We all know the saying of if you are not paying then you are the product, which again became relevant with how Reddit is dealing with its business model and trying to get everyone into their dataharvesting for more ads ecosystem. It is really sad how many of the worlds brightest techminds are building technologies that in the end all leads to show more ads.
I have been online for over 25 years, so it is a hard expectation to break that everything should be free. Free email, free search, free news, free social media etc.
Given how much time many of us spend using various online services, paying a little seems reasonable. Yet I often tend to think way too long on even smaller digital expenses, like an app for €2, but I will happily pay €10 for a coffee and a croissant at a train station like it is nothing.
I have seen many saying they wouldn’t mind paying a bit for a good Reddit experience, and I think I could even be persuaded to pay for Facebook if it removed all the ads and let me control my feed again like we could in the beginning. Yet these companies don’t really seem interested in providing that option.
What services do you find worth paying for - even though free alternatives exists?
I have a neutral email provider, a todo app (Todoist), a journal app (DayOne), a podcast app (PocketCast) - as well as the usual plethora of streaming services. I have considered trying Kagi for a paid search engine, though that is really a hard pill to swallow when good search have always been there freely available. Though Googles quality have really gone down in recent years.
Ima need to know more on your local tts. What is it ? What does it do ?
Ngl, I’ve been thinking of ditching my Google home. Used to be great, now I would barely call it functional. Used to be super easy to play music, setup timers and reminders, ask things, now it works as expected the first time maybe 10% of the time. It’s infuriating to use
Oh, just PicoTTS. I use it for home-wide announcements, like making it remind me verbally at 7PM if any of the trashcans get emptied the next morning, or when the washing machine, dryer or dishwasher are done.
HomeAssistant takes a bit of work to learn but it’s so powerful and flexible that I found it entirely worth it. It even got me into soldering - I managed to get it to control the temperature of my plug-in cannabis vaporiser by soldering on a $5 microcontroller and writing some 150 lines of of script/code (most of which is to set the colour of the LED I soldered on)!