[non self hosted] : Cheap Services You Still Pay For

Bitwarden and Email.

I trust a company like Bitwarden to handle uptime of my password manager more than I do myself. If most of my selfhosted services went down, I'm gonna be a little annoyed, but I can survive. If Bitwarden goes down, that's a real PITA.

And email, because f**k trying to self host email successfully, I've accepted I'll just have to use a commercial provider for emails. I'll try and set up a self hosted server at some point, but on a separate domain and most likely just to mess around/learn.

I have selfhosted email for 10-15 domains for about 20 years (qmail toaster, then mailinabox). I also pay for fastmail.com and purelymail.com so that I have email addresses that still work if my hosting goes down. I host on AWS, and if something goes wrong with my AWS account, I need a way to communicate with AWS that doesn't require servers running in the affected account.

spotify. It just works and has most music I want to.

nordVPN - not sure if it is good, but I wanted to have a vpn service.

ditched netflix recently due to woke culture.

oh, and cheap domain. But that cannot be self-hosted.

I have a $5/year MXRoute account that I still use even though I self-host my emails. I use MXRoute as an outbound SMTP relay since they've got all the IP reputation stuff figured out.

I know you said to exclude VPS, but I've got some of VPSes around the $15-$50 per year range, since it's nice having my sites hosted on higher-end enterprise-grade hardware than what I'm using at home.

I'm considering paying for Kagi (a paid search engine) because it's ad-free and the results are legitimately better than Google.

Simplelogin... for random emails using my various domains.

VPN, iCloud in case I lose my drives, MEGA, Spotify

Bitwarden is one of the few invoices I enjoy seeing. It means I get fantastic service for another year. The cost value for me is insane as I use it so many times a day.

$2 iCloud

$2 Google One

$10 UsenetServer

$59.95 /3 years, PIA VPN

MXRoute, super cheap and awesome.

Bitwarden is 100% worth the $10 a year. And is independant of my selfhosting dickery.

Plex and a VPN are a lot cheaper than streaming services these days.

I pay my ISP for internet, and a domain registrar for my domain name, and backblaze for cloud backup.

That's really it.

1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.

Domain and use it for email

rsync.net - Haven‘t tested it yet, but the pricing and their offering looks really awesome.

Bitwarden I am also paying for, but I use the license for my self-hosted Instance.

3$ a month for real debrid: to download Linux iso 2$ a month for YouTube premium family plan: from a different country for cheap rates 10$ for 2 years nordvpn: black Friday deal Around 5$ a month Hulu after an Amex offer 140$ for 500gb pcloud for backups, lifetime. Then I have automated backups of that in a different country where I have an rpi connected to an external hdd.

migadu for email

Bitwarden’s $10 priceing a year is absolutely the most fair pricing that exists. They will keep me as a loyal customers.

Jellyfin

I pay for a bunch of stuff but it’s all self hosted. Bitwarden, opnsense, nginx proxy, uptime kuma, wikijs…

I pay for bitwarden because it's so cheap, and yet I love what they offer. It's able to be selfhosted, which is why I'm willing to trust it. The service I pay for is protonvpn. I need a vpn just for a few generic things like bypassing locked down networks that prevent me from using ssh, and I trust protonvpn enough to use it for smth like that.

I pay like $5 a month for web hosting. Not worth it to self-host a public e-commerce site on my own network.

Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.

Calendly. I wantwantwant to self-host Cal.com, but the only way I've ever made it work is via Cloudron. And if I'm gonna pay for Cloudron? I might as well just pay for Calendly.

I pay for a good number of them. Not that I can't self-host alternatives. It is just easier:

• 1Password
• OneDrive
• B2 Storage (backing up OneDrive amongst other things)
• VPS

5$ VPS for email server

Google Photos. We pay for 2TB and have all the family member slots loaded up. It's perfect because my parents and my in-laws all use Android phones.

Bitwarden, Paid addy.io, protonmail paid via crypto, privacy.com virtual credit cards, MySudo voip numbers, a jmp.chat number or two.

Fastmail, LastPass and NordVPN

Sneakemail. Just paid the $36 for my 10th year. Great having a fully unique, obfuscated, and permanent email for everyone you communicate with that you can also send from.

As with all email, I'm vested so switching is a burden. But this may be the year.

The domain is being rejected more often lately, so I can't use it to create accounts like I used to. Competitors like SimpleLogin/ProtonPass alias offer more for less ($30/year or bundled), but what if they end up suffering the same fate?

Spotify. Todoist and bitwarden.

Noip $25/year

I pay for my own domain name hands down the best investment, as little as 1€ per month and you get a lot more option for your homeland/vps/mail or whatever you have.

ChatGPT Plus is the only service I pay for. There's literally no substitute in my experience. Even with 10 million dollars, I couldn't effectively replace it with a self-hosted option.

• CopyMeThat shopping lists, meal plans, recipes. Lifetime price was $25 (which currently brings it to an annual price of $2.8 for me :D), and it has better features than selfhosted versions. Still would like to switch, especially after they had an annoying outage, but still holding out for improvements in the oss versions.
• Nabu Casa Cloud (Home Assistant), mainly to support them, some minor benefits.
• Open AI API, because getting a GPU that can run any decently sized LLM would cost decades of what I pay Open AI ;)
• Backblaze Personal Backups for my PC and B2 for my server
• Mullvad VPN forrrrrrr nothing special.

nextdns really like the custom dns overrides and the great tailscale integration

A few:

1. YT Music
2. 1Password (technically I get it free from work, but I would pay if they switch or I change jobs)
3. Proton VPN , i am grandfathered into an older plan

VPN, Cloud storage, cloud hosting.

I don't exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.

It's not cheap, but I pay for Spotify because overall I've been pretty happy with it. It has a good selection of features, lots of content, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint that I have is that the offline mode isn't great.

An actually cheap service that I pay for is addy.io, and even though I haven't been using it much, so far it has been working pretty well.

Google Photos.

I pay $15 a month for unlimited storage.

Photos of my family are of the most important things to me so I'm paying out for guaranteed redundancy.

I still host a local photo storage version but I also backup everything to Google Photos.

(Obvious disclosure, I am the one running the service)

If support for open source is what you are looking for, may I suggest taking a look at Communick? It basically takes the open source alternatives for social media and messaging platforms, and packages them for easy access and setup. There are packages for Mastodon, Lemmy or Matrix each of them for less than $10/year and fully managed. I'm pledging to take 20% of the profits and contribute to the upstream projects.

mullvad is worth it for not having any data caps

I pay migadu to host my custom email domain. Well worth it. I tried self-hosting email, and it was too much of a pain for me.

Deezer - better sound quality than Spotify - good family plan Bitwarden - of course MS365 - family plan for $100 a year. 1Tb cloud storage, and all the MS apps for 5 up to ppl

BackBlaze, 1Password, mxroute, Spotify, different usenet indexers

Thats about it

An AWS S3 bucket to sync important files off site. £1 a month.

a .xyz domein .i just can be botherd to paying a lot for a domein . 2x dedicated servers for all the thing i self host.(28 euro with a 6 tb space total between the 2)(oneprovider decent space /speed but old hardware/isos /their raid options kinda suck)

kinda wish they kept there images up to date .it sucks to update ubuntu with ofline repo mirrors .i keep using debian because of it

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i am also planning on maybe getting a cheap license trough patrion for photoprism

(i dont have a creditcard being a person in the eu .leaving me with only paypal as a payment option)

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i would like to suport more opensource projects.

but im constraind mostly by my hosting cost /buget

1. Borgbase for server backup
2. Vps for CGNAT
3. Protonvpn/Mullvad
4. Tutanota (Although I don't like the recent changes they are making)

Don't know if donations count but I try to periodically donate to these projects I could not live without

1. Signal
2. Grapheneos
3. Fdroid
4. Smarttube

I'd likely start paying for bitwarden even though I don't have much need for any premium services because just realized this is one of those services I can't live without.

Proton Mail ($5ish a month for me?), Jira/Conflience (free), and password manager.

I don't get this. So bitwarden knows all your passwords? Doesn't that kind of make you feel uneasy?

Real-Debrid. €3/Month.

Too good to pass.

I'm paying a cheap VPS for stuff that I want to be 100% available. Like vaultwarden and Authentik for example.

But services, hmm let me see. Does Netflix count as I have plex? Nvm I pay both monthly, did not buy the plex lifetime pass yet. But for Netflix I recently switched my payment to turkey via vpn. Price is less than 1/3rd now.

Email (Tutanota), Cloud backups (B2), VPN (Mullvad)

Quite a bit of stuff: Fastmail, domain registrar, Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Microsoft Office 365 Family subscription (includes 1 Tb storage for 6 family members), GitHub copilot.

I think my domain is basically what I pay for.

• tasks.org - $1/year
• ardour - $1/month
• tasker (autoapps on android) - $1/month

Don’t even use them anymore. But as I wouldn’t miss it, I’ll keep it going to support the devs.

Albeit more than 30 annually but I still consider cheap/good value:

Exchange online few domains streaming services (TV and music because WAF)

Its not actually cheap but im all for my proton enterprise plan.

VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month

Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month

1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail

Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.

I have just loaded $10 initially for PurelyMail & it works great for simple outbound emails from my homelab services.

Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox

Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.

I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.

Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.

Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.

Proton Suite

Im into fitness so: Lose it! and Hevy (dont know if there are good selfhosted alternatives)

Mullvad Bitwarden Goodnotes cuz im studying right now and make notes on my iPad

Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can't really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10.

Proton services
https://proton.me/

PIA 3 years for like 80$

Seedbox for, I dont even know

and icloud for a dollar a month

I self host vaultwarden but I also pay teh $10/year to support the project, I self host for Collections and I use the paid bitwarden at work since they do not allow ddns addresses in our network.

AirVPN but if you don't need port forwarding Mullvad is king.

Bitwarden for passwords
MXRoute for mail
Kagi for search
Backblaze B2 for offsite backups

I self host pi-hole, but I send them some money once in a while.

Honestly, standard web hosting is far and away cheaper to outsource.

I pay Ionos $14 a month for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth to host an unlimited amount of sites. It easier to let them handle the hosting and just redirect the sub-domains I need to my home server.

Most Redditor's here in r/selfhosted have likely never felt the slashdot effect, and the havoc it creates. I've had two big posts hit Reddit frontpage over the years linking to my website, and Ionos handled 100k daily unique visitors without a hiccup. No Pi4 on AT&T home fiber could handle that.

Edit: Whoops, missed the under $30 qualifier, Still leaving this here though.

Cloudflare + VPS

Cloudflare (custom domain)

NextDNS

Zoho mail (you@customdomain.com)

Proton mail

HA cloud. Apple iCloud storage.

Pushover. One time payment that covers lifetime push messages.

Real-debrid and bitwarden, both are amazing and dirt cheap

Backblaze b2 backup. I'm backing up almost 500gb of personal data (compressed and only things I can't get back easy) for less than $2\month.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.

In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.

It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)

I mean I get that's a strange mention here, but with the value I've got from it (like being able to reference content of some website *in point of time* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that's how it was in recent years), so it's a nice idea donate right then.

I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.

I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.

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I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups.

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I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.

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I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.

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If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.

Why not just self host Bitwarden, or Vaultwarden?

Pushover

I only pay for iCloud+ for mail

Not vps but adjacent: I have a Dreamhost storage account to sync my Joplin notes. It's so very very smol it barely costs anything. The notes are E2EE with a key I own.

Unsure if this classifies as cheap but:

• BitWarden
• AnonAddy - I use the extension and create an email for every website. Wish I knew this years ago.
• Proton Unlimited for email and VPN
• YouTube Premium - I watch a lot of YT and this is a great use of money. YT Music has also great radio station generation, in fact I think better than Spotify and Apple Music in my experience.
• Apple Music for the car and less less/Atmos audio. It’s lovely in the living room.

Bitwarden.. for me its for 2 reasons. One I dont have to deal with keeping something that needs to be super secure up to date. and 2 it help continue the project and its 10 bucks. I spend more then that one dumber stuff.

Strongbox App for iOs, allows me to access my Keepass password file on my iPhone.

Bitwarden and NextDNS. They're so cheap so what the heck.

Fastmail. Left Gmail for it like a decade ago and have been happy with it ever since. It really is fast.

1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.

Obsidian

I pay for a small VPS thats running my mail server and other extremely important services.

Even though I have a lifetime LastPass subscripion I still choose to pay the $10 bucks and stay with Bitwarden not just becuse I wanted the yubikey support, its also just so simple to use and I love its simplicity. Its also polite and does not bring any extra bloatware. Its really quite good value. It just does its job really nicely

Asian VPS to bypass GFW in China so I can go on Google and such