I have been reading about internet privacy for a long time. As time went on, I got a vpn subcription, a custom domain, a paid email hosting, etc. No regrets on the services themselves.
I recently had this conversation with a colleague of mine, complaining about the rising cost of everything including internet subscription services: netflix, spotify, youtube, you name it. I could simply disregard my colleague’s complaints as I didn’t have any of those and know the ways of obtaining materials. However, once I start adding up the privacy related services I’m willingly paying instead… they also add up into a considerable amount.
So, do you pay for anything privacy related, how much do you pay in total, and is it affordable for you? For example, many VPN providers offer yearly subscriptions around 40-50 USD.
- 12€/year for a domain incl. backup mx and sending relay for emails
- 10€/year for encrypted backup
- Energy cost of my NAS (unknown yet)
- 48€/year for a ways service
So just under 6€/month + electricity.
I honestly only pay for Bitwarden. 10€ a year is very very cheap. And you don’t even have to, the free features are all the things you normally need. I am paying just as a donation.
- ~$20/year domain name
- €12/year Tutanota mail
- ~$idk yet/year energy costs of a self-hosted server (an old laptop lying around the house) which handles:
- Backup solution
- File hosting
- Wireguard VPN Tunnel
- Other free and open-source services which allow me to own my data locally.
- Sometimes €5 Mullvad VPN for if I’m traveling internationally. Otherwise Tor or my home VPN would suffice.
@rar I pay for my own domain name + VPS for ~45 USD per quarter. (I know there are cheaper providers, but I am happy with my current one).
I don’t use VPN, I use Tor while browsing and use I2P while torrenting—so I don’t pay a dime to obfuscate my online trails.
I use a free tier from a “privacy-conscious” email provider, so I don’t pay for that either. I don’t self-host my email and I don’t seek die-hard email privacy with mine, currently. At most, I PGP-encrypt some of them.
I self-host my own matrix server, which is an e2ee chatting service. So, that goes into my VPS subscription.
I pay $110 total with $50 going to Proton for email and the other $60 going to kagi.con
@shortwavesurfer @rar any advantage in using kagi instead of various searxNG/whoogle instances that are free to use? Also, brave’s search engine is getting better.
I do like SearxNG and used it, but many public instanxes get rate limited by ddg, google, and several others due to being a proxy fir many more searches than an average user would need. This makes the results from that instance very nearly useless. I am still testing Kagi and added enough for a 2 month subscription after my free trial ends. Since it is paid there are no ads at all, targeted or generalized. Plus they now accept crypto as payment so i can use a burner email and pay without giving up my identity and they are okay with it.
