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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.
If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you'll unlock a fun new mini game: DNS White List Tuning.
I actually pay for quite a few digital service subscriptions. Off the top my head: Proton (email/VPN), Mega (storage), Kagi (search engine), Inoreader (feed aggregator), Signal (both voluntary donation and for online backup), Audible (audiobooks), Reuters (news), a few newspapers and magazines (online editions), some apps, …
If you like movies, I've been enjoying AMC Stubs A-List, been going to more movies with the gf, screen unseen is fun if you have nothing specific you want to see. And we keep costs down by sneaking food in.
YNAB
Seedbox. I've had mine for over 10 years and I'm still paying the same $15/month, so it's effectively gotten cheaper, and they've actually upgraded me at least twice in that time to give me more storage & bandwidth.
Housing, transportation, internet, electricity, water and a VPN if your country doesn't let you pirate without it.
Everything else is either superfluous or you can pirate it.
Grocery delivery
Electricity
Water
Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.
YouTube family subscription. It's YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn't changed in several years.
Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.
Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.
Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I'll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won't change.
So I pay monthly for a few streaming services, those are rarely worth the money, although Qobuz is pretty close. I could pirate my music or buy CDs and rip them, but that would be a huge hassle and expensive for the CD route as I like to listen to a lot of random artists.
Other services I pay monthly for that I think are good value are the National Trust and the RSPB. National Trust is particularly good value if you like looking at gardens/old houses, you save a fortune. RSPB works for me as I have two on my door step and just the car parking alone is almost the cost is the cost of the months membership.
Subscription-based services are in general worth the money, if
E.g. it doesn't matter shit how much content on Netflix is terrible, if I use it for one month precisely for that one new show, a new season or a few movies I'm interested - just about anything that makes up an actual reason to starting the subscription.
The only extra subscriptions I have are a VPN while I'm at school, a domain name for my portfolio, and one game that is the main place I interact with my friends. Also have a slightly larger Google drive until I can afford to make my own NAS.
Honestly, I don't see the need for much more. Costco is great if you live near one (they are one of the few decent companies left). Server hosting for games is another one I've done in the past.
Adobe used to be manageable a decade ago, especially if you were sharing the cost. Same with Game Pass when it came out. Now the prices for both are absurd. Streaming has been replaced by the high seas.
Columbia House.