My Bitwarden renewal came through this morning. It’s still $10 per year. I was about to cancel, but I thought what the heck at $10, I’ll keep it on out of principle and to show support.
I also have a tutanota encrypted email, which costs little more than pocket change over the year. I hardly use it, but it’s there.
I wondered then, if this community had any little gems to share - services they pay for that are let’s say under $30 annually. I think we can exclude VPS, since lots of people will probably have them already.
I’m going to cross post at /r/opensource too.
Calendly. I wantwantwant to self-host Cal.com, but the only way I’ve ever made it work is via Cloudron. And if I’m gonna pay for Cloudron? I might as well just pay for Calendly.
Same.
I don’t exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.
A few:
- YT Music
- 1Password (technically I get it free from work, but I would pay if they switch or I change jobs)
- Proton VPN , i am grandfathered into an older plan
VPN, Cloud storage, cloud hosting.
nextdns really like the custom dns overrides and the great tailscale integration
(Obvious disclosure, I am the one running the service)
If support for open source is what you are looking for, may I suggest taking a look at Communick? It basically takes the open source alternatives for social media and messaging platforms, and packages them for easy access and setup. There are packages for Mastodon, Lemmy or Matrix each of them for less than $10/year and fully managed. I’m pledging to take 20% of the profits and contribute to the upstream projects.
5$ VPS for email server
I pay like $5 a month for web hosting. Not worth it to self-host a public e-commerce site on my own network.
Who do you host through?
Linode. It’s a pretty basic Wordpress site on their shared hosting plan. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic so I haven’t really seen a reason to upgrade or switch.
I pay for a good number of them. Not that I can’t self-host alternatives. It is just easier:
- 1Password
- OneDrive
- B2 Storage (backing up OneDrive amongst other things)
- VPS
Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.
I took the time to teach my kids how to use a password manager with Bitwarden on my self hosted instance. But my wife asked me what’s going to happen if I die. I’m confident in minimal downtime while I’m alive, but it’s important that my family’s passwords can outlive me. So I wound up purchasing the family plan.
Same.
I could absolutely self-host it, but at the price they charge it makes no sense to do so especially as it means I can support it’s development.
I hate to say it, but “this”.
It works fantastically, it’s not expensive, it’s one of the more critical services in my stack, and I get to support the company.
No brainer.
No problems with uptime running vaultwarden as a docker on a hetzner vm. Only thing I am missing is some sort of SSO integration.
MXRoute, super cheap and awesome.
- tasks.org - $1/year
- ardour - $1/month
- tasker (autoapps on android) - $1/month
Don’t even use them anymore. But as I wouldn’t miss it, I’ll keep it going to support the devs.
Albeit more than 30 annually but I still consider cheap/good value:
Exchange online few domains streaming services (TV and music because WAF)
I pay for a bunch of stuff but it’s all self hosted. Bitwarden, opnsense, nginx proxy, uptime kuma, wikijs…
1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.
