I just read Jlelse’s blog about subscriptions, which was a response to Manumorale’s blog post and others. Here is my take, maybe it helps someone.
I consider myself an impulsive buyer and I wanted to change that, I tried using Excel, more accounts (I moved money to another account and kept only what I needed) or Notion. Nothing worked the way I wanted, so I subscribed to Ynab and I think it is getting better with time. It cost me ~€100 per year. And this is the first subscription I wanted to talk about.
This gives me a pretty good overview of where I am spending my money. I manually enter my transaction 2 or 3 times a month.
Here are more.
Tech subscriptions#
I have subscribed to Office Family which costs me €10 per month (I pay annual subscription). I first got this because my dad needed it but now I share it with my family members. Everyone has 1TB cloud storage and office suite. I also back up my computer’s data there.
Next I have Google one and iCloud, both for €2.99 each. I use Google one mainly for backing up my phone and as a photo storage. I also have several Apple devices and needed more storage for data and backups. It’s a bit of a drawback if you have devices that don’t quite work together.
My code goes to GitHub, for which I pay €3.80 per month.I tried to self host it but moved away from it.My code editor is Visual studio Code, which I use since I cancelled the Jetbrains subscription for all products. One of my extensions is Copilot. I pay 10Eur per month for that.
My servers cost me €18 per month, which I use for several personal projects. Object storage on AWS costs me €4 per month. And my CDN is 1 Eur per month. My blog costs me literally nothing, just the domain which I pay for yearly.
My newsletter, which I subscribe to at Buttondown, costs about €9 a month.
In total, this comes to around €57.79 per month.
Fun#
I have subscribed to 3 streaming services, Netflix Family, Disney+ and HBO Max. Netflix costs me €2.99 per month (I have it as part of my phone contract), HBO is €0 per month - part of the phone contract and I get it for 1 year as a benefit. Disney+ is €6.60 per month.
I also pay for TV which is €15.90 per month. I do not watch TV but my mum does. I don’t have a problem getting something else, but I can’t find a channel she likes anywhere else.
Youtube Premium gets me €7.90 per month - I use it for youtube without ads and try streaming music. I also have Spotify for €6.49 a month for music and podcasts. I switched to Spotify after Pocket Casts went up in price.
Speaking of games, I have a Nintendo Online subscription which costs €1.70 a month (1 year subscription). Final Fantasy XIV cost me €13.80 per month (90 day subscription), which ends in December, but I haven’t had much time to play it so I probably won’t go back to subscribing it.
I also pay about €15 a month for Audible. I subscribed because I wanted to improve my English. Every month I get one free audio book.
Totally, fun cost me €54.48 per month.
Communication , privacy#
I don’t pay for antivirus software now, but I use NextDNS on my router, which costs me about €1.70 a month.
My email costs me 5 euros a month. It runs on Fastmail. I read that some of you use cheaper Purelymail or Migadu. But I don’t think it’s the best idea, especially the first option. If you want to know why, you can read my post about privacy vs security.
My VPN subscription cost me around €2.40 per month with a 28 month subscription.
My password manager is 1password which I have in family licence for €5.70 per month (with 1 year subscription). I have tried other options but using SSH keys directly from the password manager and masked email (in company with Fastmail) is a must have for me. I also like the security features (you have master password, account password and 2FA authentication on top of that).
This category totals approximately €14.80 per month.
Others#
I also like to try new things, so for example I subscribed to Obsidian sync for €9.94 per month (cancelled automatic payment). I can sync my PCs using onedrive or another cloud, but it does not work on mobile devices.
For RSS, I use Readwise’s Reader, which again costs me about €9 a month. As a bonus, it syncs my highlights from Amazon books or Raindrop to my Obsidian vault.
I also have MS365 on which I have my domain. It costs me around €8 per month. I use it to experiment before applying changes to customer tenants.
I don’t know if I can talk about it as a subscription, but my car costs me somewhere between €40 and €80 per month (excluding insurance) just for fuel.
And the last thing I wanted to talk about is Laracasts, which I got as a lifetime subscription on Black Friday last year, which cost me about €200.
At the end#
So the total is around €130 a month. I’m under €150, which is the limit I don’t want to go over. This is not the final price because I often try new things and subscribe to new services or cancel services that don’t suit me. I have excluded the mobile phone price from this summary.
What about you? How much do you spend on subscriptions? Do you have several services in the same or a similar category or do you always choose a unique service?
Reply by Email