Really just curious what folks out there deem valuable enough to give money for monthly or annually. As a software engineer I have quite a few that keep me productive and I’ll list a few:
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Obsidian Sync
- YouTube Premium
I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.
Philosophical monthly support:
- Grapheneos
- Eff
- Tor
- Briar
- Molly
YouTube Premium
Unless you’re doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there’s Revanced or Grayjay.
Anyway, I pay for Nebula.
Nebula
Do you like it? There’s only like 10 creators I watch on YouTube who are there, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find replacements. If I pay for Nebula, I’d rather ditch YouTube entirely.
And yeah, I use Grayjay and I’m about ready to buy it. I love the new Twitch integration, and some are on Odyssey, so that’s cool. The app seems to use a lot more resources than NewPipe, and it’s missing a few NewPipe features I really like (seeing playlists is the biggest one), but overall it’s pretty good. If it was FOSS I’d buy it today, I’m just hesitating because there’s just too many tradeoffs.
I’m a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.
The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you’d get from them.
But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it’s sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators’ Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I’d be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula’s annual plan, it’s just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).
Honestly, I don’t care about bonus content, I just want the content I have on YouTube elsewhere without ads and tracking, and I’m happy to pay for it.
The only ones I’m interested in are:
- Not Just Bikes
- Half as Interesting
I looked through the rest, and I honestly haven’t heard of any of them. I don’t watch a ton of YouTube, but I do follow a few channels. Here are some of my favorites, by category:
Tech news:
- Level1Techs
- Louis Rossmann - on Odysee
- Gamer’s Nexus
- Optimum Tech
- Digital Foundry
- The Phawx
Privacy/advocacy:
- Audit the Audit
- Mental Outlaw
- NBTV - Naomi Brockwell
Math/science:
- Stand Up Maths
- Psyshow
- Steve Mould
- Tech Ingredients
Other news (balances liberal bias here on lemmy):
- Reason TV - could replace with podcast; still love Remy vids though
- John Stossel
Misc entertainment:
- Mr. Puzzle
- Lockpickinglawyer
- Jerry Rig Everything
If I had one or two solid channels from each category, I could abandon YouTube. But I don’t know any of the channels there, and I’m not super excited about looking through a bunch of new channels again, it took years to filter through the trash on YouTube…
You forgot to mention that at least with the newer videos, the videos cut out all the sponsored sections.
I’ve never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that’s not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I’ll stick with Revanced for now.
I mean playlists by a channel, not ones you create. I assume you can get those (Grayjay has playlists), but I don’t actually has that feature at all.
I watch some channels with a huge back catalogue, and I’ll often want to watch something in a category from a year or two back. I don’t know how to efficiently find that on Grayjay, but it works fine in NewPipe.
On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly
That’s my issue. I use YT primarily on my Chromecase and mobile.
Firefox + ublock is clunky.
3rd Party apps are a no-go for my Google Account. To much depends on that to get hacked just because I don’t like ads.
My justification for the price is, that I pay less for that than for Netflix and I use it daily.
Also Creators get a significantly higher cut per view in comparison to regular viewers. So I don’t need to feel bad when I block ads on Desktop and don’t sub their patreon.
I mean, it’s something like $7-8 for 6 months via a one-time VPN payment in India or the like. Definitely worth it.
Nah. Just donate a little to the creators you like and block the ads. Everyone would be better for it except Google.
- Proton
- Bitwarden
- VPN
- Spotify
All I need as a student. I have a few open source projects that I aim to support monthly, as soon as I get my first paycheck after I’m finished with my degree, might count those as subscriptions then.
