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.
- 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.
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 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.
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.
Albeit more than 30 annually but I still consider cheap/good value:
Exchange online few domains streaming services (TV and music because WAF)
I have selfhosted email for 10-15 domains for about 20 years (qmail toaster, then mailinabox). I also pay for fastmail.com and purelymail.com so that I have email addresses that still work if my hosting goes down. I host on AWS, and if something goes wrong with my AWS account, I need a way to communicate with AWS that doesn’t require servers running in the affected account.
Proton services
https://proton.me/Domain and use it for email
migadu for email
spotify. It just works and has most music I want to.
nordVPN - not sure if it is good, but I wanted to have a vpn service.
ditched netflix recently due to woke culture.
oh, and cheap domain. But that cannot be self-hosted.
Bitwarden is 100% worth the $10 a year. And is independant of my selfhosting dickery.
Plex and a VPN are a lot cheaper than streaming services these days.
Even though I have a lifetime LastPass subscripion I still choose to pay the $10 bucks and stay with Bitwarden not just becuse I wanted the yubikey support, its also just so simple to use and I love its simplicity. Its also polite and does not bring any extra bloatware. Its really quite good value. It just does its job really nicely
Backblaze b2 backup. I’m backing up almost 500gb of personal data (compressed and only things I can’t get back easy) for less than $2\month.
What tool do you use for the backup? I use rclone to achieve end to end encryption. Don’t know how much data I have but I’m charged every few months once the incurred charges go above $0.50
I switched from rclone to restic. Rclone is primarily built for file syncing, not backups. Whereas restic is always encrypted and supports incremental backups, chunk based deduplication, and snapshot history, diffs, and pruning. You can even use rclone as a backend for restic, should you so desire.
+1 for rclone. I’m backing up the important family data (~1 TB) to OneCloud and B2 with end-to-end encryption and it just works.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.
In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.
It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)
I mean I get that’s a strange mention here, but with the value I’ve got from it (like being able to reference content of some website *in point of time* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that’s how it was in recent years), so it’s a nice idea donate right then.
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