This question just came to me while I was buying a subway pass. It’s priced very well, provides a very good service, doesn’t suffer from enshittification, and its price increases very rarely.
What are some other services which people don’t mind subscribing to?
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My state has a special state parks license plate with a parking benefit. Free parking at almost every state park. This includes beaches, nature reserves, mountains, hiking areas, skiing areas, etc.
Having the plates on means you just park and go, no kiosks or paper slips, putting money in a box or dealing with someone.
Parking is $5 and up, and the plate is only $40 extra (on top of normal vehicle registration fees), so it can pay for itself many times over the course of a year.
dropout
beacon
pbs passport
my local libraryElectricity and water. Those actually have a real cost to provide, unlike software
Most software with a subscription has some kind of backend resource that is being consumed, even if that’s not obvious to the user. The software companies are getting rich too of course, so yeah it should cost less.
Some services, like social media, require backend resources and there’s no way around it.
Others, dare I say most, are backend by the company’s choice and usually to the detriment of the user.
Some require backend resources purely for DRM and so that they can pull the plug on it whenever they please and screw over everyone who paid for it. Like most single player games these days. Or as a means of holding your in game items hostage to get more money out of you (Pokemon Home comes to mind).
Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine. There are many reasons why using someone else’s computer would be required, which have nothing to do with social media. Just off the top of my head:
- Image/video/audio processing that requires more compute than you can reasonably except from average consumer hardware.
- Antivirus and other forms of security which require near real-time fingerprinting and/or new definitions.
- Licensing/certificate servers
- Servers which receive and process telemetry data
- Resources for submitting/processing/securing legal/government forms/documents
And a lot more I can’t think of right now. Most of this shit makes me want to vomit in my mouth. I’d much rather spend my time and money sourcing, building, and configuring my own hardware and running everything locally. But that’s just because I’m an idealistic nerd with an uncompromising bent towards digital liberty - most users and softwares are not built for that.
Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine.
No, but it wouldn’t need to cost the original vendor that much backend resources either if they’re willing to relinquish control of it. There’s a reason most Linux distros would rather you use the torrent than their hosted images, and package managers allow you to add any mirror you want and for anyone to spin up a mirror. Something like IPFS (or BitTorrent) would be a great fit for software updates, because it doesn’t matter where the file comes from, as long as it’s the same file.
Updates are expensive for the vendor because they insist on their servers being the only place you can get them from.
Image/video/audio processing that requires more compute than you can reasonably except from average consumer hardware.
I’d be more accepting of this if it wasn’t for the fact that they increasingly don’t even let you try to run it on your own hardware. Taking an hour or even overnight to process a video might not be ideal, but there are still countless use cases where that’s acceptable and worth the security of not sending your data to the cloud.
Antivirus and other forms of security which require near real-time fingerprinting and/or new definitions.
Antivirus is an antipattern and the need for it is usually a symptom of the OS architecture/permission control model being hopelessly vulnrable. An ideal system would be zero trust and some random piece of code wouldn’t be able to do anything truly harmful to begin with. You can still social engineer the user into giving a malicious program trust, but you can social engineer them into whitelisting it in their antivirus too.
Licensing/certificate servers
Certificates don’t need that much backend resources and can be decentralized in the same way as updates, taking load off the original vendor.
Licensing is a circular argument. I’m paying for you to maintain the system that determines if I paid or not?
Servers which receive and process telemetry data
Yeah that’s not a “feature” most people appreciate. At best they accept it as inevetable because they can’t turn it off.
Also, if a company tries using that as justification for their subscription model, they can go fuck themselves.
Resources for submitting/processing/securing legal/government forms/documents
If it has to do with the legal system or government, then it should be covered by the ultimate subscription model: taxes. I shouldn’t have to cover a company’s costs of filing things with the government when I already pay the government.
I hate to say this but value wise amazon. You get the shipping benefit, songs, videos, and video games. Its not the best at anything in particular but you get a pretty good bang for the buck.
Our art museum is free but for 100/yr we used to get a subscription that got us 4 free tickets per day to visiting exhibits that are normally $16 each, plus free parking which is normally $10 and it’s across the street from a big park with food trucks and activities.
Also, the zoo and botanical garden memberships that offer reciprocity with a bunch of other zoos or gardens.
Zoo membership is clutch with toddlers. 100% worth it. Same with the Children’s museum.
Not just toddlers! My best trip to contiguous America involved the zoo and the aquarium in Atlanta, as well as the Fernbank.
In about a decade, when America is safe for outsiders again, I’m totally going back … after Hanauma Bay, that is.
Dropout.tv Great content, rewards creative talent, more than fair price
I’ve been loading up my Jellyfin server with their shows for a while and I’ve been meaning to grab a subscription purely to support. Great people and great content.
What shows do you recommend? I watched the first episode of Very Important People a while ago and it was fun
Game Changer is their flagship show, and has been consistently great at reinventing itself and surprising season after season. It’s a game show where the game is different every time and the contestants have to try and figure out what’s going on. It goes places.
If you enjoy long form TTRPG, they have dozens of Dimension 20 campaigns with all kinds of settings and genres.
Smartypants is a show where comedians get to give PowerPoint presentations on anything they want.
Play It By Ear is a personal fave - each episode is an entirely improvised musical, which feels like an incredible magic trick when they pull it off.
Um, Actually is a nerdy quiz show where contestants have to interrupt the host with factual corrections about video games, anime, sci-fi, etc.
Gastronauts is a cooking challenge show with professional chefs trying to fulfil unhinged requests from comedians.
There’s way more on there besides all that, but thought I’d share some highlights.
I loved Um, Actually a lot when Mike Trapp hosted. It was formatted well for people to play along with at home and the trivia spanned a greater gamut of nerd culture.
Now that Iffy is hosting, the format seems to have become more like “watch them play the game” with shiny questions that are physical interactions they contestants perform like shoot the character we photoshopped with nerf darts or hurry and put these things on different walls based on some category and see who got more. They show less and less of the art or games so we can’t even try to solve it along side the contestants.
Also, the content has narrowed with a significant increase in anime questions. And a sharp increase in making “themed” or special episodes.
I feel the direction has focused more on what Iffy is interested in rather than what they viewers are interested in. It’s turned me off of the show and a lot of my family as well.
They sound like a blast, thank you so much for the recs!
Make Some Noise for me is always peak.
Definitely GameChanger and Make Some Noise. Although, Make Some Noise starts off pretty mid in my opinion.
I honestly think there are very few things that make sense as a subscription service. Basically all software that runs on your computer (Adobe, Office, etc) make 0 sense being a subscription. Honestly, most web software could just be made to run on your computer. Things like email, cloud storage, phone service, that have ongoing non-development related costs make sense.
Media is the worst offender. Just let me pay for a download and watch/listen to something.
Cloud storage makes no sense at all. You’re better off creating your own server in your house.
Oh no, your house just burnt down. Now all your data is gone.
You don’t have house redundancy? What about the 3-2-1 rule for residences?
Cloud housing when?
Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you commented killing Palestinian children is bad on a social media platform they also own. Now all your data is gone.
Oh no, your cloud account got banned because that hello world binary you just shared with your friend got flagged as a virus. Now all your data is gone.
Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were using adblock on their paid streaming service. Now all your data is gone.
Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were sharing your password with your friend so they can use your paid streaming account. Now all your data is gone.
Oh no, you uploaded media files that you bought but they got replaced with DRM versions.
Oh no, they’re suddenly not letting you log in until you upload your ID and a 3D scan of your head. Now all your data is held hostage.
Oh no, they accidentally deleted the production database and the recent data you absolutely can’t afford to lose wasn’t in the backup.
Oh no, you got phished and they changed your password from under you. Now all your data is theirs.
Oh no, they suffered a data breach. Now all your data is on the dark web.
Oh no, they’re developing the next generation AI. Now all your data is being used to help companies replace workers and the right prompt might just give some rando fragments of your personal information.
I think web browsers would make sense as a subscription. The battle to keep them secure is intense and always ongoing. I think Firefox and Chrome should be subscriptions, while free browsers should have a drastically reduced feature set.
Stop making websites do more and more shit, and browsers would need less and less development.
Stop making browsers with AI enhanced garbage. Stop embedding “features” in software that at its core only needs to render websites.
This is a terrible idea!
It is the reason why Microsoft was able to gimp the Internet for so long with Internet Explorer. Companies couldn’t make money off of the browser, so Microsoft made a browser that helped defend the Windows monopoly.
Average capitalist consumer
I’m not against supporting a software in a recurring form but the web browser is essentially the lock and key of accessing the entirery of what exists outside your machine.
That would garner an immense power to whichever entity developing one. Remember Microsoft and the IE case.
Firefox is not perfect and apparently on a downwards spiral but what made it stand out was because it wanted to be free and for all. Chrome is far from being a good thing.
Even though it would be one way to make Mozilla self-sustainable, it would open a pandora box of different problems. Would free-versions continue receiving security updates? Would access to some websites be locked behind the premium version? It’s a dangerous idea.
By “free browsers” I didn’t mean “free versions”. I’m thinking more along the lines of Pale Moon or Konqueror (in it’s early days), third-party FOSS browsers with limited features.
Mail provider. There are very cheap and privacy friendly options. Like 1 euro pr. month.
Similarly I always think that a domain name with unlimited mail forwarding addresses (aka aliases) is amazing; a .eu domain costs me around 6-7€ a year with Bookmyname - old timey interface but all I need it for is to add more and more aliases :)
Which service do you use to have the alias? I use mailbox.org but the number of alias are limited.
I use the mail service included with the domain at Bookmyname, they give you 2GB that you can split between multiple mail accounts, and unlimited aliases that can also send (they are called Identities in K9mail and other programs, you have to add them to send).
The aliases still end with your domain name - for more privacy you can nest them for example one alias to receive simplelogin mails, another for 33mail, ecc.
BTW mailbox.org is a great choice too, probably simpler to use but it costs a bit more.
I also have a domain with bookmyname but I didn’t know about the mail service included. I’ll have a look, thank you.
Correction, it’s 3GB split between 20 mailboxes max. Most info is in the FAQs: https://en.faqs.bookmyname.com/enfaqs/services#section111
IIRC some things were/are badly translated from French :D hmu if you need help with smth
Debrid services
Lol your not wrong (despite the legality of it).
