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.
I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you… walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups… I’m fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.
I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don’t offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.
I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups – excellent low-cost provider for my “Cloud” backups.
I run Home Assistant locally, but I’d definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor… very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.
I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago – best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.
If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they’d be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That’s about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize “life” for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life – SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.
finally leaving Google Photos
What do you recommend for a photo hosting site? At the current time, I can’t really self host a photo album and I’m tired of emailing pictures to my family. I’d rather have something like google photos, where I can share a link to an album and they can see the pictures.
I know there’s flickr, but i don’t know if you can make albums sharable via link, without the need to have a flickr account.
For backup, I think I’ll use my backblaze account. I’ve had a backblaze account for years and mainly use it to backup my ebooks.
Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can’t really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10.
I had that too for a while. Currently just paying $2 for unlimited access with a singly country. Just for anonymity. Not worried about geolocation at the moment.
I love windscribe. They’re up there with dbrand for snarky promotional emails.
Oh I love windscribe. I was there when they just launched up and got their lifetime deal. been running since 2016 on that deal . pretty happy with their service
Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox
Have you tried restoring from it? I’ve read about pretty gnarly situations where they have corrupted the data and even lost it (raid failed)
Any other cheaper options? Not looking for a tb. Even 100gb is good with me.
Backblaze is great and transparent
I recently got myself a storage box, too. If I’m not mistaken, there’s no smaller option than 1 GB.
Scaleway offer up to 75GB of their Object Storage for free and only start charging when you go over.
That’s traffic not storage.
Blackblaze B2 costs me pennies using 50GB of storage. $0.18 last month
Do you encrypt the backups? I’m interested in learning more about this process.
If you are sending any of your data from your home lab to an outside server that you personally do not control then yes, you should ALWAYS encrypt the backups (unless it’s crap you don’t care about like your tax returns, credit card details, passwords, etc.)
How do you I encrypt the files before copying them to a remote server/storage?
Some backup services have an option for it, like Duplicati. Rclone also has it but requires a lil setup I think.
Use a good backup system like Borgbackup (with Borgmatic to automate it).
Good backup software will have this ability built in - such as duplicati for instance.
Restic is great for that, deduplication and snapshots as well
Damn ok that’s cheap, even for a small business this looks like a great option for off-site backups.
Is there a service like this in the USA?
$2 iCloud
$2 Google One
$10 UsenetServer
$59.95 /3 years, PIA VPN
I pay for my own domain name hands down the best investment, as little as 1€ per month and you get a lot more option for your homeland/vps/mail or whatever you have.
Bitwarden and Email.
I trust a company like Bitwarden to handle uptime of my password manager more than I do myself. If most of my selfhosted services went down, I’m gonna be a little annoyed, but I can survive. If Bitwarden goes down, that’s a real PITA.
And email, because f**k trying to self host email successfully, I’ve accepted I’ll just have to use a commercial provider for emails. I’ll try and set up a self hosted server at some point, but on a separate domain and most likely just to mess around/learn.
It’s not cheap, but I pay for Spotify because overall I’ve been pretty happy with it. It has a good selection of features, lots of content, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint that I have is that the offline mode isn’t great.
An actually cheap service that I pay for is addy.io, and even though I haven’t been using it much, so far it has been working pretty well.
I do this but for Tidal Family because I’m a bit of a snob.
I used to pay for Spotify, but they kept removing features I liked, and last time I used it, the Android app was just absolute garbage. They’re also missing alternate releases and bonus tracks on just about every album on there.
Their shuffle feature is also absolutely whack, it will play like the same 10 songs over and over from a playlist of hundreds of tracks.
Their shuffle feature is also absolutely whack, it will play like the same 10 songs over and over from a playlist of hundreds of tracks.
Same thing here. I can’t seem to figure out how it decides what to play. Sometimes I’ll actually forget that I added certain songs to my playlist because one day Spotify will just decide to play it.
Try Deezer. Better sound quality too.
Im into fitness so: Lose it! and Hevy (dont know if there are good selfhosted alternatives)
Mullvad Bitwarden Goodnotes cuz im studying right now and make notes on my iPad
1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail
what is NextDNS and putio for?
Lmao Icloud is one of the services i started self hosting to replace
What do you use iCloud for? iCloud Photos? I’ve been debating using my Synology for photos or iCloud.
Also why 1P over Bitwarden? Both are electron now?
What is put.io good for? I seem to not really understand what it is or what you would use it for?
Proton Suite
My expressVPN 2year plan is about to expire in February. I am seriously considering switching to Proton, especially since I already use protonMail as the inbox for my Anonaddy instance. What’s your experience with Proton?
I also have the proton suite, I love all of them. The only one I haven’t used is calendar, but everything else is great. The only complaint I have about their VPN is that port forwarding is mildly annoying and not automatic - but most people wouldn’t care, and it’s really very minor.
PIA 3 years for like 80$
Seedbox for, I dont even know
and icloud for a dollar a month
Bitwarden, Paid addy.io, protonmail paid via crypto, privacy.com virtual credit cards, MySudo voip numbers, a jmp.chat number or two.
Bitwarden is one of the few invoices I enjoy seeing. It means I get fantastic service for another year. The cost value for me is insane as I use it so many times a day.
Do you use any of the premium features because the free plan looks essentially the same?
VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month
Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month
Yeah. Same. VPS for $4/mo for the purpose of VPN. In addition to WireGuard, I host X-UI dashboard which runs ShadowSocks-2022 and VLESS/VMESS/XTLS-Reality, all on top of XRay core.
All relatives and friends are using this VPN, no complain.
$5/m is pretty expensive for a VPS if you’re just using it for Wireguard. A $15/year 2 GB RAM / 20-ish GB SSD VPS would be totally fine for that use case.
Black Friday is coming up… The best time of year for VPS deals. Even without Black Friday deals, providers like GreenCloudVPS (their “Budget KVM” packages) and RackNerd have good deals.
Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month
I should try those… I can never force myself to use them, but I bet they are amazing to have.
I’m tired of torrents…
I made the switch in the summer of 2022 after nearly two decades of exclusively using torrents. I’ll never go back to torrents for anything media related again.
Does your provider not offer IPv6? That’s usually the best way to avoid all NAT, including CGNAT.
$10/m for 1 provider and 1 indexer?
If you hunt around this black friday you should be able to get a better deal than that. For reference I have 1 unlimited provider (newshosting) for about $30/yr and 2 indexers each around $15/yr
Yeah I can’t read, my indexer is $12 per year provider is $6 per month
VPN, iCloud in case I lose my drives, MEGA, Spotify