Library membership

Email to avoid email providers from companies like Google or Microsoft.

Electricity has been a pretty good subscription. Zero sales or promos ever though.

Nebula is pretty cool, though I have the lifetime pass. Or patreon.

VPN

I'm happy to give Qobuz my money for providing an excellent music library and be the best paying streaming service for the musicians that I listen to.

Judging based on what I'm actually paying for myself I'd say Mullvad VPN, Protonmail and a nameless AI assistant.

Edit: I forgot I've got a website too, so hosting of that is another one.

Health insurance, if you can afford it

Your own email domain + an account at a privacy respecting email service is more than worth it. Avoids the privacy nightmare that is using Google/Microsoft for your email, and gives you the flexibility to change email providers on a whim if your current one starts doing anything you don't like.

Kagi is a great search engine that I've found to be worth paying for.

None. Other routes or methods exist for just out everything. Knowledge, services etc. stop buying into this concept created to part you with money. We did years with subscriptions not being a thing.

Take the slightly harder path and keep your money in your pocket. Learn how to get what you want without further enabling big tech and the greedy class. Sorry probs not the answer you want.

Only decent one is as above VPN!

Dropout is one I enjoy and they do profit sharing internally, which is nice to see.

None, you should but outright not lease forever with the chance of removing features or content.

Online backup. Because it will happen, eventually.

A good VPN that values privacy is a pretty easy answer

Random one, but I get a lot of use out of a boardgamesarena premium membership. I've got a few mates that I can't see IRL as much any more, so it's nice to be able to jump on a video call and play some board games. Only one in the group needs a membership to unlock all the games and it's about £30 for the year. Easily better value than a few hours in a pub

I have other subscriptions I find varying levels of useful for me, but hard to argue for many of them being particularly good value.

Internet, the shit show is 24/7 no need to pay more for anything.

Kagi, next DNS, mullvad

Mullvad, and a strong internet connection from the spyware company of your choice. With that you can pirate any media, and browse the internet. I have never needed more.

The only thing I pay a monthly subscription for is domain/web hosting and medication

Mobile data.

Email, Nebula, Dropout, Borgbase, a domain name.

I also have humble choice, but that's a bit of a tossup. I've found some great games through it that I still play, but most months it still feels worth it to me

Edit: Forgot Mullvad VPN! Love that thing, 15/10 would recommend. Reddit doesn't like it, but also I don't like reddit so whatever

Libro.fm - Audiobooks but (unlike Audible) you can download drm-free audio files to listen however you want.

NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.

If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you'll unlock a fun new mini game: DNS White List Tuning.

Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.

YouTube family subscription. It's YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn't changed in several years.

Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.

Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.

Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I'll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won't change.

PBS Passport. Support your local PBS station