Ask YC: What do you actually pay for, you, yourself?
Spawned off from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288231
It'd be interesting to know what people in the YCNews demographic actually pay for online. Which paying subscription services do you actually bother spending money on?
The question is open to you both as a consumer and as a business. If you are both, please split your answer into two parts, e.g.:
As a consumer, I pay for: Flickr
As a business, I pay for: Bug tracking software,...
Note 1: Please feel free to use specific product names.
Note 2: Please don't include things that everyone pays for online, e.g. Amazon books, electronic odds and ends, hosting - unless you feel your particular version is special.
Thanks for sharing!
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79 comments
| 32 points
| on HN
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I physically hand over money for hardware, and that's about it. Everything else I like is free...
...except that in return for some of that free stuff I give demographic information. Oh, and in return for some of the other free stuff I give coding/testing/bug fixes. And I guess some of the free stuff I pay for via being temped into buying their real-world/physical products. Then some of the rest I suppose I pay for by validating someone's ego through the mechanism of pushing up their numbers.
I'm a cheap ass I like to call it being practical. :)
I pay for Yahoo NFL Gamepass (all NFL games streamed live via internet!). I pay 200 bucks a year for that. Would pay >1000 if they wanted to really push it. I'm obssesed.
I used to pay for the Zune Pass but the service became so utterly worthless plus my Internet connection times out quite often here in Kuwait that I just said forget it. Back to torrents, which will automatically resume the download, when my connection wakes back up (without locking up the entire system, might I add).
Personal:eRobertParker, MyFoodDiary, eMusic, iTunes (mostly for TV Shows and kids movies), callcentric (VOIP line for my house), .mac/mobileMe (I know, I know) *just recently canceled so I can afford my startup.
Business:Safari (as part of my Komodo/ActivePerl Studio license)
Looking at soon: a slice at slicehost, Balsalmiq (an app, really)
As a consumer, I've paid for: peepcode screencasts; a flickr pro account; an account to freshlymixed.com while it was still up; That's about it over the last couple of years. I'm not a prolific purchaser of consumer services.
As a business, I'm paying for: EngineYard hosting, Fogbugz, and we paid for Basecamp for a little while. That's it.
Almost everything else seems to be pretty much free.
1. ESPN Insider
Things I would pay for (but are free):
1. Hacker News 2. Yodlee 3. Feedburner 4. Google Alerts
It would be useful though if you care about a bunch of teams and don't have time to read the hometown newspapers of all your teams.
Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.
2. Flickr Pro account for easy photo management
3. Dedicated server with LayeredTech for hosting projects
4. EasyNews account for newsgroups
5. Netflix for movie rentals and streaming
Cook's Illustrated (for access to Solid Tested Recipes)
NetFlix
Consumer Reports (big purchases)
Mozy (Online Back Up)
used to pay for WSJ but dropped that due to News Corp content degradation.
Work pays several Online Journal and Library Access fees for me.
This was actually harder to come up with than I imagined because several of these only bill yearly or every two years and so the pain of paying virtually disappears...
thats it. i'd pay for other things if i had more disposable income and/or profitable startup, though. i'm making do with what i have, for now. i'm considering paying for something like an automatic cloud backup system, too, but am not currently.
Video Games: Xbox Live Gold Account, Xbox Live Arcade Games, download tracks for Rock Band, and FFXI (think WoW.)
Movies: Netflix
Hosting: In the very near future, Amazon Web Services
Finance: Credit score tracking
Biz: Basecamp, Campfire, PBWiki, AWS ... and hosting from Slicehost, Rackspace, and EngineYard
Used to pay for VirtualPBX, Experts Exchange, and Wall St. Journal
Startup: Campfire, Basecamp, Amazon S3, Pingdom and soon Liquid Planner
As a business, hosting/mail/sourcecontrol accounts, and the big one is the ADC membership. Sure, you can get the devtools for free but the WWDC videos make it worthwhile around a new OS release.
Business: Pingdom. Easy peasy way to make sure your site is up. Amazon S3.
Business: Basecamp, Zoho
Consumer: O'Reilly safari - safari.oreilly.com - browse their entire library (including books in pre-publication) for $42.99/mo
Ebooks , Domains(Godaddy), Hosting(Webfaction)
Also spent 20$ on Linden Dollars (Second Life).
As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3
As a business? * JIRA * Confluence * Fisheye * vBulletin * JungleDisk * S3
Amount spent through business = 0.
Amount that could have been earned if I had been billing instead of on hacker news > 0.
Tax preparation software.
Everything else online is business related.
Thrifty: consumer/biz: flickr, domain, adsl
Business: shoeboxed, earthclassmail, MSDN
Business: CVSDude (VCS hosting), Highrise
Consumer: Smugmug, S3, JungleDisk
Business: GitHub, AWS (soon)
Business: - Google Email - Skype
flickr
tasks (by Crowd Favorite)
business:
Highrise
Quickbooks online