Madza

Posted on Sep 17, 2020

What paid services do you use?

#webdev #discuss #productivity

Maybe you have bought some tools, extensions, libraries, etc, or you have some active paid subscription plans on some services?

Currently, I can't think of any of my own, but I would be interested to discover recommendations on the best cost-value stuff worth paying for?

Top comments (40)

Gary Bell • Sep 17 '20

Full JetBrains suite. I'd not be without them as a suite of IDEs. My blog is hosted on Ghost professional, so I pay monthly for that.

I'm sure there's probably one or two others, but at the end of the day I am happy to pay for software/tools which make my life easier. Whilst I love open source software, and the freedom which comes with it, people still need to pay bills. Not everything can be free.

David Dal Busco • Sep 17 '20

I also use Webstorm and pay the yearly fee.

One of the few subscription, if not the only one, for which I have absolutely no doubts that it is worth the money. I am just more effective with their editor and the fact that you can reach out their support anytime, makes it worth it.

Gary Bell • Sep 17 '20

I have the full toolbox. I also got my employer to pay for it for the rest of the dev team. JetBrains have done alright from me over the years, and will continue to do so.

If I had to pay the full £499 a year for just me, I'd reconsider it and just go for PHPStorm alongside PyCharm Community

David Dal Busco • Sep 17 '20

Indeed the full one is quite an investment. I only use Webstorm (since a couple of years), so I (aka my company 😉) pays something like 79$ a year.

Gary Bell • Sep 17 '20

I use PHPStorm just about every day. I also use DataGrip quite often, so there's two tools already. I dip in and out of PyCharm, but use it less than I would like.

I've been a customer long enough that an annual licence for toolbox for me is less than 2 licences individually, so I stick with it.

David Dal Busco • Sep 17 '20

It makes fully sense 👍

scroung720 • Sep 18 '20

Last time I used webstorm was 4 or 5 years ago. Currently, I am working with VS Code and a friend lately has been saying that I should try WebStorm and he gives me a list of features that I believe are already in VS Code. Does anyone of you know features that are not built in VS Code?

David Dal Busco • Sep 18 '20

This week I saw a tweet mentioning that you can now in VS Code visualize upcoming changes before refactoring in order "to be sure that it is correct". I found it actually funny because in Webstorm, refactoring just works, period. It's really a powerful and reliable feature.

Another feature which I found better implemented in Webstorm is Git. Even if you are slick with the GitHub commands, which are seamlessly integrated, it can still helps in case of merge conflicts. The way of resolving these is pretty well handled.

Summarized: Refactoring + Git are really great in Webstorm

Of course the above answer is my humble opinion. Other might see it differently and even I might change my mind with the time. That being said, few times I tried VS Code, these two features were bringing me back to Webstorm.

Bernhard Wittmann • Sep 17 '20

1Password as a Password manager

Adam Davis • Sep 17 '20

I started my blog pretty recently. These are the things I've paid for so far:

Domain name (annual fee)
Logo and generic header image design (one-time fee)
Affinity Designer (one-time fee)
AWS (most stuff I use is free tier. Spending less than $1/month on this so far)

These are things that I plan on paying for at some point:

Skillshare. I'm currently in the free trial taking some design courses to be able able to create my own graphics and animations. This is partially for my blog, but I also create open-source projects that I'd like to be visually appealing.
Probably more AWS services

Mohammed Zeeshan • Sep 18 '20

Skillshare is really worth subscribing to. I started with atrial and went up a 1-year subscription. It was worth it for me

Adam Davis • Sep 18 '20

What classes on there have helped you the most?

Robert • Sep 17 '20

Just my domains. Everything else is hosted on vercel for free.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Sep 18 '20

Domain names are very cheap, compared to hiring a VPS.

Pricing is PER YEAR.

Emilie Ma • Sep 17 '20

Same - Netlify and free tier of various hosting services for the win!

ender minyard • Sep 17 '20 • Edited

None. Everything should be free 🙂

There's so many open source projects for every domain of life that can help you.

Kasper Sanguesa-Franz • Sep 17 '20 • Edited

Everything should be free?

One of the issues with Open source projects:

You have to host it yourself
You have to do patches
You have the responsibility if something goes wrong.

But I think it all comes down to what your time is worth :)

If I can pay 3$/ month for a todo list app I would happily do that than spend hours trying to set it up and manage it myself :)

ender minyard • Sep 17 '20 • Edited

I'm grateful to be tech literate and a proficient developer. Using open source software is quite fast and efficient in my case :-)

Keff • Sep 17 '20

I heard this phrase and it stuck with me:

"If you don't pay, you're the perfect customer."
From Tom Scott video on VPNs

Keff • Sep 17 '20

But yeah, I know where you are going. There is most likely a free and OSS alternative for most stuff.

Thomas Bnt ☕ • Sep 17 '20

You can create your website for nothing. Just to pay the domain per year and it's good. Hosted with GitHub or other and pass into a serverless 🙌🏼

Ranieri Althoff • Sep 18 '20

There are free domains too. Namely .la, .md and .ag

Thomas Bnt ☕ • Sep 18 '20

Yeah but I not recommend free NDD because isn't better for SEO 😁

Lud • Sep 18 '20 • Edited

I purchased several apps that I regularly need for working:

LittleSnitch (basically a FireWall, great for developers if you e.g., quickly want to cut off your machine's access to a specific domain for testing)
Postico (great and simple database client for PostgreSQL)

Subscriptions:

RescueTime (tracks how I spent my time on the computer)
Dropbox (private stuff)
Google One (shared things with my family)
Patreon (e.g., Patrick Wardle, he has great security tools for macOS, some artists whose music I like)
1Password (password manager)
GitHub pro (I don't need pro since Microsoft massively upgraded the free tier, but before Microsoft bought in, I did use the pro-only features)
AWS/Heroku (various services, on and off depending on my private projects)
Udacity (not a regular one, but I try to do one "Nanodegree" per year to dive into new topics)
external agency to handle my tax declarations etc.
Grammarly (checking my spelling & grammar)
Netflix (watching movies)
Notion (to document all kind of things, including my cooking receipts^^)
Masterclass (learning various topics on a high level, like movie making, cooking, philosophy, science,..)

Services that I consider removing:

either one of Dropbox or Google One. Most likely, I'll consolidate everything into Dropbox. It is more expensive, but their apps sync much better.

I guess, I can categorize all my tools into:

fun (e.g. Netflix): depends on how you spent your leisure time
daily life (e.g. Dropbox): depends on what you use your computer for
coding/work related (e.g. GitHub): depends on what you work on

Dĵ ΝιΓΞΗΛψΚ • Sep 18 '20

password manager: bitwarden annual
cloud storage: pcloud lifetime
dedicated servers: online.net monthly
vps servers: vultr monthly
web api framework: servicestack annual
bulk emails: amazon ses monthly
domains: cloudflare annual
music: spotify monthly

everything else is either free, open source or cracked 🤪

Tom • Sep 17 '20

SourceHut. It's still in alpha, but I really enjoy the simple and straightforward build system based on Linux shell scripting in separate stages. The pipeline definitions and secrets system are concise and allow you to pull in configurations to files at specific locations as well, which makes applying a secret for AWS or NPM CLI commands a single entry in the secrets property and you're good to go.

I'm using this primarily as a tool to automatically build and host webpages on Netlify with ease, but it allows functionality like containers (long live podman) for reproducible builds and supports various Linux and BSD distributions already.

Plus the UI is just easy to work with, most websites today feel like they're hiding things I care about in random corners of subsections in the page (I'm looking at you, GitHub, why is my Starred tab gone)

Brandin Chiu • Sep 17 '20

Jetbrains, LucidChart, Gsuite, various cloud products, github pro, gitbook.com, and testing fellow.app.

I still have a physical copy of Adobe CS6 that I refuse to let go of until it completely stops working.

Garret • Sep 18 '20

Guess it really depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for just personal use tools most stuff is completely free for personal use.

For personal use I really only pay for domains, everything else I run is hosted freely at vercel basically with DynamoDB free tier database.

For business use theres a lot of different tools that I use.

GSuite, Stackery, a lot of the atlassian suite, github teams, and probably a lot more I cannot think of off the top of my head.

Kasper Sanguesa-Franz • Sep 17 '20

When I read this the first time, I could not come up with a lot of services I pay for, but after thinking a bit more on it, they all began coming up

"Tech" tools I subscribe to:
todoist.com (everyone needs a good and simple todo list)
Grammarly
Jetbrains (I have lost count on how many of their IDEs I got installed on my machines)
A few active subscriptions on Patreon and other services to support OSS