FyrnyxWhat are subscriptions that are worth it and subscriptions that are not?
What are subscriptions that are worth it and subscriptions...
solrizeIt’s a trick question. They’re basically never worth it.
TruscapeVPN and a private email provider like Protonmail?
I hadn’t thought of those as subscriptions but I just use cheap VPS instead of a VPN vendor. Also I wouldn’t use Protonmail especially since the recent incident where they (temporarily) booted some journalist email accounts. But I’m happy with fastmail, which tbh is on the expensive side.
I also have a cheap MVNO cell phone plan and I guess that is worth it since I do use the phone. My home internet is definitely not worth it though, and I should get rid of it.
I consider anything with a reoccurring payment as a subscription, even if it’s technically just upkeep for a provider you use (domain renewal might be another example).
I haven’t tried fastmail, although I haven’t heard anything bad about it. How does it compare to proton?
Is my apartment rent a subscription? It dilutes the word enough that the question stops meaning anything.
I’ve never used Proton so I can’t directly compare it with Fastmail. I would say Proton used a lot of privacy hype in its marketing that didn’t hold up in reality, though I can’t say it was insincere when it started.
In a pure technical sense, Fastmail is not particularly extroardinary. They run mail servers with decent uptime, have a fancy webmail client with a calendar sort of like gmail, etc. I like that there are humans at the other end. I’ve emailed the devs with issues and gotten answered, support tickets for routine probs also get answered (not by engineers but still by humans), etc. So, I think it is worth it since I’m unwilling to use gmail/whatever and I’m not well enough organized to self-host something as critical as email. That said, I could probably survive using mxroute which is a lot cheaper.
I guess one way to narrow it down would be “reoccurring payments for digital services”, since that is much clearer.
I guess that makes sense for what Fastmail’s trying to achieve. Sounds like it could be a good option for others trying to migrate from “free” webmail providers that I’ll recommend in the future! :)
Thanks for your quick reply btw.
Well, maybe you’re right, though I had thought of subscriptions (in the sense of magazine subscriptions) as being for products, rather than services. That is, you pay them and in return you get access to a pile of bits that they generate, but the bits you get (video streams or whatever) are the same as what everyone else gets (minor personalization doesn’t count). So their business model is that they have a certain blob of data, and they sell access to it in dribs and drabs, and moreover, they charge you monthly whether you use it or not.
I haven’t generally found that to be worth it, though I’ll occasionally make one-off purchases of data, such as books and CD’s.