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.
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.
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.
I took the time to teach my kids how to use a password manager with Bitwarden on my self hosted instance. But my wife asked me what’s going to happen if I die. I’m confident in minimal downtime while I’m alive, but it’s important that my family’s passwords can outlive me. So I wound up purchasing the family plan.
I hate to say it, but “this”.
It works fantastically, it’s not expensive, it’s one of the more critical services in my stack, and I get to support the company.
No brainer.
No problems with uptime running vaultwarden as a docker on a hetzner vm. Only thing I am missing is some sort of SSO integration.
Same.
I could absolutely self-host it, but at the price they charge it makes no sense to do so especially as it means I can support it’s development.
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.
Cloudron
I self-hosted cal.com on a docker container, then exposed the port via CF Tunnel to a subdomain.
Same.
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
Once you try Bitwarden you will really ask yourself why’d have you paid for last pass. And their app on a phone works with self hosted instance as long as it is exposed to world. Last pass broke my mfa that totally borked webui and chrome extension for me. As soon as I got password export I deleted my last pass account. Took them 2 fix to fix it
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.
What’s the price a month?
- 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.
do we have any good self-hosted shopping list/recipe software?
CopyMeThat
I use that! It’s pretty cool. I didn’t mind the one time payment of $25.
nextdns really like the custom dns overrides and the great tailscale integration
A few:
- YT Music
- 1Password (technically I get it free from work, but I would pay if they switch or I change jobs)
- Proton VPN , i am grandfathered into an older plan