We Need To Pay For The Things We Use
Published August 15, 2025
For the last 20 or so years we have moved away from paying for the virtual things we use and towards "free" software and services. We stopped paying with our wallets and started paying with our attention and our data. This should not be news to anyone. It needs to stop. We need to get back in the habit of paying for the software and the services that we use.
I have taken steps in this direction. I have been a paying Google user for years, getting "enterprise" service for my family (and how I wish they had a personal level of their paid services!) as well as YouTube Premium. I am a Mastodon user; the instance I use https://twit.social is run by the TWiT podcast network and I pay a monthly subscription which gives me, among other things, guilt free use of their Mastodon instance. I pay, outright or via subscription, for Ivory, Carrot, and many other apps that give me the things that I need.
I recently (earlier this week) started paying for search. I am using a search engine called
kagi and am paying
$5 a month for 300 searches (if I run out I will use a larger subscription but I think this is a
reasonable level for me.) To be honest, I might upgrade to a larger subscription - not
because I need it - to help support them. Kagi has been a game changer for me in terms of
search. It has taken me back to when search was good. When I got results, not slop and
ads.
I will admit there are services I use but do not pay for. Some, like GitHub, were intended to be financed by corporate customers and free for individual users. I have looked at Codeberg but I don't think, for my use case and my level of devops expertise, it is a solution for me. Some, like Discord, I use because that is where the people are that I need to communicate with. Some, like Meta products I will not use anymore.
I am taking what steps I can to walk the walk and pay for the services I use. I am actively looking for services that charge me for what they offer in exchange for just receiving what I pay for. It's a change that we all need to make for ourselves.