personal

On subscriptions

— 2 min read

Manuel Moreale wrote about his subscriptions and said:

I'd be curious to see other people's breakdowns so if you do end up writing about your situation let me know.

Encouraged by this Kev Quirk and Jan-Lukas Else wrote about their subscriptions. After reading their posts I decided to throw my hat in the ring as well.

As a disclaimer I'll say that I won't be including all recurring expenses here, such as insurance payments, my contribution to joint bank account with my wife, loan payments, utilities and so on. I'll focus mainly on tools/services/products that I have decided to invest in as I find value in them, rather than out of necessity. That being said, here we go.

Family

  • iCloud+ 200GB
    • ‌Cost: 2,99 € / month
    • Both me and my wife save everything to iCloud, as do my parents with their photos. 200GB has been enough for us (for now)
  • Apple Music Family
    • Cost: 19 € / month
    • Our music streaming service of choice, mainly due to my & wife being invested in Apple ecosystem and my dislike of Spotify for trying to be everything

Tech

  • Bitwarden
    • Cost: 8,20 € / year = 0,68 € / month
    • I consider password manager an essential tool and something I happily invest in. It holds so crucial and valuable information I want something that is platform-agnostic (for which reason iCloud Keychain is not an option). I've lately been thinking about migrating to 1Password as Bitwarden app both on my Mac and iPhone has started to behave weirdly.
  • SimpleLogin
    • Cost: 28 € / year = 2,3 € / month
    • I consider this almost as essential of a tool as a password manager. SimpleLogin allows me to have unique email address for all the different services/tools and places where I need to provide an email address
  • Mullvad VPN
    • Cost: 5 € / month
    • For secure connection in unsecure networks and to circumvent certain geographical restrictions around content
  • Hetzner VPS
    • Cost: 4,70 € / month
    • As I wrote previously, this website is now running on Ghost CMS hosted on Hetzner. On the same server I host privacy-focused Plausible Analytics to help me understand if anyone else rather than me is reading these words.

Entertainment

  • Netflix
    • Cost: 15,99 € / month
    • Our current media streaming service of choice. We have a rule in our house that we have only one such subscription active at the time. The reason for the rule is that having multiple services racks up to a good amount of money quickly and we do not have that much time available to watch entertainment that it would warrant such costs.
  • Playstation Plus
    • Cost: 59,95 / year = 4,99 € / month
    • Gaming has always been a big hobby of mine, however the older I've gotten (and with more responsiblities) I have less time for gaming. For that reason I mostly play story-focused single-player games nowadays, for which reason I am likely not renewing this subscription when it lapses.

Other

  • Training Today
    • Cost: 9,99 € / year = 0,83 € / month
    • A tool for Apple watch which allows me better to evaluate my recovery and performance (based on data). This is something I used when I exercised more regularly. I still have work to do to get back on the regular exercising schedule/regimen after we got our baby boy last year. I am not renewing this subscription when it lapses, as I first need to master (again) the basics of regular exercising.
  • Athlytics Pro
    • Cost: 31,99 € / year = 2,66 € / month
    • Similar tool to Training Today but with more information related to recovery and training. Similar situation as above with Training Today.

Conclusion

There we have it. If my math holds up, all the above sums approximately to 37 € per month, which is around 444 € per year.

Having read about other people subscriptions and discussed with friends, I think the amount of subscriptions I have and their costs is quite modest. Still, as said, I think there's some services/tools that I can drop without causing any significant drop to the quality of my life.

Read more