Paying for Software
It’s been said, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” This is overly simple¹ but the core of truth is that if a company has a functional business model that’s not based on extracting and abusing user data, it’s less likely to do so. Incentives aren’t the only thing that matters, but they help!
I wish this weren’t the world we lived in. I wish the excesses of surveillance capitalism were illegal, that we didn’t have to worry that everything we did on the web was going to be collected and turned on us². I wish that even putting up the slightest defenses against this didn’t require either financial privilege or disengagement. I wish this weren’t an individual choice at all, but built into the fabric of the web that you didn’t have to worry about these things. We should be building toward that world.
But as long as we’re in this world, I’ve been increasing the services I pay for so I can believe I’m the customer and not the product. It feels weird to say, “Hey, you know that thing you’re getting for free? Have you thought about paying for it?” but that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. Here are a few things I pay for, from independent companies I believe respect their users. If you have the means – I recognize not everyone has the budget to decline free services – you might consider doing so as well.
I have mostly bought these services for my personal benefit and recommend them on the same basis. Arguably, doing so improves the world by voting with my dollars – but I largely suspect it will have to be government regulation and not market forces that brings surveillance capitalism to its knees.
I use Fastmail. I really like it. Some small things are worse than Gmail; other bigger things – a cleaner client, full-featured custom domain support – are better.
I was already paying Google for storage. Switching to Fastmail enabled me to delete my emails from Google’s servers and stop paying. Since the Fastmail fee ($6/mo, or $4.67/mo for me on their 3-year plan) is only slightly more than I had been paying for storage, it wasn’t even that hard of a switch to make.
Other friends use Protonmail. It’s not for me, but it’s a great option, particularly if you want an encryption-first service.
Search Engine
I use Kagi. Search results are as good or better than Google and I rarely find myself going back to Google search for anything.³ It may seem crazy to pay for something we’ve gotten for free for over 30 years, but Kagi really shines on customizability and features that exist nowhere else. Here are two that I really use:
- You can tell Kagi to prioritize or suppress results from certain sites. This has been handy for things I find myself searching for repeatedly.
- “Custom bangs” allow you to redirect search queries to other websites. For example, if I add
!cbto a search, it searches Caller’s Box for contra dances with matching titles.
Those features add some convenience to tasks I perform daily, sometimes hourly – on top of opting out of Google’s surveillance machine. For that, $10/mo (or $9/mo on their annual plan) doesn’t feel like too much to me.
Kagi also has plans to compete more broadly with Google’s offerings. They already have a functional maps service (not as full featured as Google Maps at this point) and a web browser. They’re alpha testing an email service. They also have neat projects like Small Web.
Transit
Transit (that’s the name of the app!) has a much nicer UX than Google Maps. It provides more routing options. It doesn’t share data with advertisers, but does partner with transit agencies to use the data they do collect to improve transit service. They seem like a pretty neat company and I’ve been very happy paying $25/yr for it.
Social Media
Much has been said about how destructive corporate social media is, yet we keep jumping ship to new corporate or VC-funded options (free, of course) and hope they’ll abuse our data and attention less: from Facebook to Instagram, TikTok, or Discord, from X/Twitter to Bluesky.
I still use many of these. The gravitational pull of network effects – the need to be where my friends are – is hard to escape. But I also use a Mastodon server, social.coop.
This recommendation is a bit of an oddball on this list. On the one hand, I don’t recommend it for everyone. Though every Mastodon server connects to a single virtual space (known as the Fediverse), that space is still smaller than corporate social media options. Unless your friends are the right kind of nerd, you probably won’t find them on here.
On the other hand, social.coop represents my ideals for what the web could be more than the (admittedly pretty cool) products I’ve listed above. What’s better for aligning user and product interests than ensuring users are the customers? Ensuring users are the owners.
I’ve long liked cooperative ownership models – I founded a cooperative web development agency that operated for four years. I think user-ownership is a particularly good model for web services. My money goes directly to the infrastructure and labor that powers the service and, in return, I get to play a direct role in decision-making about how that service is governed and operated.
I am optimistic that Mastodon⁴, small as it is, will prove more resilient long-term than centralized social media services, the same way that email, for better or worse, has outlasted many proprietary and centralized communication services that have come and gone in the past several decades. I’m hopeful that we’ll also see more cooperative services like this one.
I did not get paid by or even communicate with the makers of any of these products in writing this blog post. I just genuinely like all of them and wanted to recommend them!
For one thing, there are plenty of counterexamples: Users of free Linux distributions are in no sense a “product” being sold by the open-source software developers that produce them. Paying Google for extra email storage doesn’t protect you from their personal data hoarding and advertising. YouTube will still milk your attention and maybe radicalize you, even if you pay for their premium service. ↩︎
I mean, even setting all the other problems aside, the web is just way less fun when people are afraid to share photos and personal stories, join new sites, etc. ↩︎
I tried DuckDuckGo for a while and found it pretty useless. I was going back to Google constantly. Frankly all internet search is much worse than it used to be. In the war between signal and noise on the internet, noise has been winning for years – and AI slop has dramatically accelerated that trend. ↩︎
And the protocol that underlies it, ActivityPub. ↩︎