

Ask YC: What do you actually pay for, you, yourself? - swombat

Spawned off from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288231<p>It'd be interesting to know what people in the YCNews demographic <i>actually</i> pay for online. Which paying <i>subscription</i> services do you actually bother spending money on?<p>The question is open to you both as a consumer and as a business. If you are both, please split your answer into two parts, e.g.:<p>As a consumer, I pay for: Flickr<p>As a business, I pay for: Bug tracking software,...<p>Note 1: Please feel free to use specific product names.<p>Note 2: Please don't include things that <i>everyone</i> pays for online, e.g. Amazon books, electronic odds and ends, hosting - unless you feel your particular version is special.<p>Thanks for sharing!
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vaksel
Well you said no hosting, so besides that I'd say nothing really. I'm a cheap
ass.

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notauser
Are you sure?

I physically hand over money for hardware, and that's about it. Everything
else I like is free...

...except that in return for some of that free stuff I give demographic
information. Oh, and in return for some of the other free stuff I give
coding/testing/bug fixes. And I guess some of the free stuff I pay for via
being temped into buying their real-world/physical products. Then some of the
rest I suppose I pay for by validating someone's ego through the mechanism of
pushing up their numbers.

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shafqat
Holy cow - didnt realize so many people pay for Flickr! Thats seriously
surprising to me.

I pay for Yahoo NFL Gamepass (all NFL games streamed live via internet!). I
pay 200 bucks a year for that. Would pay >1000 if they wanted to really push
it. I'm obssesed.

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walesmd
Skype

I used to pay for the Zune Pass but the service became so utterly worthless
plus my Internet connection times out quite often here in Kuwait that I just
said forget it. Back to torrents, which will automatically resume the
download, when my connection wakes back up (without locking up the entire
system, might I add).

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bestes
Startup:gitHub, S3 & EC2 (just experimenting, so minimal actual charges),
zonedit

Personal:eRobertParker, MyFoodDiary _, eMusic_ , iTunes (mostly for TV Shows
and kids movies), callcentric (VOIP line for my house), .mac/mobileMe (I know,
I know) *just recently canceled so I can afford my startup.

Business:Safari (as part of my Komodo/ActivePerl Studio license)

Looking at soon: a slice at slicehost, Balsalmiq (an app, really)

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swombat
I'll start the ball rolling.

As a consumer, I've paid for: peepcode screencasts; a flickr pro account; an
account to freshlymixed.com while it was still up; That's about it over the
last couple of years. I'm not a prolific purchaser of consumer services.

As a business, I'm paying for: EngineYard hosting, Fogbugz, and we paid for
Basecamp for a little while. That's it.

Almost everything else seems to be pretty much free.

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fallentimes
Things I pay for:

1\. ESPN Insider

Things I would pay for (but are free):

1\. Hacker News 2\. Yodlee 3\. Feedburner 4\. Google Alerts

~~~
mattmaroon
Is ESPN's insider content that much better than what you get for free
elsewhere? If so, that's really saying a lot, since the bar for sports content
has risen faster than the price of gas over the last few years.

~~~
fallentimes
Yes it really is. People like John Hollinger and KC Joyner are must reads for
my line of work. Chad Ford has gotten a ton better as well - he used to be a
hack.

~~~
mattmaroon
There's been an all out bidding war for sports writers lately. I guess that
must be why.

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asif
Fantasy football real-time stats on Yahoo!

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mattmaroon
Interesting. Those are free on ESPN now. And, of course, Draftmix :)

~~~
asif
We've been using yahoo for 5 or 6 years now and we're just used to it. I think
it costs about $10/season and given how seriously we take this thing, it
doesn't feel like a lot of money.

Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in
parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.

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blogimus
For business and professional development, I pay for the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, which includes a lot of material
including a couple of online books selections: One large run by Books 24x7 and
a somewhat limited subscription to Safari Books Online.

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larrykubin
1\. Freshbooks for time tracking and invoicing clients

2\. Flickr Pro account for easy photo management

3\. Dedicated server with LayeredTech for hosting projects

4\. EasyNews account for newsgroups

5\. Netflix for movie rentals and streaming

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agotterer
I pay yearly for mozy and rapidshare.

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culley
Consumer:

Cook's Illustrated (for access to Solid Tested Recipes)

NetFlix

Consumer Reports (big purchases)

Mozy (Online Back Up)

used to pay for WSJ but dropped that due to News Corp content degradation.

Work pays several Online Journal and Library Access fees for me.

This was actually harder to come up with than I imagined because several of
these only bill yearly or every two years and so the pain of paying virtually
disappears...

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noodle
i pay for a slice at slicehost, and a pay for supportive subscriptions to some
community-based forums/sites. oh, and skype.

thats it. i'd pay for other things if i had more disposable income and/or
profitable startup, though. i'm making do with what i have, for now. i'm
considering paying for something like an automatic cloud backup system, too,
but am not currently.

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iamelgringo
Rhapsody (2 subscriptions one for the wife, one for me). Safari unlimited.
AWS: I just used Mechanical Turk. It's an awesome service. Safeway online
grocery delivery. It's only 10 bucks! Neflix, of course. GoToMyPC for
servicing the family's computers back home. Basecamp for a short time.
Launchsplash. Moo : Killer business cards. Just got them today.

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LogicHoleFlaw
I'm going to limit myself to online services, as opposed to more mail-
cataloguey applications.

Video Games: Xbox Live Gold Account, Xbox Live Arcade Games, download tracks
for Rock Band, and FFXI (think WoW.)

Movies: Netflix

Hosting: In the very near future, Amazon Web Services

Finance: Credit score tracking

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callmeed
Personal: Backpack

Biz: Basecamp, Campfire, PBWiki, AWS ... and hosting from Slicehost,
Rackspace, and EngineYard

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mtoledo
One thing I pay for and I don't think anyone mentioned is "O'Reilly Safari
Bookstore". US$ 22,00 month (I think?) and quite some nice books: the
Javascript Rhino book, Obie's the Rails way, the Ruby way, the Pragmatic
Programmer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Hackers & Painters, to name a
few.

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bokonist
Skype, NetFlix, Rhapsody, Peapod

Used to pay for VirtualPBX, Experts Exchange, and Wall St. Journal

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PStamatiou
Consumer: Flickr, Giganews.com, Amazon S3 (personal docs), DirecTV +HBO +HD,
access to a private tech forum, Wufoo for my blog's contact form, Google Apps
Premier, misc iTunes Store purchases

Startup: Campfire, Basecamp, Amazon S3, Pingdom and soon Liquid Planner

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cellis
consumer

    
    
      Napster - 15/mo - i like to support the musicians i listen to
      Netflix - 15/mo 
      Rockband songs - 25/mo something around that although not anymore as I'm now boot strapping
    
      Come to think of it, i could easily give up all of those services
    

business

    
    
      TollFreemax - 9/mo
      ProjectLocker - 5/mo svn repository
      Authorize.net payment gateway - 30/mo (not really special, but people *can* use paypal/gpay/aws/ccnow etc freely)
     

used to run a clothing store (long ago when i didn't know how to build my own
ecommerce)

    
    
      prostores 30/mo
    

I've also purchased software for my business

    
    
      boxshot3D - 60

~~~
mattmaroon
Paypal's merchant services still have a montly fee.

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warwick
As a consumer, nothing.

As a business, hosting/mail/sourcecontrol accounts, and the big one is the ADC
membership. Sure, you can get the devtools for free but the WWDC videos make
it worthwhile around a new OS release.

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calvin
JungleDisk (for backup via S3), hosting (Dreamhost for shared, Slicehost for
more power), Amazon MP3 for music. I've been trialing Pingdom for site
monitoring and will probably sign up once trial is over. Netflix.

~~~
blender
I forgot, I too pay for Jungledisk

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aschobel
Personal: TWiT subscription. FLOSS weekly is awesome, <http://twit.tv/FLOSS>

Business: Pingdom. Easy peasy way to make sure your site is up. Amazon S3.

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ninjaa
Subscriptions I have

Business: Basecamp, Zoho

Consumer: O'Reilly safari - safari.oreilly.com - browse their entire library
(including books in pre-publication) for $42.99/mo

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tptacek
Office space, a managed colo from a provider in Canada, 2-3 slicehost VMs, DSL
from Verizon and AT&T, 37Signals Campfire (excellent), 37Signals Basecamp (not
excellent).

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shabda
Freshbooks(19USD/pm) for Billing Clients. Unfuddle(9USD/pm) for Repo+PM
Seobook(100 Usd/pm) for learning marketing.

Ebooks , Domains(Godaddy), Hosting(Webfaction)

~~~
dhimes
Is Seobook any good?

~~~
shabda
Yes, very!

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Tichy
I only paid some MMORPG subscriptions so far. Ultima Online and WoW - never
longer than a month, though.

Also spent 20$ on Linden Dollars (Second Life).

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ComputerGuru
As a consumer? * Flickr * Amazon Prime * NOD32 subscription * S3 * NewsDemon

As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3

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ComputerGuru
As a consumer? * Flickr * Amazon Prime * NOD32 subscription * S3 * NewsDemon

As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3

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ibsulon
Rhapsody, and my partner pays for NetFlix. I was paying for Oreilly's Safari
but I wasn't using it enough. I pay for Espn.com insider as well.

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imp
Skype, Amazon MP3s. For web analytics I pay for GetClicky.com Even though
there's Google Analytics, Clicky is well worth the money.

~~~
dhimes
Does it bother you that you can't host Clicky? I'm using Mint (thanks to a rec
on #startups), but Clicky seems to have more data by far.

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edw519
Amount spent personally = 0.

Amount spent through business = 0.

Amount that could have been earned if I had been billing instead of on hacker
news > 0.

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LKM
flickr, mefi, FogBugz, used to pay for O'Reilly's Safari. Bought the
Instapaper iPhone client, if that counts. Made donations to a ton of services
and people, mainly open source projects, web comics and such. Also donated to
wikipedia, wikileaks, eff and a few others. That's all that comes to mind
right now.

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attack
Skype phone number and skype-out.

Tax preparation software.

Everything else online is business related.

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bootload
_"... What do you actually pay for, you, yourself? ..."_

Thrifty: consumer/biz: flickr, domain, adsl

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tstegart
Flickr and blogging software (Typepad).

~~~
tstegart
I should add that I'm about to pay for Balsamiq's Mockups (for business).

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iamdave
Honestly? Nothing outside of the everyday stuff, but even Amazon I only buy
books every now and then.

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rudyfink
Consumer: netflix, amazon prime, ACM, cook's illustrated

Business: shoeboxed, earthclassmail, MSDN

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aichcon
I pay for Backpack and Basecamp, and will start paying for GoToMeeting once we
have more use for it.

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moonriver
Flickr and until very recently, Last.fm, although I may subscribe to that
again in the future.

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blender
Consumer: iTunes, Club Penguin (for my daughter)

Business: CVSDude (VCS hosting), Highrise

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yaj
Nobody uses Smugmug?

Consumer: Smugmug, S3, JungleDisk

Business: GitHub, AWS (soon)

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scumola
Amazon S3 & UnBox. Google Adwords. Playstation Network. GoDaddy. Tivo.

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gizmo
Consumer: \- ACM membership \- Skype

Business: \- Google Email \- Skype

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waldrews
Rhapsody, Audible, GoToMyPc

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terpua
I pay for: unfuddle, itunes

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initself
I remember paying $.99 for a Google Video once. That's laughable now!

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pyroman
I didn't see anyone mention Pandora. I pay for that and flickr pro.

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inovica
Flickr, iTunes, a backup service, host/server/domain monitoring

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kapitti
Business: Freshbooks, Github, Vonage Consumer: iTunes, Peepcode

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pjackson
I pay for GitHub and AWS. Total cost: under $10/mo

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rickd
consumer: xbox live, netflix (if you consider that "online") for business:
skype, pingdom.com (lets me know my clients' sites are up!)

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dmnd
BoardGameGeek, although it's more of a donation.

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aggieben
Consumer Reports ACM iTunes CovenantEyes

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barrym
I pay for Flickr, Last.fm and Github.

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gsiener
consumer:

flickr

tasks (by Crowd Favorite)

business:

Highrise

Quickbooks online

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Lally
rsync.net (solid backup) .mac (hey, it has a few uses) motionbased itunes

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sonink
notebook backup, website uptime monitoring service

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rokhayakebe
Paypal fees.

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simianstyle
My domain.

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bjclark
Lighthouse

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santacruz
todoist

