I’ve been idly pondering the number of services to which I am subscribed / Sandra and I am subscribed together, wondering whether I could, and should, cut down.

I’m thinking here about media and so on, not utilities.

tl;dr: we have more than I thought, and I’d like to reduce it a bit, but I’d also like to do (even?) better at support FOSS.

Software

Not “subscriptions” but, for a few years now, I’ve been trying to donate, on a systematic basis, to Free software projects from which I benefit.

It’s hard, and I’ve not managed to make it as regular a thing as I had hoped, but I do it when I can all the same. I want to continue this and, frankly, improve it.

I am trialling Kagi, a paid-for search engine. I’m on the fence about it; I think it’s important to fund a service like search but, well, the results seem on par to me with DuckDuckGo, and I’d like to understand more about how Kagi gets its search results. (Actually, I’d love to run my own indexing service, but also it doesn’t seem worthwhile…)

The other software subscription I have is for Microsoft 365. I have not used it at all in over two years now, so it really is money down the drain. Sandra, who is still using macOS, uses the Apple productivity suite, iWork. I should get rid of it.

Music, films etc

We subscribe to both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I don’t watch anything on Netflix, and perhaps two or three programmes a year on Prime.

I prefer to buy and rip CDs and DVDs.

If it were down to me, I’d ditch them both, but Sandra watches them.

I’m hopeful that we can unsubscribe from Netflix though; two services seems excessive.

We don’t have any separate music streaming services. If I want to stream music that I don’t have on our system, I use Internet radio. Sandra doesn’t listen to much music.

Sandra occasionally buys audiobooks on Audible, and has a subscription associated with that. That’s completely hers, not mine, so out of scope.

News

I subscribe to 404 Media. I’ve got the bulk of a 12 month subscription remaining, as I bought an up-front year-long subscription only a few months ago. Their output is both fascinating and regular, and I’m currently planning to renew it when it them time comes.

I was tempted to subscribe to our local paper, even though I have no intention of using their mobile app (the only way to read it ad-free, apparently; who wants an app to view what should be a web page?!), but, while I can subscribe online, it renews automatically, and I’d have to phone them to cancel, and I object to that. No money for them.

Patreon, Kofi etc.

I have a handful of small Patreon subscriptions, for creative friends. I’ve no plans on changing those.

I make occasional donations/gifts, and I’d like to continue to do that when I can.