iOS/macos extension, but Vinegar is awesome for watching YouTube.
I would have said the Affinity suite of stuff, but they recently sold out to Canva, and fuuuuuuuck them.
nzb360 that I got a perpetual license for at 10eur. It's so easy and convenient to torrent stuff for my Jellyfin.
Niagara launcher is free but I paid for the perpetual license. It's a third party launcher that I really like.
I'm also a Jetbrains fan depending on the language, they have so much support for everything just out of the box and are on Linux.
Also games, but I guess people don't want to hear those here. Factorio was definitely worth.
Bitwig. Excellent DAW that has a native linux build. I tried to like Ardour and many of the other open source alternatives, but they all felt cumbersome and not very mature.
Symphonium, a music app for android (maybe also iOS, dunno). I've tried so many other apps for both local and remote music, none of them come even close - I particularly like the pre-caching and rolling cache features, as there are some places I go regularly where connection is spotty, and they allow me to stream pretty much uninterrupted from my subsonic server.
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