I used to happily pay for YouTube premium. Back in 2008 someone told me he uses YT to listen to music and I was like "You silly man, the youtubes are fore watching not listening." Some time in the early 2010s I realized he was right. I can't get through a work day without some nice ambient something or other on in the background. It also used to be a phenominal source of info about any sort of topic you care to name, with videos posted by actual humans who were interested in those topics. It fed my sundry ADHD hyperfixations very well.

Now I still pay for it, but I'm not sure it's worth the money anymore between them foisting shorts onto us and the torrent of AI slop. The other day I wanted to watch videos on Australian lungfish and was met with AI voiceover after AI voiceover. It's made me wonder if I should quit, but where else am I going to find 8 hours of server room ambience or an hour long video of a dog chewing on a bone?

Hetzner for my VPS Mullvad for my privacy

Steam games/Valve.
I dont know if this counts/its a hot take.
It really depends on the game tbh(some regret some dont)
I appreciate their work on Proton.
And Steam is the only website I can really buy video games from.

My email provider (and domains), Bitwarden and Obsidian.

Less happy:
Spotify and Spotify Premium (If I could I'd get rid of the YT music part)

YouTube Premium. No ads and the creators I watch get paid more.

Yes, I'm aware of all the apps out there that give you the Premium perks without actually paying for it. Here's the thing: the VAST majority of my watching is done on my TV via an Apple TV and I really CBA to go through all the hoops to make any of those apps work with my setup.

I don't watch any other streaming services and I don't watch cable / network TV. I'm okay paying for Premium to get the best experience.

I give monthly to my Mastodon instance.

Email.

Bunch of open source projects.

I'll pay for Mullvad and Usenet/indexer

I use YNAB for budgeting. There is a version of a related software you can self-host and you can subscribe to a bank-info-linking service on your own as well, but I don't want to have to administer something as boring as budgeting.

The support is also pretty good!

The one bad thing is price. About $100 a year :<

Hetzner VPS and their Storage Box, that is, managed Nextcloud instance.

Mailbox.org email service.

I donate $5 quarterly to Wikipedia. It's not much but I figure every bit helps

• Netcup (I switched from hetzner a few months ago because I found a better deal)
• Infomaniak for domain names
• Purelymail, a really cheap email host (I don't want to deal with self-hosting it)
• Exoscale as an object storage provider, which I use for Lemmy and self-hosted Ente (which I chose over Immich because it supports S3 as a storage option, I don't have enough storage on my netcup server or my homelab for image backups and I'd rather not deal with the stress of a potential loss of data caused by drive failure or something) for my family
• Threema (not really a service because it's a one time purchase, but now that we're shilling I thought I'd include it), which I also managed to get my family to buy.

Kagi.com - excellent search engine. Yes, it shouldn't be needed, but in this day and age it clearly is. Excellent slop filter, and it let's you downrank and uprank certain sites in your search results. And I just found out you can see the most popular sites for each category, so it's fast and easy to see which sites probably are and aren't worth having in your results at all. It makes internet search feel like it did 20 years ago.

Namecheap.com - It's where I have my domain names. Mostly because they aren't godaddy.

EDIT: Forgot to mention hetzner.

Nebula

It supports independent creators and I get to watch Jet Lag a week early

Roll20. I play D&D twice a week, and the paid features (increased storage & dynamic lighting) are absolutely worth it. It's not even super expensive; just $60/year. Totally worth it for how often I use it!

What I pay for:

• Mullvad
• Addy.io
• Tutamail

What I "pay" for (through donations, if that counts):

• The EFF
• Wikipedia
• GrapheneOS
• Asahi Linux
• Python

I don't really subscribe to much, but I'm definitely looking to expand the latter list, so I'll probably start donating to the maintainers of ad blocker filter lists and seek out more organizations fighting the good fight.

Kagi. https://kagi.com/

Best search engine I've ever used.

mullvad vpn.

i be sailing them seas with no abandon.

Mealime.

Meal planning app. Has a database of hundreds of easy to make, healthy, tasty recipes. Tell it how many people you want to cook for, for how many days. It builds a whole meal plan, adjusts the quantities of all the recipies, builds a shopping list for you, and will even forward the list to Instacart for you if you're into that.

It also builds the meal plan based on reducing food waste, so if you have one recipe that uses half an onion, it will automatically find another recipe that uses the other half. You can also define ingredients you don't like/allergic to and it will avoid recipes that use those.

MASSIVELY increased the amount of at-home cooking I do by getting rid of all the boring/annoying parts. Kinda like Blue Apron, but you just go buy your own groceries. Best $2 a month I spend.

donations to soma.fm, listener supported free music streaming/internet radio out of San Francisco

Proton for email Signal for messaging (donations) Bitwarden for passwords Currently trailing Kagi for search after the comments on this post Random donations to my instance

Nebula. There are only a handful of creators on there that I watch regularly, but even then, it's worth it for the price.