
Ask HN: What SaaS or apps are you paying for? - busymichael
I am curious to know what saas or apps are HN user&#x27;s paying out of their own pocket for? Not business apps, but for your own personal use.<p>Personally, I pay for feedly (rss reader), G Suite domain (for my personal email), beyondpod (podcast app for android), mighttext (syncs sms to gmail), todoist premium (task&#x2F;to do app).
======
cuu508
Spotify, TrainerRoad, Zwift, Strava.

I used to pay for Crashplan until they terminated the plan I was on.

I hop on and off the paid plan of my own SaaS just to test the payment flow
from time to time ;-)

~~~
sbrother
Zwift is pretty much the best SaaS service I've ever paid for. My wife and I
had a baby recently and it's let me stay in shape while watching him. I think
even when I can ride outside more again I'll keep using it -- the way it
gamifies cycling makes it a better workout and almost more fun than the real
thing.

------
newusertoday
why are you using g-suite instead of gmail? is it just to get email's like
name@your-domain.com ? or you have other reasons as well?

~~~
busymichael
When I started, it was just to get mylastname.com email for myself and my
family. But, now I pretty much use Google Docs exclusively and the cloud sync
for all my files and photos.

~~~
Jeremy1026
Someone has my-last-name.com for my last name. They are selling email accounts
for like $30 a year. No. Bitches.

------
gkoberger
A good amount!

Media: Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, put.io

Personal "Work": GitHub, Heroku, Photoshop, Sketch, Dribbble Pro

Workflow: Superhuman, Dropbox, 1Password

Donations: Wikipedia, Watsi

~~~
bastijn
Interesting to see superhuman there, I thought that died after being in the
media for a brief while. Is it worth the subscription? What makes it that you
would really need it, for you, not the ads.

~~~
gkoberger
You might be thinking of another product? As far as I can tell, they're doing
pretty good. The hype may have died down a bit, but as far as I can tell the
company itself is doing great. They're still in beta, and slowly rolling out.

For someone who spends most of my time in email, definitely. It's $29/mo,
which is nothing for how much time I spend. It's really fast, and as a vim
user I love how everything can be done with a keyboard shortcut. They have a
ton of awesome little features, such as auto-BCCing people in intros, or
snippets (which are way more than you'd expect... you can use snippets to do
things like auto-CC someone you CC a lot, or insert text).

I mean, at the end of the day, it's still just an email client. However so
far, I've really liked a lot of the nice little features and attention to
detail.

------
anotherevan
Newsblur for RSS feed reading.

NearlyFreeSpeech for web-site hosting.

VentraIP for my .id.au domain. This includes DNS and email forwarding. The
email forwarding is awesome - no need for G-Suite just for personal email
domain. I just use a regular Gmail account.

Cerberus for phone anti-theft on all family phones.

I use to pay for Lastpass and Xmarks, but they shut Xmarks down, and the free
offering of Lastpass expanded to include the features I needed. (To be honest,
I've been looking to move off Lastpass since LogMeIn bought them, but
especially since they shuttered Xmarks. That really rankles.)

------
allenbina
I found myself paying upwards of $100 monthly in these small incurring charges
until my credit card was lost and they were all cancelled. I'll answer with
what main services I used to pay for and what I replaced them with. Evernote
got replaced by OneNote. It's not an equivalent, but it gets the job done. I
moved from lastpass once they changed their subscription model to the free
tier. I'm considering moving to bitwarden's free tier. I'm somehow unable to
get together the few hours it will take to migrate a handful of sites and
email accounts from my 1and1 site to something less painful, but every time I
try to move, it becomes a small nightmare.

~~~
danvoell
I actually get really excited when I need a new credit card, for just this
reason. We should start some sort of service that just denies payment to every
monthly subscription once every six months.

~~~
laken
[https://privacy.com/](https://privacy.com/) kinda does that :)

------
thepumpkin1979
Backblaze business(two computers), Spotify, Github, Amazon EC2 and RDS(Rancher
DB and Master), Digitalocean(Rancher Workers), Circleci, Buddybuild, Google
Business (three seats), Name.com( one IO, a dozen dot coms), Netflix, Amazon
Video

------
Southclaws
I have a dedicated machine from online.net that hosts a few services that
_would_ incur a monthly cost but self hosting helps save a bit of cash there.
These are: GitLab for private projects (because I work with a team and per-
seat costs multiply fast), Confluence and Jira for project management (again,
team size scales the cost and a self-hosting license is only $20/yr).

As for actual SaaS: Backblaze personal, Adobe full suite ($400 per year I
think, gives me everything I need for art/video projects), A password manager,
and... that's it actually! No netflix, no google, no dropbox, I'll probably
keep it this way.

------
Arqu
It is interesting to see that most people only pay for some large brand name
services, would love to see more people paying for SaaS solutions from smaller
businesses/startups and for more technical resons (I guess SME's would better
qualify for this than individuals)

As for my spending I guess I also fall short of the above point: Play Music -
music streaming, Netflix - chill, Github - Private repos, GSuite - mostly
emails, GDrive - storage, Namecheap - Domains, Google Cloud and AWS - cloud
stuff, Asana - side project management, AdWords - side project marketing

~~~
saganus
Numerous comments here on HN suggest that this is due to lack of confidence in
the startup/small business survivability.

If I am going to build a business, I would like to be reasonably sure that the
tools I'm using to build it won't suddenly close if they lack funding.

Of course, this is by no means any guarantee, as there's also the case where a
startup is so successful that some bigger company will buy it and close down
the service anyway.

------
mstaoru
Newsblur for great and flexible RSS experience. Fastmail for great email
experience (does that count as a SaaS?). Sync (sync.com) for cloud backup and
storage (switched after Dropbox faked OS X password prompt and didn't even
blush). 1Password for passwords. MyNoise app for white noise / procedural
music generation. Github is paid also for my own private projects. I also used
to pay for Evernote, but lately, the quality of their service declined in
China and I gave up.

------
berbec
JuiceSSH - android, highly recommened GSuite a t2.micro EC2 - tiny websites,
personal url shortener, screen with ssh sessions to every machine I have
access to more Win10 licenses then I care to admit to - my VMs gave keys!
Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, VRV, DirecTV Now - HBO is included in dtvnow, and
we're grandfathered in to the intro $35/month plan Office 365 from work - If I
love jobs, I'll pick up an Office subscription myself.

~~~
rgrieselhuber
What url shortener script do you use?

~~~
berbec
YOURLS - [https://yourls.org](https://yourls.org)

Just needs a SQL database and php

~~~
rgrieselhuber
Thanks!

------
jstrate
I pay for Charles Proxy, Digitalocean(droplets), and Netflix.

~~~
halotrope
+1 For Charles. One damn fine piece of software.

~~~
jreid
Would you pay for Charles if they converted to a recurring subscription model?

~~~
moltar
Only if they also converted to a more polished, native UI.

------
pfarrell
Two I haven't seen mentioned that I pay for

* Postman: an awesome tool for API work (I'm not affiliated)

* Amazon Glacier: cheap offsite backup of photos/video (also not affiliated)

------
eranation
Not all active at the moment, but: Robinhood gold, tipranks (in the past),
marvel unlimited, Intellij IDAE (not really a SaaS per se), Adobe Creative
Cloud (same) ,Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO (Hulu and HBO only when there
is a good show to catch up on... ). iCloud, AWS, leetcode (in the past)

------
laken
In order of amount I pay for each service:

Atlantic.net (Hosting), Fastmail, Discord Nitro, Todoist, Private Internet
Access, Twilio

Some that I paid for in excess of 1+ years (or Lifetime):

Freedom.to, Brain.fm

Couple that I'm using premium plans, but not currently paying for (prolonged
trial offers, etc.):

Reddit Gold (still have several years left), Todoist

~~~
wpasc
Have you liked Brain.fm? I used to use it, but started to think it wasn't
really worth it/much more useful than regular whitenoise

~~~
laken
I use it on and off. I've only primarily used the focus mode, and it's a
decent way to help get "in the zone" if there's a really deep task I need to
do.

------
mindcrime
Apps, in the strictest sense? I can't think of any that are purely personal.
Unless you count entertainment oriented stuff like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon
Prime with some "add on" channels like Shudder and HBO.

------
josteink
LWN, Wikipedia, FastMail, Digital Ocean, Google Play Music, Plex, Netflix and
Amazon Prime Video.

I buy music at Bandcamp, bleep and direct at artist pages. I buy movies at
rifftraxx.

I donate to various FOSS projects with money and time.

------
projectramo
#dev: cloud9 digitalocean serverpilot

#education: onemonth udacity/coursera as needed Gotham

#entertainment: HBO netflix hulu youtube Red (music)

#other: dashlane dragon dicatate amazon prime apple storage

I use the free tier of many other services.

------
adorable
GSuite, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Github, Sightengine, Travis, Twilio

------
amorphid
Google Play / YouTube Red: ad free streaming music, ad free YouTube

G-Suite: mostly for email for my personal domain

Netflix: streaming video

101domain: domain registrar

Amazon Prime: faster free shipping

DigitalOcean: virtual machines

AWS: cloud stuff

~~~
busymichael
I forgot YT Red -- I pay for that too for music and ad free YT.

------
bufferoverflow
OneDrive 1TB of storage. It's convenient for photo/video storage and sharing.

Glacier. Very cheap storage, but extremely inconvenient.

------
scarface74
Evernote, Resharper, Backblaze, Office 365

~~~
handbanana
Have you tried not using R#? The only reason I ask is that a lot of its
utility now exists in Visual Studio.

R# actually overwrites many default VS key bindings and provides the same
functionality, just with a different UI. So people are like "hey look what I
can do!", when in actuality they could have done the same thing without R#.

Also, it's a resource hog. I've only met a handful of people who contest this
- and they are long time users, who haven't gone without resharper recently
(full uninstall) for a meaningful period of time.

~~~
scarface74
VS doesn't have any of the functionality under Generate Code:

\- create delegating methods

\- create equality methods

\- create formatting members (ie override ToString() and just click on the
properties - mostly for debugging)

[https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/code_refactorin...](https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/code_refactoring.html)

This list doesn't include things like converting some patterns back and forth
to Linq expressions, converting foreach to for, better extract method that
takes advantage of local methods and lets you choose which variables you want
to capture, and various other code hints.

It also doesn't include safely adding and removing parameters, intelligently
knowing when a class is used via DI when you are looking for unknown classes.

The unit test runner is also much better than the built in VS Test runner.

~~~
handbanana
Interesting that you need/use all those things

~~~
scarface74
I'm usually hired to fix existing code bases/departments. I trust automated
refactors to get my head around really bad huge classes.

------
mrweasel
Kolab for email, and tarsnap for backup.

------
_corym
Bear: the best note-taking app I’ve ever used, with a great tagging system

Spotify: music subscription

Github: private repos

1password: password manager

------
holografix
Netflix, Spotify, GitHub, gdrive... Evernote but Inreally must cancel that

------
ta848347
Office 365, Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Patreon, Cricket Stream, NFL Stream

~~~
scarface74
I didn't add streaming services.

In that case DirectTV, Hulu no commercials, Netflix (not really its free with
T-Mobile) and everything I said below.

------
poidos
Linode hosts my website

FastMail for email from said site

Dropbox for storage

Spotify for music

And the $1 icloud upgrade (for ios backups)

------
ajb413
GitHub and Laracasts

------
kreeWall
Spotify Family, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Backblaze

------
jasonkostempski
Fast Mail and Cold Storage (google and amazon).

------
patwalls
* Adobe Suite

* Boomerang

* Heroku

* AWS S3

* [https://wip.chat](https://wip.chat)

* Apple iCloud

* Amazon Prime

* Spotify

------
synapse0
I pay for laracasts.com and apollohq.com

------
feelepxyz
GSuite, 1Password, NewsBlur, Mullvad VPN

------
vis52
Additional Gmail Space and 1Password

------
jryan49
Spotify

Donations: Wikipedia, Firefox

------
bearjaws
Crashplan, Spotify

------
ah-
runbox.com

------
greatamerican
AWS, Soundcloud, Github, Namecheap, Google Apps Suite

