

Online services I pay for - niels
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/online-services-i-pay-for.html

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eggbrain
I still don't understand the draw of Hulu Plus over something like Netflix or
Amazon Prime (with its new video on demand servce). $8 a month to still have
TV shows with ads in them? (and I swear they keep adding more advertisements
to the shows each time I watch them). They do let you watch earlier seasons of
shows, but that seems like Netflix would be a better option for that. So
what's the real draw Gabriel has for subscribing?

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sjs382
It works on an iPad while regular Hulu doesn't. (right?)

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eggbrain
True, but it seems like a high price to pay simply to watch the latest
television shows on your iPad / other iOS devices.

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mike-cardwell
The guy who wrote that article is a millionaire.

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jason_slack
And that is relavent how?

I am sure he got that way by not spending money he deemed as frivolous just to
spend money.

I am not a millionaire but I spend money on services I deem necessary for me.

~~~
mike-cardwell
The relevance is obvious.

"it seems like a high price"

...

"The guy who wrote that article is a millionaire"

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roel_v
I've been asking around among the people I know lately, and I have yet to find
someone who will pay for online services. Of course they're all 'regular'
people, i.e. not working in the tech field, and with 'modal' incomes, so not
always buying the latest gadgets (phones etc).

Of course there are plenty of businesses doing fine selling online services.
It's just that it seems to be to an audience that I cannot find off line. Is
it a European thing? It it possible to target the (mainstream) B2C market in
Europe with online services yet? Anyone with experiences in this field?

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truthseeker
Most users don't mind paying for services with their time. eg: watching tv
programs with ads in them vs HBO subscription. The cases where you see people
paying for services is when the service will provide them with
value/convenience/time savings and _the users care for the value/convenience
and time savings_

I could check if my servers are up every hour without subscribing to pingdom.
Do I want to do it though? no. It's too painful and time consuming. For most
people, it really doesn't matter if their desktop is up or down, their
livelihood doesn't depend on it.

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kylec
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Dropbox yet - for me, it's certainly the most
useful online service I pay for.

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Goladus
So far, I've only had one experience with dropbox, and it was mediocre.
Someone('s dad) was trying to share a ~1.5 gig file with up to 50ish people
(mostly artists and musicians). The free account used up all its bandwidth and
the person had to apologize to everyone and ask that they please wait while
they figured out what to do (I assume they were using a free version and
needed to upgrade, but that's just a guess. The Dropbox faq doesn't say
anything about bandwidth).

So I uploaded it to amazon s3 and configured direct access to the bucket via
the web (a very easy procedure though somewhat technical). It cost me less
than $5 to get that file to the remaining people, with little worry about
service interruption.

~~~
mestudent
See that really isn't the main use case for dropbox, dropbox is more like
seemless backup and sync. You have a dropbox folder on your computer you work
on stuff in, everything gets uploaded and revisioned while you are saving
files and when you change computers everything is there.

You also get pretty good folder sharing with others and a web interface.

Personally though I've stopped paying for dropbox and might consider going
back if they implement client side encryption for some users, but til then its
waiting for a fast enough good enough replacement or for dropbox to implement
it.

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Goladus
_See that really isn't the main use case for dropbox_

Of course, but the user was clearly taken by surprise.

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robryan
It's in the terms somewhere, I remember this coming up once before on hacker
news when something was being linked directly from dropbox.

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Jun8
Safari books online is ~$300/year but is worth it weight in gold. Most of the
time you just need part of a book and need to look at several books to find
the right answer or code snippet. Currently my company pays for it but I'm so
used to it now, I would pay if they decide not to.

~~~
radioactive21
A lot of schools including my alma mater has this free for students/staff.
They also allow alumni if you bought the lifetime alumni pack when you
graduated which was $300 and included a bunch of other university services.

I have use the safari books extensively, but their book viewer sucks. I wished
it was a much better UI.

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andymoe
FreshBooks, CrashPlan, GitHub, AWS (grudgingly - because I like
building/running servers) and NetFlix.

I am more likely to drop 20, 30 or even 100 bucks on some software that I may
or may not use daily - it takes a lot more to get me to commit to a
subscription service - it has to provide ongoing utility and joy on a daily
basis.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I recommend you give Invoice Machine a shot, I like it better than Fresh
Books.

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trafficlight
I wish NewEgg had a program like Amazon Prime.

Edit: I was just browsing NewEgg and it looks like they have joined with
Shoprunner.com to offer 2 day shipping for $79/year.

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smackfu
I definitely don't use NewEgg enough to make that worth it, compared to
Amazon.

~~~
trafficlight
I'm the opposite. I'm ordering things from Newegg every few weeks and I hardly
ever buy from Amazon.

Though for the past year we've had a free Amazon Prime account because my wife
is a college professor. With free shipping, we ordered a lot more things than
we would've otherwise.

~~~
ben1040
I've been a Prime subscriber for a little over 3 years. I use it for
_everything_. It's really dangerous, combined with the mobile app. For
example, my wife and I were talking over lunch the other day that we needed a
new weed-whacker for the yard, and three minutes later I'd priced one out and
ordered one on my phone for next day delivery.

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tonyskn
Spotify. No ads, offline syncing, higher quality audio.

~~~
tiddchristopher
No USA service, either. I would have considered Spotify, but I went with
Pandora because of this limitation.

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antihero
How much does this all cost a month?

I just have Linode and Astraweb :\

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jsz0
I pay for Audible since it's about the only way I can churn through all the
books I want to read thanks to long commutes. I opt for a good usenet account
instead of Netflix/Hulu simply because the selection/quality isn't good enough
yet and, at best, the content is spread between at least two services. Usenet
is just easier.

~~~
tallanvor
Giganews' Diamond plan is the most expensive internet service I pay for. I've
thought about switching, but the VPN service they include is very handy for
when I need to access sites that are only available from American IP addresses
or if I'm connecting from an untrusted network.

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stevenj
Re: "switching between accounts a pain"

Not sure if most of the switching is between email accounts, but if it is,
I've been using the 30 day free trial for MailPlane
(<http://mailplaneapp.com>) and have been pleased with it.

I'm going to pay for it when the trial is over ($24.95).

~~~
truthseeker
Try Sparrow. I've been running their trial version as well. It is really good
and 10$ for full version.

~~~
jason_slack
Agreed. I paid the $10 and I have not looked back. I really like this app.

~~~
stock_toaster
I heard/read about issues with very large cache directories (with thousands of
tiny files).

I have an ssd so the speed isn't a concern for me, but as osx lacks trim
support, I am concerned about huge caches.

Have you seen or noticed the cache being overly large?

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jason_slack
I do have a weird 'lag' when I get to my e-mail in the morning after being
away all night. My system does not sleep, but Sparrow is unresponsive for
about 60 seconds. But just then everyday. After that I am fine until the next
morning. I am not sure if that relates at all.

I have a lot of e-mail and 'labels' and I seem to do just fine.

TRIM support is coming in Lion (OS X 10.7) but I am sure you know that since
you know 10.6 doesn't have it. I still felt compelled to type it though...

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beck5
Only non server based thing I pay for for is evernote, currently in second
year but have fallen out of love with it slightly so will probably be my last.

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lhnn
Pandora. No ads, higher quality audio. I do it because I appreciate what I get
from the site, same way I buy the Economist even though I can read its
articles online for free.

~~~
foresterh
Rhapsody. No ads, access to tons of stuff, on demand. You have the choice of
picking and choosing songs, or just playing on a radio (Pandora style). And I
think it's the same price as Pandora's ad-free service (which makes me wonder
why people pay for Pandora?)

~~~
shazow
I pay for Pandora, too.

I can't quantify it but Pandora does a much better job at playing music I
enjoy in the context of the previous music it played and I enjoyed. There will
be times when it hits streaks of an hour of non-stop amazing music song after
song (with only a few that I've heard before).

Other services I've tried are not much better than a genre on shuffle.

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joezydeco
Could it be because Pandora actually uses humans to categorize the music?

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1718527/pandora-ipo-tim-
westergre...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1718527/pandora-ipo-tim-westergren)

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RyanKearney
I used to use Jungle Disk until I found out they still bill you for bandwidth
costs even if you use your own S3 bucket so you effectively having to pay
double for bandwidth costs.

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gcb
for me jungledisk/dropbox/ubuntuone sounds really dumb.

any hacker worth their salt can just use rsync or something else. and you can
somewhat trust your remote host with openSSH.

if you are already going to pay for storage/bandwidth? why settle for a dumb
client and doubtful privacy?

dropbox i can understand on the price issue to be more appealing, but if you
plan to backup private documents, this is not a good selling point. more so in
recent fear mongering campaign against them.

I'm paying the lowest linode with backup and just have a cron job on all my
devices (home/work PCs, android, openwrt router) sending rsync diffs there.
and as an added bonus i also use that host to host my private git repositories
and run mysql slave for an offsite backup for my personal projects data.

...not extremely cheap, but not extremely insecure.

~~~
RyanKearney
I starting using Dropbox while in college so I could sync all my school work
with great ease. Now I have 82.25GB of space (72.9% used) and I mainly use it
to backup my iTunes library, pictures, and projects. While rsync would work as
an alternative, I just go with Dropbox because it's dead simple to use.

