- Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) via Flickr
The idea of paying for stuff can be difficult — my father firmly believed that there was one thing real men never did — pay for parking. He was from NYC, when we went there for visits, he was willing to park the car in another borough (or probably another state) and take the subway to our hotel before he would be exposed to the embarrassment of being seen “paying for parking”.
On this site, I encourage the use of free web services, freeware and open source software as substitutes for much commercial software, but sometimes I pay for it — I thought it might be interesting to look at what services for which I’m willing to pay and how I feel about them. Let’s call this disclosure.
Evernote - I pay $5 a month for unlimited bandwidth and storage. Evernote is my primary means of syncing information between computers and storing information. The service is free for a generous amount of storage and bandwidth.
Audible - Audible is a service that allows you to download “audible”, get it, books. They have most bestsellers and a pretty good selection of classics, history, bios, business and meditation books. Since recorded books themselves tend to almost as pricey as their paper counterparts, I subscribe for $22.95 per month, I can download two books. Perfect for dog and baby walking, downloaded to my iPod.
Tivo - I have two Tivos, for timeshifting Letterman and old movies, for one I pay $12 a month for service, the other has a lifetime plan so doesn’t cost anything.
Cable – I use Comcast for video and Internet. The download speed is actually very close to the 16MB they advertise. Other than a 250 GB a month cap, I have no comlaints.
Mobile Phone – I use Tmobile and have since 2003. I have a grandfathered 5000-minutes-a-month for $99 plan which is too good to ever give up. I use a G1 Android phone which at the moment is only available on Tmobile. Their customer support answers immediately and has always been very helpful.
Web Hosting – I pay HostGator $35 for a reseller account and host more than 20 websites for my various businesses and still have more than enough resources for the forseeable future.
Wufoo - This one may be a little geeky but it’s one of the coolest products I use. Wufoo is a service that creates beautiful forms for web pages as well as collecting information the information that is entered. If you do any web development and don’t use Wufoo, best check them out.
Increased Storage for Gmail and Picassa Web Albums – I pay $25 a year for extra storage for my much used Gmail account. I’ve been using Gmail constantly, archiving pratically everything, since 2004 and have used 4.9GBs of storage.
Flickr - I pay $25 a year for a Pro account which pretty much allows me unlimited uploads and storage.
That’s it. I’m quite satisified with all of them. What are you willing to pay for?
