Subscriptions: The Reasonable and Unreasonable

2023-05-25 22:16:14Z (last updated 2024-05-15 14:44:53Z)

Subscriptions

A "subscription" in this post will be considered something you pay for and get in return for a period of time. This is not about subscribing to email lists or newsletters, those kinds of things.

I've thought about subscriptions more thoroughly during my shower time, and I think I have something more concrete of a reasonable subscription, and an unreasonable subscription.

A reasonable subscription

Here's my current list of services I consider to have reasonable subscriptions:

=> Sourcehut | Migadu

What both have in common is that they provide a service that makes sense to be paid:

• They have servers
• They handle your stuff
• Operating such services is not free

However, Sourcehut and Migadu are actually different services. Sourcehut is a full-fledged software forge, and Migadu is an email service (with lots of knobs and dials).

Now onto the unreasonable subscriptions

Unreasonable subscriptions

Types of subscriptions I don't consider reasonable, not even close:

• YouTube Red/Premium. You don't get a lot of value out of your subscription, and there are quite some limitations even on downloaded videos (resolution limitations, offline limitations, citation needed). yt-dlp is likely a much better choice because there are no ridiculous limitations enforced on you.
• Some app where you can make and post memes with its subscription to remove watermarks from the images. Why do I have to pay you to remove an arbitrary marking placed on my damn image
• Smartphones. If you buy a new Smartphone every year, it's kind of a subscription. (Buying new smartphones every year is wasteful. Please stop being wasteful. Thanks!)

=> Heated seats in cars.

Yes, this is just an opinion piece

Hopefully it's pretty clear that this blog post is mainly an opinion piece. I originally thought of it as a quick post on my Fediverse instance, but then it quickly turned into a more serious piece and so I decided to settle on a blog post.

Other Links

=> YouTube premium limits (warning: bullshit quality a little too high for me)

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