On Subscriptions

Just sharing the subscriptions I have, inspired by other bloggers doing the same

I’ll be honest, I have always been the kind of guy who will try to get stuff for free and work around whatever I don’t want to pay for.

This was very prevalent around 4 or 5 years ago. I would use a patched version of Spotify, random apps to scrape movies from the internet as well as books and other content.

Nowadays that has changed quite a bit, but its still nothing close to what some fellow bloggers I follow do. Kev wrote about this, inspired by Manu’s post, and I have to say, I was really surprised about the amount of subscriptions they had. Maybe they are not the norm but it was still a lot more than I expected—at least compared to me.

As I still live with my parents, I don’t actually fully pay for a lot of the subscriptions I make use of, in fact, my parents don’t pay either, here in Mexico it is very common to just share accounts with people and split the bill, and I am usually the one in charge of circumventing whatever measures are taken to detect this—although that has never really happened.

Regardless, after some thought, here are all the subscriptions I use, some I pay for, others I just enjoy. I will list the prices in Mexican pesos, because they usually differ from the price in other countries.

Entertainment

Pretty much all of my subscriptions are for streaming services, and the only one I pay myself is YouTube Premium, although I haven’t payed at the moment because of the free trial.

Spotify ($199/month) is the subscription service I use the most, for kinda obvious reasons. Music is a huge part of my life. Back in the day I just used whatever patched APK I could find on the internet, at some point I discovered I could get a discount as a student, so I did, getting 3 free months. After that I just didn’t pay and went with the ad supported plan. At some point a friend added us to his Family plan and the rest is history.

Netflix ($299/month) comes second, of course, for obvious reason as well, this is also a plan we share with another family and since we live close enough we don’t have any problems with the password sharing policies.

Disney+ ($179/month) has gotten more use from my family recently because of Blueys and Malcom in the Middle. We watch the latter every night during dinner, and Blueys from time to time with my sister, as well as your regular Star Wars or Marvel show from time to time, although we tend to pay less and less attention to them, we’ve not finished one of those shows since Kenobi…

YouTube Premium ($79/month). I know, I know, but somehow I got the itch to try out what it feels to have this, so I just got a free month with their student plan, I’ll see what I think about it. I’ve heard multiple times how this model benefits the creators I watch quite a bit more than regular ad supported views. Yes, I hate Google, yes I use Newpipe in my phone, and yes, I just gave info regarding my studies AND my finantial information to the big G, but whatever.

Domains

I guess these technically counts as a yearly subscription, so yeah, I am paying for 3 domain names right now, this blog’s, this blog’s old domain, and also a personal IRL website that I won’t share here. all together, they cost around $564.99/year, so its not really that big of a deal at all. I use Porkbun to manage my domains and I quite like it.

Patreon

Fosstodon ($25/month) is the only service I support on Patreon, there are a couple of podcasts and YouTube channels I’ve been considering too, like Into The Aether or Darknet Diaries, but I haven’t really gotten around to it—and I don’t actually want to spend money on that—frankly speaking. I spent a bit of time looking for people and channels I might wanna support and they are either too expensive, or I just don’t care that much about missing their episodes, specially when there are lots of free content out there to consume.

Gaming

I payed for a full year of Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, I only payed $238 since we split a family plan between 8 people, so it was very cheap for us all. I like playing online sometimes, its pretty cool.

Final thoughts

I know that when it comes to patreon the point is more about supporting people rather than what I get in return, but I can’t help it.

I actually struggled to remember what I am subscribed to, I even felt a little left out, like I needed to prove “I can have subscriptions too!”, I literally got YouTube Premium while writing this post so, oops.

The cost, for the services I actually pay for, is shown in the following table:

So, yeah, this is it for now. This was quite a nice excercise to be honest. Living with my parents and being part of a shared plan for these Subscription services really is a lot cheaper…

This is day 78 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/111372647217343217

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