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💰 On Subscriptions

·975 words·5 mins·
subscription money management newsletter
May Meow
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May Meow
MayMeow is a developer and cybersecurity enthusiast with a passion for cryptography, DevSecOps, and open-source contributions. They enjoy creating tools that strengthen digital security, blending creativity and technology to innovate in fields like PHP and .NET. Always exploring new frontiers in tech, MayMeow is dedicated to safeguarding the digital landscape through their work.
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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
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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?

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