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> didn't think my list was particularly egregious. There's Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a
by jsnell 4y ago
> didn't think my list was particularly egregious. There's Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a few more
At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a weather app not egregious?
Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people's irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 / year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can't know whether the author really needs 2TB.
- SoftTalker 4y agoYeah I have two subscriptions: Netflix, and YouTube Premium. I have purchased a handful of other apps on my phone but all were one-time payments.
- ghaff 4y agoApple One is a bundle. If you use the majority of the services at a given tier, it can make sense to just buy the bundle rather than a la carte. Some of those definitely seem high for what they are. Certainly he has more than I do although I do subscribe to The Economist and The New York Times which are relatively high ticket and also have an Adobe subscription--in addition to various streaming content.
- perardi 4y agoI didn’t realize Apple One Premier was that expensive. I…guess it could make financial sense? If you do use Apple Music for streaming, and you do watch shows on Apple TV, and if you have a family that could plausibly use 2TB of backup storage. But yikes that seems costly—I have the 200GB iCloud Storage plan, and I still have over 100GB available.
- iasay 4y agoI have it. I use it with 6 people and we all use Apple Music, watch stuff on Apple TV and use about 1.2TB of storage for backing up 5 macs and 12 iOS devices. Two of us use Apple Fitness. Oh plus hosting 3 email domains. Works out fairly cheap if you use it all.
- gumby 4y agoSame for us, with a “family” account. The teens didn’t care about switching from Spotify to apple and this way I know all their stuff is backed up. iCloud…can’t say it’s as good as Dropbox but in the bundle it’s cheaper than paying for Dropbox. Etc. An unexpected feature is their News app. I pay for some subs to read news in my RSS app, but sometimes i come across a paywalled article that is free with the bundled apple news sub, so I read it there. I wouldn’t pay for that benefit but when the marginal cost is $0 I’m glad it’s there. It’s a good deal for this use case. I’d actually think there are a lot of people in that category.
- iasay 4y agoNews app is fairly good actually. I use it for BBC Good Food magazine mostly.
- aniforprez 4y agoWhile commercial VPNs are scams from a security perspective with misleading marketing, they're pretty useful for location spoofing and accessing blocked content (if the content service hasn't blocked a VPN already). Especially if you travel a fair amount and want to access things from the perspective of your home country, they do the job I'd also say my password manager (1Password) is by far my most used and most bang for the buck subscription I currently have. I literally use it almost every hour of every day and paying a few dollars a year is not a big deal
- abirch 4y agoHow does it compare to Google's password management? I constantly use it from chrome or mt Android phone.
- staindk 4y agoI think Chrome's pw manager is pretty fine if you don't feel like you're missing anything. I'm on the free tier of Bitwarden and it's been perfect for me. I'm a cheapskate with subscriptions though.
- nsm 4y agoBrowser password managers are probably fine for most users, but 1password is really good for specific use cases 1password works across multiple OSes, works in other browsers, allows saving much more than just passwords (ssh key management, API credentials). The ability to securely share passwords with time limited links is a big draw for me to use the subscription model. 1p cli is also seriously useful. Also for those who are not aware, if your company uses 1p business, you get one FREE personal family account for every business user.
- abirch 4y agoThank you!!! This is why I come to HN.
- z3c0 4y agoOr shielding content from intrusive ISPs. Comcast and AT&T will both shake down people over torrenting media, especially if that media is copyrighted by one particular mouse-related company. It's also a good way to obstruct mass data gathering by governments, provided your chosen VPN lives outside the 5/9/14 eyes.
- nicce 4y ago> I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app. You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices. Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.
- jakear 4y agoExcept Apple already provides one for free
- snug 4y agoI also don't understand paying for this when both Apple and Chrome have one, and you can even use the chrome one instead of apple for most things on the iPhone
- diab0lic 4y agoI’ve had this thought a few times, but am pretty entrenched in 1Password with hundreds of logins. I’m curious if you know about a good migration tool to get these into the Apple password manager?
- nicce 4y agoIt is quite limited and not very usable on cross-platform use.
- kaashif 4y ago> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app. I agree but I think the point being made is that there are free password managers that do the job just as well. I use keepassxc on the desktop, it has autofill, it's backed up in my Google Drive, I have an Android app that works pretty well too. I've never really felt a need to pay for a password manager, my current solution works well enough.
- priyanmuthu 4y ago
- noirbot 4y agoLike the author, I pay for Carrot Weather. I do so because I find the features it provides to be helpful and of high-quality, and I find it a joy to use. I could probably just use the free version, or any other app that didn't charge, but I also find it feels good to give a clearly talented and passionate developer a job making an app they seem proud of. I don't find it any different than buying a nice piece of art, or eating out at a nice restaurant.
- hendersoon 4y agoI use the free Carrot Weather myself. I love the app and would actually love to pay for it, but they only offer subscription options-- and oh my, what options! These payment options vary from $1/month to $30/month. For a weather app. They seem to be intentionally obtuse. It's extremely difficult to parse out which one you might want. I believe you need "Premium Ultra" to get weather notifications, to let you know it's about to rain, and that's $8/month. The listings in the Apple store are different from the documentation on their support website, so that's no help. Seriously, check out the in-app purchases at the bottom of the Apple app store. How could anything be more anti-consumer? And I like this app. If they sold a new version every year for, say, $10 I'd buy it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrot-weather-alerts-radar/id961390574 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrot-weather-alerts-radar/id... http://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/ http://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/
- noirbot 4y agoAt the same time, I mostly understand their levels. The higher levels are mostly intuitively as a developer, things that cost more money to provide in terms of infrastructure and access to paid APIs. Also, I'm not sure what you're looking at, but looking in the app, Premium Ultra, which seems to only give you notifications for lightning and storm cells, as well as tidal data and the ability to hook up to your own weather data source, is $29.99/year. I'm literally not seeing anything that costs $30/month on either of your links, or in the app. They even do a decent job on your link of explaining why they charge money: "The subscription is necessary because weather data is very expensive. Without charging extra for the subscription, in just one year it would cost CARROT more to supply weather data than a $4.99 upfront payment for the app. So CARROT's Maker either had to offer a subscription or not add these awesome features at all." What's anti-consumer is how the app store obfuscates things in their UI. If you open the app itself and look at their options for purchasing a subscription, it gives you plenty of information that's clear and explains the levels. If you think this is your height of anti-consumer behavior, you're blessed in who you're shopping with.
- raverbashing 4y agoPretty much this 1/3 of this list is just BS. Another 1/3 are things that you can go for the cheaper option. Not to mention stuff like "CleanMyMac" (oh yeah I'm not paying for 1password)
- noirbot 4y agoSure, and I could eat rice and beans with water every day and save thousands of dollars per year. It's confusing to me how many people on here seem to think paying money for non-essential things that provide enjoyment or convenience is some sort of moral failing.
- raverbashing 4y agoI'm all for spending money on convenience (that doesn't mean a "fundamental laziness") and enjoyment NordVPN and CleanMyMac or the oversubscribed options like Apple+ are not enjoyable nor convenient to me "fundamental lazyness" - things like relying only on your phone to unlock your car then running out of signal/battery/etc and getting stranded somewhere and looking like a dunce because you were more lazy than you should have been. Or getting takeaway coffee as first thing in the morning when a coffee machine would pay for itself in a month of usage.
- noirbot 4y agoSure, I'm not defending every choice they're making specifically. I don't subscribe to almost anything they do, although I probably subscribe to plenty of other things you think are "not enjoyable not convenient". But I can think of reasons why most of these things could be a reasonable purchase for someone. I'm not seeing any of these that are "fundamental lazyness" unless you're trying to claim that entertainment is a bad value proposition.
- xigoi 4y agoEating the same food every day is unhealthy.
- kkielhofner 4y agoCommercial VPNs prey on ignorance as well. They frequently talk about “keeping you safe from hackers”. When is the last time sensitive data was intercepted due to lack of TLS? Twenty years ago? VPNs do nothing to protect from the most common and serious threats - data breaches, spear phishing, any/all of the other myriads of ways users are tracked online, etc. I’m also of the belief that security services take a closer look at VPN traffic (like some Tor exit nodes) that also happens to make their jobs easier by concentrating the data for them. Commercial VPN services certainly have some valid use cases but for the vast majority of the population they effectively do nothing or worse. If there’s any benefit to their proliferation it’s in the security service case. Now that all of your non-technical friends have signed up for ExpressVPN because they heard about it on a podcast there’s just that much more data to sift through. Not that security services can’t handle vast amounts of data… I’m just certain that from a classification standpoint intercepted data coming out of a VPN (and certainly Tor exit) is likely classified higher for analysis, potential manual review, etc. Much bigger haystack in the VPN/Tor case.
- gumby 4y agoTwo decent use cases are out-of-region TV and hiding your unencrypted traffic (URLs) from your ISP (as you say you don’t hide it from your VPN provider, but they don’t know your address). Also sites you visit don’t get your location. Personally, given the kinds of friends I have, a VPN hides my traffic from them when I’m on their WiFi. But I don’t need a commercial VPN for this.
- kkielhofner 4y agoThe out of region TV is a use case but I wonder how long before this turns into a cat/mouse game between VPN providers and streaming services/content providers. I am pleased to see (when I have to sit through these ads on podcasts) that providers have seemed to start emphasizing this use case instead of their dubious security related benefits. This is kind of my point - now if a law enforcement or security service wants to get access to a treasure trove of traffic and analytics that is likely significantly more interesting to them than general ISP traffic they send an NSL or equivalent to a VPN provider and have it all nice a collected for them. That said, DoH appears to finally be gaining some traction (default on Firefox, IIRC). Hah, I’m a little curious about what kinds of friends you have for this to be of concern :).
- worldofmatthew 4y agoI have a 2TB Storage VPS that costs $48/year............. With a host that has been operating since at least 2016.
- KronisLV 4y agoHuh, that seems like a pretty rare offer! Some of the more affordable providers that I know of: Hetzner 1 TB storage VPS: €3.45/month Time4VPS 1 TB storage VPS: €6.65/month (with yearly billing) Contabo 1.4 TB storage VPS: €12.99/month So Hetzner can be €41/year (though taxes vary) for a single TB, but all other providers that I know of cost at least twice the amount of money or so.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoServaRICA "Polar Bear Storage Offer".
- naniwaduni 4y agoHetzner storage is not VPS, for what it's worth; it's a restricted ssh environment that won't do much beyond storage. About the same category of offering as rsync.net, I'd say?
- kristianp 4y agoWhat do you use for backups? That's another cost on top.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoAs someone who is unlucky enough to live in Russia, VPN is now more or less a necessity to access information around Putin's internet censorship. However, while using it I've found some unlikely virtues of using VPN: - I'm never offered ads based on my location - Services like Google are not suspicious of your logins and don't bother you with additional 2fa measures. Previously it could be a real pain if you are abroad without your regular phone service and Google really wants you to enter that code it sent you over SMS.
- xanaxagoras 4y ago> people's irrational privacy fears. My ISP sees me connect to one server and one port only. I think it's great. It's irrational not to want my ISP to record my activity on the internet all day every day, and associate it with my real life identity?
- iLoveOncall 4y agoIs it better if it’s your shady VPN provider that knows all this? It’s a ridiculous argument.
- xanaxagoras 4y agoThey don't know _who_ I am