What subscription services are worth paying for IT professional

I'm a tightwad, so for me to pay a recurring fee, the software must continually improve or provide immense value to my life.

To that end, here's what I pay for ordered most favorite to least:

Cronometer - https://cronometer.com/

BitWarden - https://bitwarden.com/

FastMail - https://www.fastmail.com/

Grammarly - https://grammarly.com/

Raindrop - https://raindrop.io/

Adobe Photoshop, but not for photoshop, but for image hosting.

If I decide to trim my budget, Photoshop is going first. But raindrop is a close second. It's really expensive for what it does, but it is so far the best way I've found to keep bookmarks sorted between multiple Linux, iOS, and Windows machines.

JetBrains, O’Reilly subscription

1Password or any other password management application.

Domain name[s] and a decent/minimal host that doesn't blackhole port 25 egress.

I wouldn’t say any are worth it inherently. There are a lot of good subscription services but what matters most is your tech stack, habits and needs.

For example, I haven’t found the per-language focused IDE approach of JetBrains to fit well with the multi-language architectures I commonly work on, and while I’ll watch Pluralsight courses I find I don’t read as much O’Reilly content even though it’s often something I get more out of.

End of the day, identify what you want to take away from things and focus on optimizing for your own mannerisms.

This may be an unusual recommendation but a music subscription service such as Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music.

Music helps me personally to be way more productive when working on IT problems.

Navicat, SecureCRT, and Jet Brains.

Linked in learning is only $26.99 a month if you pay annually. If you have a university email try logging into O'Reilly with it. It it works for me.

https://pragmaticengineer.com/ newsletter for me was a fun investment. another thing that I do, which is not a subscription for products, is putting money into opensource projects that I use. E.g. the terminal emulator, cli tools and some such. If they have patron or something I try and sign up or send one time sums.

Setapp, I get so much value out of the software available there each month. Im saving hundreds of dollars per year.

GitHub Copilot.

https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c...

Pretty general but Todoist. I'd be a disorganized mess without it.

No subscriptions, but I do buy upgrades.

- I buy Udemy courses when they are on sale.

- JetBrains (Annual)

- MobaXTerm (Annual)

- Synergy (Once)

- Beyond Compare (Once)

- Total commander (Once)

- LinqPad (Major Upgrades)

- The Bat (Major Upgrades)

- Ashampoo Office (Much cheaper than MS Office)

The usual ones:

- Jetbrains [1]

- Bitwarden

- Migadu (Email)

- Porkbun (domain)

- AWS (Hobby Projects)

That is all I can think of. Had netflix for a while, but didn’t feel the need, so stopped.

[1] Subsidised by employer.

[ Edit: Formatting ]

Jetbrains, hosted email and calendar, health insurance, Netflix sometimes. But mostly Jetbrains.

JetBrains

The Microsoft action pack may be worth consider. Comes with significantly more azure credits than it costs and has various software included too ( with some usage restrictions )

Hosting (both websites and VMs to run services on), domain names, and Office 365.