My Bitwarden renewal came through this morning. It’s still $10 per year. I was about to cancel, but I thought what the heck at $10, I’ll keep it on out of principle and to show support.
I also have a tutanota encrypted email, which costs little more than pocket change over the year. I hardly use it, but it’s there.
I wondered then, if this community had any little gems to share - services they pay for that are let’s say under $30 annually. I think we can exclude VPS, since lots of people will probably have them already.
I’m going to cross post at /r/opensource too.
Bitwarden and Email.
I trust a company like Bitwarden to handle uptime of my password manager more than I do myself. If most of my selfhosted services went down, I’m gonna be a little annoyed, but I can survive. If Bitwarden goes down, that’s a real PITA.
And email, because f**k trying to self host email successfully, I’ve accepted I’ll just have to use a commercial provider for emails. I’ll try and set up a self hosted server at some point, but on a separate domain and most likely just to mess around/learn.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.
In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.
It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)
I mean I get that’s a strange mention here, but with the value I’ve got from it (like being able to reference content of some website *in point of time* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that’s how it was in recent years), so it’s a nice idea donate right then.
Fastmail, LastPass and NordVPN
Once you try Bitwarden you will really ask yourself why’d have you paid for last pass. And their app on a phone works with self hosted instance as long as it is exposed to world. Last pass broke my mfa that totally borked webui and chrome extension for me. As soon as I got password export I deleted my last pass account. Took them 2 fix to fix it
Bitwarden… for me its for 2 reasons. One I dont have to deal with keeping something that needs to be super secure up to date. and 2 it help continue the project and its 10 bucks. I spend more then that one dumber stuff.
- CopyMeThat shopping lists, meal plans, recipes. Lifetime price was $25 (which currently brings it to an annual price of $2.8 for me :D), and it has better features than selfhosted versions. Still would like to switch, especially after they had an annoying outage, but still holding out for improvements in the oss versions.
- Nabu Casa Cloud (Home Assistant), mainly to support them, some minor benefits.
- Open AI API, because getting a GPU that can run any decently sized LLM would cost decades of what I pay Open AI ;)
- Backblaze Personal Backups for my PC and B2 for my server
- Mullvad VPN forrrrrrr nothing special.
do we have any good self-hosted shopping list/recipe software?
CopyMeThat
I use that! It’s pretty cool. I didn’t mind the one time payment of $25.
Bitwarden and NextDNS. They’re so cheap so what the heck.
A few:
- YT Music
- 1Password (technically I get it free from work, but I would pay if they switch or I change jobs)
- Proton VPN , i am grandfathered into an older plan
nextdns really like the custom dns overrides and the great tailscale integration
VPN, Cloud storage, cloud hosting.
I don’t exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.
migadu for email
Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.
I hate to say it, but “this”.
It works fantastically, it’s not expensive, it’s one of the more critical services in my stack, and I get to support the company.
No brainer.
No problems with uptime running vaultwarden as a docker on a hetzner vm. Only thing I am missing is some sort of SSO integration.
Same.
I could absolutely self-host it, but at the price they charge it makes no sense to do so especially as it means I can support it’s development.
I took the time to teach my kids how to use a password manager with Bitwarden on my self hosted instance. But my wife asked me what’s going to happen if I die. I’m confident in minimal downtime while I’m alive, but it’s important that my family’s passwords can outlive me. So I wound up purchasing the family plan.
(Obvious disclosure, I am the one running the service)
If support for open source is what you are looking for, may I suggest taking a look at Communick? It basically takes the open source alternatives for social media and messaging platforms, and packages them for easy access and setup. There are packages for Mastodon, Lemmy or Matrix each of them for less than $10/year and fully managed. I’m pledging to take 20% of the profits and contribute to the upstream projects.
I pay my ISP for internet, and a domain registrar for my domain name, and backblaze for cloud backup.
That’s really it.
