Self-hosting can save you a lot of money, even when the cost of your hardware is taken into account. I run most of my services on a cheap mini PC, and I’ve been able to ditch several subscriptions by self-hosting similar versions of the same services for free. There are some subscriptions, however, that I won’t be getting rid of any time soon.
Apple One
There are two Apple subscriptions that I think are worth the money. The first is Apple Music. For the same price as I used to pay for a single album, I can access almost all the music I could ever want, with over 100 million tracks to choose from. I can even add my own music if I want. I would happily pay the $10.99 per month for an individual Apple Music subscription. I’m not saying Apple Music is any better than Spotify; it just integrates so perfectly with my Apple devices.
The other subscription is iCloud+. The 2TB of iCloud storage allows for full iPhone or iPad backups, and plenty of space for photos and videos. It also comes with multiple other perks, including iCloud Private Relay and HomeKit Secure Video.
Instead of paying for both subscriptions individually, I have an Apple One Premier plan. Not only does this include Apple Music and iCloud+, but the Premier plan that I subscribe to also includes access to Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, and Apple News+.
Apple One Premier isn’t cheap; it’s currently $37.95 per month. The beauty, however, is that Apple One Premier can be shared between up to six people, which is exactly what I do. Five family members and I share the subscription between us, meaning we’re each paying about $6.33 per month, with each of us getting individual access to all of Apple’s subscription services. The only real frustration is that the price of Apple One Premier isn’t divisible by six.
- Subscription with ads
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No, all are ad-free
- Price
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Starting at $11/month ($6/month for students)
Listen to your favorite songs, artists, and playlists on Apple Music. Stream music in lossless audio, download songs, and play them offline.
Home Assistant Cloud
I spend hours tinkering with my smart home using the incredibly powerful Home Assistant software. While it has a fairly steep learning curve, the software allows you to connect, control, and automate an enormous number of smart home devices. You don’t need to worry about smart home ecosystems, either. Whether a device is intended to work with Alexa or Apple Home, you can usually add it to Home Assistant regardless.
Nabu Casa is a commercial company that was founded by Home Assistant’s creator, Paulus Schoutsen. It’s funded by subscriptions and sales of its hardware products, such as the new Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread connector or the Home Assistant Green.
Nabu Casa offers a Home Assistant Cloud subscription that offers some really useful features. It makes it simple to connect your Home Assistant devices to popular voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant, so that you can turn on your light in Home Assistant just by asking Alexa. It also offers cloud backups of your Home Assistant server that you can use to get back up and running quickly if anything goes wrong, and a cloud text-to-speech (TTS) service for generating realistic speech.
Another major benefit is that you can use Home Assistant Cloud to securely connect to Home Assistant remotely, so you can control your home lights from the other side of the planet as long as you have an internet connection on your phone. All the data is fully encrypted between your device and your Home Assistant server; not even Nabu Casa itself can see the data.
You can replicate the key features that Home Assistant Cloud offers by other means, without the need for a subscription. You can use a VPN tunnel or reverse proxy to access Home Assistant remotely, for example, or back up Home Assistant using an integration such as Google Drive Backup. So why would I pay for features that I can recreate for free?
Convenience is part of the reason, but it’s not the main one. The key reason that I have a Home Assistant Cloud subscription is that the money goes to funding Nabu Casa’s work, supporting the development of the Home Assistant project. For $6.50 per month or $65 per year, it’s a price I’m more than willing to pay to support such incredible software.
ChatGPT
Before the comments get crazy, I’m not saying that ChatGPT is better than the other AI chatbots on the market. Far from it. I regularly use the free versions of other AI chatbots as they can often perform better than ChatGPT can.
The reason that I continue to pay $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription is mostly inertia. I have a lot of custom instructions set up for specific use cases, and years of previous conversations that I can call upon. Starting again with a different chatbot just feels too much like hard work, and there’s no guarantee that were I to do so, OpenAI wouldn’t release a new version of ChatGPT that’s better than the option I switched to.
Regardless of which chatbot I’m using, however, this is a subscription that I just can’t let go of. I use ChatGPT for so much these days that I’m not sure I could cope without it. I use it for searching for information, for reading my articles aloud to check for errors, for help with creating Home Assistant automations, for generating images, for brainstorming, and much, much more. I’m fully aware that AI is in no way intelligent in any meaningful sense, and that it’s essentially a sophisticated version of autocomplete, but even though it’s very often wrong or frustrating, it can still be unbelievably useful.
I’d love to be able to run my own local LLM that was good enough to meet my needs, so that I didn’t have to share every aspect of my life with a company that’s almost certainly going to use my data for its own ends. Currently, however, I just don’t have the hardware to make that a reality.
Self-hosting has helped me to cancel several subscriptions that I used to pay for, as I can now replicate those services myself. I’ve still not reached the point where I can ditch every subscription, however. I think I’ll be clinging on to these three subscriptions for the foreseeable future, as long as the prices don’t go crazy.