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Ask Slashdot: Your Favorite Subscription Services?

Posted by msmash on from the let's-get-going dept.

An anonymous reader writes: What are some subscriptions services that you are paying for and love to pay? Please include music/movie services, news outlets, software, and courses.

21 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. amazon prime by maliqua · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Amazon prime is like 'fast china' you can buy something for $4 you pay $4 and $4 only then it shows up at your door

  2. Linux Weekly News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    LWN is an invaluable resource for keeping track of Linux kernel development.

    https://lwn.net/

  3. Re:Piratebay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My UseNet and NZB Indexer Subscriptions save me from all the HBO piracy threats, and costs a fraction of what a CableTV subscription costs..

  4. Audible is my jam by Coldeagle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Audible is my favorite service, I've been an audible customer for over a dozen years and have over 800 books in my audible library. They're the ones I can't do without.

    I also subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, Playstation Vue (cable replacement), HBO Now, and Amazon Prime (also use it for add free music, their free version of music has a pretty wide selection, you don't have to pay extra).

  5. I spend 5x the effort of paying for subscriptions by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I probably spend about 5x the effort of paying for subscriptions finding ways around them. The intellectual reward is worth the extra time - it's like a real-world puzzle. With the glut of entertainment available today, the thrill of unlocking a [game]/[show] /[book] seems to make it worth consuming.

  6. Private Eye by coastwalker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the UK Private Eye is not just entertaining but it holds to account our masters.

    --
    Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
  7. GitHub by darkain · · Score: 3, Informative

    We're all techies here, right? Seriously, GitHub. The $7/mo or whatever it is has served me a hell of a lot better than my previous setup using a free GitLab deployment locally.

    1. Re:GitHub by Luthair · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or you could just use BitBucket for free.

  8. Huh? by aquabat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Loving a service is one thing, but if you love paying the bill, there's something seriously wrong with you. (No offence).

    --
    A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
  9. Re:Does the Internet connection subscription count by tsa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That, and I pay for having a domain with email and websites. I like having that.

    --

    -- Cheers!

  10. Everyone rents their house by Weaselmancer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Property tax.

    You have to pay it every year, and if you don't the government will throw you out of your house and sell it to pay off your tax debt. They can call it a tax all they want, but it's rent. The dynamic is exactly the same. Pay a recurring sum without end or be evicted. Rent.

    Everyone in the US is renting their home from the government.

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    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
    1. Re:Everyone rents their house by Junta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you rent your house, you are funding the upkeep and property tax for the owner, plus the owner gets profit.

      If you 'own' your house, sure you are still paying property tax, but you are not funding the landlord.

      For example, when I rented, I spent about 12k/year to use half of one bedroom of a two bedroom townhouse.

      Now I pay about 2k/year in taxes for full use of a three bedroom house in the same area (having long paid off the mortgage).

      The issue is that so many people view car loans and mortgages as eternal things, and compare rent or lease payment to those loan payments and think 'well it costs the same'. I've seen this to the extreme of someone getting a new car every two years because 'well, it's not like it's any more expensive, the monthly payment is the same, why should I pay the same to drive a two year old card as a brand new car?'

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Everyone rents their house by 31415926535897 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You totally missed the point of the GP. This is not about quantity at all. It doesn't matter if the government wants $2 or $2 million. If you don't pay it, they take your property and kick you out just like a landlord would. It's a perfectly appropriate analogy.

      Personally, I'm not inherently opposed to property tax, though I would much rather see services paid for a different way if possible. They really NEED to codify a hard cap for property tax percentage. The part about property tax that bothers me is that they are willing to ratchet up the percentage to laughable levels. When I was a child, it would take 100+ years to pay in property taxes what the value of the property was (1%). Now we're at a level of about 30-35 years (~3%). Nobody cared when home values were rising exponentially. But now that prices have stabilized in most places, it seems absurd that the government can take an increasingly large slice of your assets, and they need to precisely because home values aren't going up, yet they need more and more revenue. At some point, owning a property becomes a liability (what if the government taxed at 10%, or 25%?). My math says we're really close to that tipping point (approximately 3.5%), where the value taken by taxes harms the value of the home more than the services they're paying for.

      We need to pay for schools and roads and parks and libraries, but paying for those through property taxes makes us serfs of the state. Even though yours is $2k/year, you are still under serfdom, it's just a lighter load.

    3. Re:Everyone rents their house by kanwisch · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And having lived 10 years in IN, my experience is that the quality of schools shows it. A top-level private education turned out to be roughly equivalent to public schools in IA. The roads outside Indy were atrocious, too, and it was the first state in which I observed paved roads being rolled back to gravel.

      You do get what you pay for, IMHO.

  11. JetBrains and Safari by Average · · Score: 3

    Two things that make me more productive... and sadly my workplace is too nickel-and-dime to actually buy for me.

    The JetBrains IDE all-access pass. I didn't like IDEs until JetBrains. Eclipse... still not friends with. All the extendable code editors (Sublime, Atom, whatever)... meh. IDEA, RubyMine, PyCharm, PHPStorm? F. Ing. Brilliant. When I see people stumbling through without code completion and good breakpoint debuggers (and that's very common in scripting-language web development to this day)... it's like I'm on cheat mode.

    And I debate it but keep up my subscription to O'Reilly (and partners) Safari Books Online, because I have it locked in from a special at $199/yr. At double that (the normal rate), I'm not sure it'd be worth it, but I use it just enough that having virtually every IT book I need available is worth $0.75 a day to me.

  12. Crunchyroll by smallmj · · Score: 4, Informative

    Crunchyroll, for the huge library of subtitled Anime.

    --
    ------- Mark
  13. IRS by LordHighExecutioner · · Score: 3, Funny

    Unfortunately I still don't know how to unsubscribe.

  14. Re:none. by bws111 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why does it matter if 'at the end' you have nothing to show for it? Have you never eaten a meal that provided flavor or nutrition above mere sustenance? Have you never attended a concert or gone to a movie? Have you never taken a vacation? All of those things leave you with 'nothing at the end to show for your expense'.

    A more sane approach would be 'how much value do you get from owning vs renting'? For me, and I suspect a lot of other people, the value of an entertainment dollar comes from how much enjoyment you get from it. I can spend $10/month on a subscription movie service and watch a different movie every weekend. Or, I can spend the $10 buying a copy of a movie, watching it one weekend and spending the other three weekends diving into my collection of movies like Scrooge McDuck saying 'look how much I own!'. I would get much more enjoyment, thus value, out of the first.

    As another poster said, people used to rent movies from brick-and-mortar stores. That business started dying off when the price to own a movie came down low enough. But the reason owning was seen as preferable wasn't so much 'look at all the stuff I own' as it was simple convenience. If you wanted to rent a movie you had to go to the store, hope they had a movie you wanted to see, go home and watch it, then return it to the store. By purchasing it you could watch it when you wanted, even if it was only once, and not have to deal with that hassle. That was worth money. When Netflix came out with DVD rentals that provided convenience at an even lower price than owning. Then when streaming came out it was even easier and cheaper to watch movies.

  15. My VPN service by johanw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So I can get easily to the Pirate Bay and don't pay for anythging else.

  16. NHL.TV, MLB.TV, and AFL Live Pass by AF_Cheddar_Head · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Get my sports fix without having to pay the cable or satellite providers.

  17. Re: none. by Albanach · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't own anything. If the government decides they want your house because it sits on land you can never own, they'll take it. If the government decides your car is unsafe, they take it.

    THis comment appears scattered throughout this topic. Are you proposing something different? A return to the state of nature, where anyone else with a bigger club, or faster legs could take your stuff?

    The only way to own something is if there's a community that respects your ownership. That requires some form of government which requires some sort of funding. The alternative, as Hobbes tells us, is nasty, brutish and short.