For me, that would be Secure CRT. I have yet to find a terminal emulator that matches its feature set. If you regularly manage hundreds of machines using various connection protocols (serial and ssh mostly in my case) It’s worth the $$$, and so far there hasn’t been any subscription nonsense. I liked using it at work so much I forked over the dough to have it at home.
None of the free alternatives do everything I need.
I’ll also mention a few iOS apps. One is Sun Surveyor. It’s an AR app that shows you the position of the sun, moon, and galactic center at any given time. The other would have to be Radarscope. It’s a weather radar app, but it’s a really good weather radar app.
EDIT:
This one’s debatable, but I use it all the time. Plasticity is 3D modelling software that attempts to bridge the gap between practical CAD programs and software meant for 3D artists like Blender. It’s not cheap considering Blender is free, but it’s buy once use forever, and at (I think) $150 it’s within reach of an individual hobbyist who knows what they want and is willing to pay for it.
Kagi search. It made cutting Google out of my life easy. I’d rather not pay for search but none of the free alternatives really worked like I needed. I tried out Kagi on a whim and haven’t looked back.
I just wish I could disable the Google search box on my Google Pixel home page and replace it with a Kagi search bar (that opens in my default browser though; not like Qwant does, that forces you to use their own browser).
now i just went to try it out, and I will, but the AI and pricing tiers screams “business and profit first” to me
And Google doesn’t?
They both value their customers. But in the case of Google, that’s not you.
Immich https://immich.app/
Absolutely amazing and it’s technically free, but please donate if you can, they fucking deserve it.
Being able to host your own photos and have ai to help identify faces WITHOUT internet or giving your private photos to the tech giants is worth every penny.
I love Immich, but I’m afraid to donate because they’re part of FUTO which looks sketchy and I know there was some drama about them.
Yes. This. 100%.
Even if it wasn’t the most reasonable to license, it’d still be the most flexible and “hackable”.
$60 for a lifetime
Yup. A price that respects their user base. On that basis alone I have had (and will continue to have) no issue paying for another license if needed.
When I switched to Linux I just bought a new copy instead of figuring out how to transfer the license I had for my Windows PC because the Reaper team just straight up deserves the money.
Gimp.
Tap for spoiler
P.S. This is a joke and I am very proud of it.
Your joke made me laugh, and I’m proud of you for making it.
Linux, KDE, Firefox, etc… we are ALL supposed to “pay” somehow for it, whatever our means and however we can.
When we consider free and open source software NOT paid software, we are sabotaging the very things we love.
Hard disagree. Please tell me where Linus said he expects normal users to “pay” (or whatver you meant with the quotes.) The thing that makes these revolutionary is that they are free in a world where everyone is always trying to get something from you.
There is literally no expectation of money or commits or anything. Don’t shame people for using FOSS the way FOSS was intended. If you are well off and want to support them do it! Authors will appreciate it, but dont try to turn FOSS into yet another guilt trip.
just adding: foss is what is supposed to happen in a world where the increased productivity through automation benefits everyone vs the ‘bottom line’. foss has always been my tiny island of space communism :)
tiny island of space communism
can you please expand a bit? What does that mean? Never heard this before.
i am referring to societal model of star fleet in the fictional lore of star trek tng
Why are you deforming my words? You are free to have your own opinion and you are welcomed to disagree but when are arguing against something I did NOT say then you are not trying to have an honest conversation.
Anyway, on the spirit of discussing anyway (despite the risk of talking past each other) what do you imagine would happen if nobody, including Linus, would contribute (not necessarily financially) to FOSS? If nobody at all build FOSS or supports FOSS, there is no FOSS, as simple as that.
I think you are missing the point
Well my point, which might be different from OP but I still is important and thus why I brought it in the discussion is :
- paying for software is important
- FLOSS is important
and thus ideally we would pay (again, however one can) AND have FLOSS anyway. I don’t see why we would have to settle for proprietary software.
Balatro on me iPhone
mullvad vpn
Bitwarden. It’s free and open source, but you can pay for a subscription
if you don’t want to self host for synchronisation between devices. It’s very cheap and no doubt worth it.Also Aseprite, for pixel art and custom format exports.
Edit: looks like both these programs are just straight up fully featured and freely available now.
Sync between devices doesnt require a subscription?
I use it on my desktop, laptop and phone, no issue
Never paid a dime
For real, I had been using Bitwarden for a couple of years for free and it never once had to show an ad to ask me to buy it’s subscription. I just realized that it was giving me tons of value, and that prompted me to buy the (fairly priced) subscription. That’s a gold standard imo.
I saw a banner in the extension telling me the premium version existed once, but it wasn’t very intrusive
Libresprite is the open source alternative and it’s nearly identical.
what kind of synchronization between devices are you referring to? I’ve never had a subscription and have used multiple vaults on numerous different devices
Basically storing an encrypted backup of your secure content so that a password you add to bitwarden on desktop can be accessed via your phone, accessible via a login.
ok, that’s basic cloud sync, which is a core free feature of Bitwarden, not a premium feature. you don’t need to purchase a subscription for that, it’s literally the fundamental purpose of any modern password manager and is completely free in Bitwarden
Yeah it does look like cloud sync is free now. I was a pretty early adopter of bitwarden so I believe originally you had to pay for cloud sync support, but I may be wrong.
Still, I’ll continue to support them because they’re the only password manager I’ve used that has some semblance of mutual respect.
Aseprite is free if you compile it yourself, isn’t it?
It used to be gpl licensed
Right, but it’s still free (even for commercial use) under the current license so long as you compile it from source yourself and don’t share the binary. The author just has some weird thoughts about the GPL.
Hmm odd. So there isn’t really much of a difference between using libre sprite and aseprite.
Wip3out 2097
Photoshop used to be worth the money. The move to subscription based comes at a time when alternatives are starting to catch up though, so that time (of being worth it) may be coming to an end.
There’s no reason to pay for Photoshop now if you’re just starting. Affinity is free (as in beer) and full-featured.
In the world of music production Reaper is an insanely good deal with a fantastically refreshing licensing system.
I haven’t used Reaper in a while, but you can technically use it for free with full features by perpetually using it in trial version mode right?
Yes!
The developer is pretty insistent on saying that Reaper is NOT free but also that stupid licensing schemes for other DAWs like the horrid iLok and others only punish people who actually buy the software, which is self-defeating since the pirates are unaffected by the ways in which the tool is made worse for people who actually bought the tool legally.
I bought it simply because of how incredibly refreshing this was, free open source DAWs have gotten better since I did but there used to be barely any accessible, lowcost ones that were fully featured enough to be useful. Now there are open source options like Muse and LMMS but the thing about Reaper is it isn’t a budget/hobbyist DAW, in many ways it is an industry leading software so even with good FOSS DAWs out there Reaper is still well worth it.
In specific, a lot of people use Reaper for live performance of software instruments as Reaper is an efficient beast at running complex chains of software effects efficiently… and yet a lot of people also use Reaper for mixing and production because it has such high quality audio processing capabilities. Reaper is a behemoth.
Reaper can do more than 99.9999% of people are capable of using it for.
This would have been mine. I generally only donate rather than buy software, but reaper is an exception.
Same with Renoise, though I haven’t bought it yet myself. Pretty cheap by Western standards, especially compared to the big DAWs, but excellent for its particular workflow, i.e. a tracker. It’s actively developed too.
DaVinci Resolve.
The software is free but not FOSS and on Linux paying for the h.264 support is nice.
Keen live is a good alternative but it feels like an advanced form of movie maker to me and lacks polish. If you learn it KDEN Live can be powerful.
I came to say Davinci Resolve. I got it for $300 with the “Speed Editor” keyboard and a lifetime license. Worth every penny.
Kagi. Search that actually works, with no ads. Worth every penny.
Another happy Kagi user here, and I also hate sounding like a shill but I’m really so glad I use their product. Not having to parse through ads and AI slop when I’m busy and looking for info is so helpful when I’m trying to work.
how is it better than ddg? genuinely asking
I like ecosia
They have ads but… they donate their profits to help the coimate
They even have a breakdown of their economy on their site
DDG still does top ranking of advertisers even though they aren’t directly targeted to you. Kagi puts the most relevant information to your search regardless to what it is you search. You’re also able to uprank and downrank different sites you want to see more or less of in your searches. For example if you’re someone who looks up a lot of medical terms for work or something you can completely block sites like WebMD from taking over the results making it harder to find more relevant information to it. Not my exact use case but have been a Kagi user for probably 8 months now and it’s 100% worth it for the rankings as well as Kagi Translate since it has a proofread feature that replaces Grammarly for me as a dyslexic that has to write a lot of emails.
thanks very much for this info. i can see the appeal of personal ranking. appreciate the details.
I don’t know, I never personally used DDG much pardon (I should have, can’t recall why I didn’t).
Why do I always see so many down votes when Kagi is mentioned?
I didn’t downvote, but probably because they’re a young USA-based search engine that requires login to use - which is usually a huge red flag for privacy, and their privacy of user searches is claimed but has never been verified by any kind of audit - another significant red flag.
Why trust another for-profit Palo-Alto search company with your search data, assist their (potential) tracking by logging in, and pay for it in the process?
Wouldn’t using their Privacy Pass solve this?
So, wait… pay for search, which we need you logged in for and ‘we swear is private bro, honest - but oh hey, if you want a search that’s definitely actually private and we promise it (harder)’, pay them more for a Professional/Ultimate/Team plan to unlock Privacy Pass access … that is uhh, a fresh red flag.
Further, you can’t access Privacy Pass (PP) searches via their standard search engine page… you can only access it by installing and using their closed source browser, or their closed source Android app, or their closed source browser extension… So again its just ‘trust me bro’ but you’re paying them more, and each of the technologies they require you use to access the Privacy Pass can theoretically track all of your data in far more detail than a search engine alone? Mate, from my perspective it’s privacy red flags all the way down.
I mean I get it, how do you have a premium search engine that your users pay for to avoid ads, while also identifying that they’ve paid, while guaranteeing their anonymity/privacy? That’s a tricky thing to solve, but the way they’ve opted to solve is arguably even more suspicious. Open source client code (at least) to validate the server service could not be using the PP tokens to link to a specific user would be a right way.
I think it might be one or both of:
- people are sick of seeing it mentioned. I’m not a shill, I just really like the product.
- they are indignant about Kagi occasionally using Yandex when it compiles search results
In both cases, meh. I’m answering the OP question with my opinion, and hopefully somebody finds it useful.
Some people don’t like the Dev also.
Also that Kagi is working alongside AI instead of resisting it. I’m not thrilled about that part either, but it’s not a complete deal breaker for me since I can just choose not to use it.
IMO, LLMs are a tool which are sometimes useful; I like appending a question mark to a query to get a quick answer. But I agree that the AI work should be kept to a minimum. At least they are using models which are far more sustainable and lightweight.
Thanks so much! I wouldn’t have known about it had people not talked about it. It’s only been a much or two since switching to kagi and I’ve been happy with it.
Kagi is definitely worth it.
I’ll be a lifer for Kagi. I still twitch my way to Google sometimes from a lifetime of habit and every time, it’s like a little check-in, and I think, “oh, god, it can’t have gotten this much worse since last time, can it?”
TeraCopy if you move lots of data around.
However, even with a pro license, I still got an ad notification in my task area recently pushing their other software. Fucking hate advertisements that go out of their way to interrupt you.
Fucking hate advertisements
that go out of their way to interrupt you.The rest of that sentence literally defines the procedure of advertising.
Well yeah, just emphasizing I already paid for your software.
Demand a refund or compensation.
I should. But I bought it multiple years ago and I didn’t care that much. But I will definitely think twice next time I need some software to not use them.
I’ve never seen ads and I use the usual free TeraCopy at home. Are there supposed to be ads? (I don’t have a pihole or anything that’d be blocking the ads at the network level)
No, I could have just kept using free. But I was using it a lot and felt like I should pay for it, otherwise free software may not be available in the future. I think it was like $20.
Fair and reasonable. I don’t use it often and have nearly finished moving entirely to Linux, otherwise I may have done the same (its Windows-only).
BuzzKill for Android.
PocketCasts used to be, before they went subscription.
Love Buzzkill 👍
PocketCasts is subscription? I don’t think I’ve seen anything indicating that to me and I know I’m not paying a subscription for it.
If you bought it before it went freemium, you’re grandfathered in.
Oh word? Nice… I guess I paid at one point to remove ads
God damn Matt Mullenweg. I have mixed feelings. I like the services that he keeps buying but I don’t like all the things he’s doing to them.
Guessing he has a sizable legal fee to make up for nuking Word Press credibility.
Anyway PocketCast now has a subscription and I hate it.
