Self-Hosted Main

I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.

I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.

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I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups.

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I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.

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I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.

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If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.

Fastmail. Left Gmail for it like a decade ago and have been happy with it ever since. It really is fast.

Unsure if this classifies as cheap but:

• BitWarden
• AnonAddy - I use the extension and create an email for every website. Wish I knew this years ago.
• Proton Unlimited for email and VPN
• YouTube Premium - I watch a lot of YT and this is a great use of money. YT Music has also great radio station generation, in fact I think better than Spotify and Apple Music in my experience.
• Apple Music for the car and less less/Atmos audio. It’s lovely in the living room.

I think my domain is basically what I pay for.

Why not just self host Bitwarden, or Vaultwarden?

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.

Spotify. Todoist and bitwarden.

Noip $25/year

Pushover

Strongbox App for iOs, allows me to access my Keepass password file on my iPhone.

ChatGPT Plus is the only service I pay for. There's literally no substitute in my experience. Even with 10 million dollars, I couldn't effectively replace it with a self-hosted option.

Not vps but adjacent: I have a Dreamhost storage account to sync my Joplin notes. It's so very very smol it barely costs anything. The notes are E2EE with a key I own.

I pay for my own domain name hands down the best investment, as little as 1€ per month and you get a lot more option for your homeland/vps/mail or whatever you have.

Quite a bit of stuff: Fastmail, domain registrar, Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Microsoft Office 365 Family subscription (includes 1 Tb storage for 6 family members), GitHub copilot.

1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.

Bitwarden and NextDNS. They're so cheap so what the heck.

• 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.

BackBlaze, 1Password, mxroute, Spotify, different usenet indexers

Thats about it

I pay for a small VPS thats running my mail server and other extremely important services.

1. Borgbase for server backup
2. Vps for CGNAT
3. Protonvpn/Mullvad
4. Tutanota (Although I don't like the recent changes they are making)

Don't know if donations count but I try to periodically donate to these projects I could not live without

1. Signal
2. Grapheneos
3. Fdroid
4. Smarttube

I'd likely start paying for bitwarden even though I don't have much need for any premium services because just realized this is one of those services I can't live without.

Even though I have a lifetime LastPass subscripion I still choose to pay the $10 bucks and stay with Bitwarden not just becuse I wanted the yubikey support, its also just so simple to use and I love its simplicity. Its also polite and does not bring any extra bloatware. Its really quite good value. It just does its job really nicely

spotify. It just works and has most music I want to.

nordVPN - not sure if it is good, but I wanted to have a vpn service.

ditched netflix recently due to woke culture.

oh, and cheap domain. But that cannot be self-hosted.

I have selfhosted email for 10-15 domains for about 20 years (qmail toaster, then mailinabox). I also pay for fastmail.com and purelymail.com so that I have email addresses that still work if my hosting goes down. I host on AWS, and if something goes wrong with my AWS account, I need a way to communicate with AWS that doesn't require servers running in the affected account.