Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can't really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10.

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.

Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.

I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.

Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.

Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.

Sneakemail. Just paid the $36 for my 10th year. Great having a fully unique, obfuscated, and permanent email for everyone you communicate with that you can also send from.

As with all email, I'm vested so switching is a burden. But this may be the year.

The domain is being rejected more often lately, so I can't use it to create accounts like I used to. Competitors like SimpleLogin/ProtonPass alias offer more for less ($30/year or bundled), but what if they end up suffering the same fate?

1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail

I pay like $5 a month for web hosting. Not worth it to self-host a public e-commerce site on my own network.

Pushover

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.

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.

Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox

I self host vaultwarden but I also pay teh $10/year to support the project, I self host for Collections and I use the paid bitwarden at work since they do not allow ddns addresses in our network.

Cloudflare + VPS

I don't exactly have a VPS per se, but rather a CG-NAT bypass server to connect my home server to the open Internet. I sometimes used it as an external backup storage as well, but the server is cheap so the storage space available is minimal.

I pay for a bunch of stuff but it’s all self hosted. Bitwarden, opnsense, nginx proxy, uptime kuma, wikijs…

Bitwarden is weird because it’s a service I could easily self host but I really don’t mind paying for because it’s pretty critical that it experiences maximum uptime and tinkering and I trust their data center. I also like supporting the company and I appreciate that the product just works.

3$ a month for real debrid: to download Linux iso 2$ a month for YouTube premium family plan: from a different country for cheap rates 10$ for 2 years nordvpn: black Friday deal Around 5$ a month Hulu after an Amex offer 140$ for 500gb pcloud for backups, lifetime. Then I have automated backups of that in a different country where I have an rpi connected to an external hdd.

(Obvious disclosure, I am the one running the service)

If support for open source is what you are looking for, may I suggest taking a look at Communick? It basically takes the open source alternatives for social media and messaging platforms, and packages them for easy access and setup. There are packages for Mastodon, Lemmy or Matrix each of them for less than $10/year and fully managed. I'm pledging to take 20% of the profits and contribute to the upstream projects.

Domain and use it for email

Bitwarden’s $10 priceing a year is absolutely the most fair pricing that exists. They will keep me as a loyal customers.

1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.

I pay my ISP for internet, and a domain registrar for my domain name, and backblaze for cloud backup.

That's really it.

migadu for email

Fastmail, LastPass and NordVPN

Proton Suite

Real-debrid and bitwarden, both are amazing and dirt cheap

Honestly, standard web hosting is far and away cheaper to outsource.

I pay Ionos $14 a month for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth to host an unlimited amount of sites. It easier to let them handle the hosting and just redirect the sub-domains I need to my home server.

Most Redditor's here in r/selfhosted have likely never felt the slashdot effect, and the havoc it creates. I've had two big posts hit Reddit frontpage over the years linking to my website, and Ionos handled 100k daily unique visitors without a hiccup. No Pi4 on AT&T home fiber could handle that.

Edit: Whoops, missed the under $30 qualifier, Still leaving this here though.

VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month

Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month

Its not actually cheap but im all for my proton enterprise plan.

Im into fitness so: Lose it! and Hevy (dont know if there are good selfhosted alternatives)

Mullvad Bitwarden Goodnotes cuz im studying right now and make notes on my iPad

VPN, iCloud in case I lose my drives, MEGA, Spotify

It's not cheap, but I pay for Spotify because overall I've been pretty happy with it. It has a good selection of features, lots of content, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only real complaint that I have is that the offline mode isn't great.

An actually cheap service that I pay for is addy.io, and even though I haven't been using it much, so far it has been working pretty well.

Google Photos.

I pay $15 a month for unlimited storage.

Photos of my family are of the most important things to me so I'm paying out for guaranteed redundancy.

I still host a local photo storage version but I also backup everything to Google Photos.

Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.

I have just loaded $10 initially for PurelyMail & it works great for simple outbound emails from my homelab services.

$2 iCloud

$2 Google One

$10 UsenetServer

$59.95 /3 years, PIA VPN

Simplelogin... for random emails using my various domains.

Bitwarden is one of the few invoices I enjoy seeing. It means I get fantastic service for another year. The cost value for me is insane as I use it so many times a day.