My Bitwarden renewal came through this morning. It’s still $10 per year. I was about to cancel, but I thought what the heck at $10, I’ll keep it on out of principle and to show support.
I also have a tutanota encrypted email, which costs little more than pocket change over the year. I hardly use it, but it’s there.
I wondered then, if this community had any little gems to share - services they pay for that are let’s say under $30 annually. I think we can exclude VPS, since lots of people will probably have them already.
I’m going to cross post at /r/opensource too.
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.
Its not actually cheap but im all for my proton enterprise plan.
If you don’t mind me asking: what type of business is it that would require encrypted emails?
I’m quite happy with migadu, and it falls in the < $30/year category even with multiple emails and mailboxes.
Its not just about the emails, they are basically just a side product of the VPN and Storage (and now the password app)
Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.
I have just loaded $10 initially for PurelyMail & it works great for simple outbound emails from my homelab services.
Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.
I’m using PurelyMail with my own domain but frustratingly emails from my homelab are being blocked by apple.
I guess it’s the reputation of my Domain? I’ve setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC but no dice.
I’ve (recently) started using Cloudflare for my nameservers so thinking about setting up their DMARK and possibly even move my Domain over to them from IONOS. If it makes any difference, who knows.
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.
Proton Suite
My expressVPN 2year plan is about to expire in February. I am seriously considering switching to Proton, especially since I already use protonMail as the inbox for my Anonaddy instance. What’s your experience with Proton?
I also have the proton suite, I love all of them. The only one I haven’t used is calendar, but everything else is great. The only complaint I have about their VPN is that port forwarding is mildly annoying and not automatic - but most people wouldn’t care, and it’s really very minor.
Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can’t really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10.
I love windscribe. They’re up there with dbrand for snarky promotional emails.
Oh I love windscribe. I was there when they just launched up and got their lifetime deal. been running since 2016 on that deal . pretty happy with their service
I had that too for a while. Currently just paying $2 for unlimited access with a singly country. Just for anonymity. Not worried about geolocation at the moment.
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
Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox
Damn ok that’s cheap, even for a small business this looks like a great option for off-site backups.
Any other cheaper options? Not looking for a tb. Even 100gb is good with me.
Scaleway offer up to 75GB of their Object Storage for free and only start charging when you go over.
That’s traffic not storage.
Blackblaze B2 costs me pennies using 50GB of storage. $0.18 last month
Backblaze is great and transparent
I recently got myself a storage box, too. If I’m not mistaken, there’s no smaller option than 1 GB.
Do you encrypt the backups? I’m interested in learning more about this process.
If you are sending any of your data from your home lab to an outside server that you personally do not control then yes, you should ALWAYS encrypt the backups (unless it’s crap you don’t care about like your tax returns, credit card details, passwords, etc.)
How do you I encrypt the files before copying them to a remote server/storage?
Some backup services have an option for it, like Duplicati. Rclone also has it but requires a lil setup I think.
Restic is great for that, deduplication and snapshots as well
Good backup software will have this ability built in - such as duplicati for instance.
Use a good backup system like Borgbackup (with Borgmatic to automate it).
Have you tried restoring from it? I’ve read about pretty gnarly situations where they have corrupted the data and even lost it (raid failed)
Is there a service like this in the USA?
VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month
Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month
Does your provider not offer IPv6? That’s usually the best way to avoid all NAT, including CGNAT.
Yeah. Same. VPS for $4/mo for the purpose of VPN. In addition to WireGuard, I host X-UI dashboard which runs ShadowSocks-2022 and VLESS/VMESS/XTLS-Reality, all on top of XRay core.
All relatives and friends are using this VPN, no complain.
$10/m for 1 provider and 1 indexer?
If you hunt around this black friday you should be able to get a better deal than that. For reference I have 1 unlimited provider (newshosting) for about $30/yr and 2 indexers each around $15/yr
Yeah I can’t read, my indexer is $12 per year provider is $6 per month
Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month
I should try those… I can never force myself to use them, but I bet they are amazing to have.
I’m tired of torrents…
I made the switch in the summer of 2022 after nearly two decades of exclusively using torrents. I’ll never go back to torrents for anything media related again.
$5/m is pretty expensive for a VPS if you’re just using it for Wireguard. A $15/year 2 GB RAM / 20-ish GB SSD VPS would be totally fine for that use case.
Black Friday is coming up… The best time of year for VPS deals. Even without Black Friday deals, providers like GreenCloudVPS (their “Budget KVM” packages) and RackNerd have good deals.
1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail
What do you use iCloud for? iCloud Photos? I’ve been debating using my Synology for photos or iCloud.
Also why 1P over Bitwarden? Both are electron now?
what is NextDNS and putio for?
Lmao Icloud is one of the services i started self hosting to replace
What is put.io good for? I seem to not really understand what it is or what you would use it for?
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.
I used to pay for Spotify, but they kept removing features I liked, and last time I used it, the Android app was just absolute garbage. They’re also missing alternate releases and bonus tracks on just about every album on there.
Their shuffle feature is also absolutely whack, it will play like the same 10 songs over and over from a playlist of hundreds of tracks.
Try Deezer. Better sound quality too.
Their shuffle feature is also absolutely whack, it will play like the same 10 songs over and over from a playlist of hundreds of tracks.
Same thing here. I can’t seem to figure out how it decides what to play. Sometimes I’ll actually forget that I added certain songs to my playlist because one day Spotify will just decide to play it.
I do this but for Tidal Family because I’m a bit of a snob.
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.
What do you use nextdns for? Whats the difference between this and a vpn?
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.
I do as well. Google Photos + Backup to Synology via Photos.
Have you considered backblaze for your photo backup?
I pay $15 a month for unlimited storage.
their plans go up to 2TB. Is this hidden?
What plan are you on that offers unlimited storage?
Bitwarden, Paid addy.io, protonmail paid via crypto, privacy.com virtual credit cards, MySudo voip numbers, a jmp.chat number or two.
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.
Do you use any of the premium features because the free plan looks essentially the same?
