The only subscriptions I am willing to pay for:

Phone bill - no choice
Internet bill - no choice
Insurance - no choice
World of Warcraft - sue me
Costco membership - worth it
VPN - worth it

I don't pay for any others. Paid for lifetime Plex for the convenience of not needing to pay for a website domain like I would for jellyfin, and self host my own music, tv, and movies

As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don't own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.

Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.

Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.

Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don't use a VPN

Edit: syntax

Subscriptions are O(n)

One time purchases are O(1)

You want O(1)..

less than a cup of coffee

cup of coffee is now $12

🤕

I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.

I get that services need to pay for staff/servers/production, so I'm fine with small monthly fees. I'd much rather pay than sit through ads.

Once a subscription creeps over six or seven bucks a month I'm gonna reevaluate it and start cutting.

It really annoys me that newspapers charge the same for digital and paper subscriptions.

Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.

Sure, Spotify doesn't pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I'm not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don't mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I'm really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I'm not paying Spotify for music; I'm paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.

And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It's saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF's of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner's car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball...gimme a sec...yep, it's in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.

But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.

Cups of coffee money is what donations for FOSS devs is for.

Yo ho/All hands/Hoist the colors high

I love the two sides of "It's about the price of a cup of coffee" like they're not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.

Then the

"Your generation can't afford anything because of your coffee addiction!"

Like companies aren't just monetizing every single last thing and telling us "you'll own nothing and you'll LIKE IT!"

Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.

Granted, it's not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.

It's a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I've been free for so long I forget what it's like

The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don't charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.

My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.

Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.

If the price gets to a point it doesn't make sense, I go back to piracy.

Laughs in having my own Jellyfin media server and ad blockers for YouTube as well as using my server for file backups as well

Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn't littered with ads, I don't mind paying at all. Like I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it's fair. There's a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don't just run by themselves for free.

But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it's incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that's when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.

And they wonder why tides of the high seas is on the rise again.

Netflix and Spotify actually makes sense to be subscription based. Amazon depends on how often you do shopping through them since it's actually free (if you don't include the fees) to function. I definitely wouldn't pay for Dropbox but cloud storage and sync pretty much has to be a monthly subscription. If you are going to be against something at least be against to the parts that makes sense to be against of.

I don’t mind Xbox Game Pass when there’s a deal on it for $1 but I make sure not to auto renew

pats SSD full of MP3s

Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes

If a subscription would be as good as just having the file or software offline… I might even pay for it. Yes I mean including DRM-Free backups like www.gog.com

twitter is the most embarrassing one on here by a thousand miles

I like to apply some business logic to it.

• I expect to use the product or functionality provided by x on a regular basis
• The use of x has no added utility
• The functionality and/or feature set (e.g. content) of x may degrade significantly without warning and/or recourse
• Unavailability of x is likely to render it completely useless

If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.

Wait... "limited ads"? Are there still some ads with Spotify Premium?

The only thing I pay for is Crunchyroll. As for me it's worth it as I get tons of stuff the watch for £5 a month and it's also pretty easy to rip anything exclusive. And then I don't feel like I'm giving nothing back to Japan when I pirate anything they don't have I want.

I also pay for a VPS, but I'd say that's renting more then it is a subscription.

I honestly just don't use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.

As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.

Fuckers wearing $2000 suits out here panhandling