$9.99/month

One practice that&#x27;s helped me is to always cancel immediately, which translates to only paying for one month. Ie. for spotify, netflix pay for the subscription, immediately jump through the hoops to cancel.<p>Forgetfulness turns into money savings, and as a bonus I get to review whether I am getting much out of it. Especially for tv like disney&#x2F;netflix&#x2F;apple tv, I often run though everything interesting and don&#x27;t have much else to watch with them.<p>Also psychologically there&#x27;s resistance to a boring to do that involves loss. I will put off &quot;go to netflix and figure out how to cancel.&quot; So do that work when you are excited to see the new show.

Is it typical to spend so much on software subscriptions? I pay for Spotify and a cheap VPS if that counts but that&#x27;s it. I figured the average person probably has one or two media subscriptions (Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc) and nothing else.

One thing I think may be underrated by many:<p>We cancelled Amazon Prime, and besides the annual fee, we noticed that our household retail spending went down significantly. It turns out that when it takes more than 1-click to buy stuff… we buy less stuff.<p>As far as convenience, one of the reasons we felt it was time to cancel is that we can just as easily get almost anything we wanted from Amazon direct from the seller or via Target&#x2F;Best Buy&#x2F;B&amp;N&#x2F;B&amp;H. Surprisingly, this is often cheaper than Amazon (and almost never more expensive). While there’s a bit of added friction to think for two seconds which store to check, the benefit of fewer impulse buys seems worth it. Plus, we haven’t ended up with any crappy knockoffs since we bailed on Amazon.

This kind of calculation is what convinced me to quit smoking before going to university in 1990. Cigarettes were $5 &#x2F; pack. I smoked a pack a day.<p>$5 x 365 days x 4 years = $7300.<p>Given that I was saving up the money beforehand, quitting was the difference between starting school in 1990 or 1991.<p>I felt like a &#x27;cold turkey&#x27; for about three months. But it was so worth it.

I always find these discussions interesting. The risks that the article outlines around losing track of how much you&#x27;re spending are certainly real, but there&#x27;s two things that strike me around all of this:<p>1. I somewhat object to them including things like Disney+ or MLB in this calculation. Sure, it&#x27;s an app subscription, but you&#x27;re primarily not paying for an app with its features and development, you&#x27;re buying access to content that you happen to be receiving and paying for via an app. You wouldn&#x27;t include subscriptions to products on Amazon as an &quot;app subscription&quot; even if you bought it through the Amazon app.<p>2. I&#x27;m curious to balance the rise of the subscription model with what I see as a generally increased quality and upkeep of many of the apps that are on it. There&#x27;s obviously exceptions, but apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced. Many of them are on the cutting edge of using new OS features well, for instance Carrot&#x27;s widget support is amazing. I&#x27;ve totally forgotten the dread of an OS update where half of your programs just stop working for weeks or months, or even forever.

I am frankly astonished by this article and all of these comments. Right now I have only 3 digital subscriptions totalling $20.58&#x2F;month. (Admittedly that&#x27;s low right now; I usually have an additional 2 streaming services, rotated every few months, for maybe another $25&#x2F;month).<p>The key thing to remember is that any recurring subscription costs us theoretically infinite money (given infinite time). Obviously we won&#x27;t have that subscription forever, so it&#x27;s up to us to calculate how much it will cost us over the next month, year, decade.<p>Any time someone says &quot;Just $N per month!&quot; all I hear is &quot;costs infinite money unless I do something about that.&quot; This thought really helps me resist leaking money like that.

Corporations have essentially enacted private taxation on the public. Sure, you are paying for a service, but does the service you receive <i>really</i> add up to what everyone is paying for?<p>I&#x27;m not even that old, and I still miss the time where you could simply buy software or a digital product and it didn&#x27;t change out from underneath you all the time. A lot of the time, it feels like you&#x27;re paying these corporations to test their software for them. For example, we went months while the voice search on our YouTube TV app went away, presumably part of some A&#x2F;B testing, or when Amazon temporarily (on the order of months) removed the ability to see pending orders and pre-orders.

I haven&#x27;t even heard of 90% of these things. It seems hard to believe that people could have so many things in their life that need paid software solutions. I get the feeling that most of these are solutions trying to invent problems instead.

I am a retired, mid-30s, former IBEW electrician.<p>That there are even so many subscription models, and that a single person&#x2F;family could spend THOUSANDS of dollars, annually, on &quot;apps&quot; ... just blows my mind.<p>Definitely, I&#x27;m &quot;an old fogie&quot; : I still use a pager for incoming contact; I still mainly use Mac OS 10.6&#x2F;10.8; I have an iPod, which is outdated but task-specific (and I enjoy its simplicity); my kid-sister installed Pandora on the iPod, which I ENJOY (and pay for)... BUT Apple no longer offers updates for the iPod, and Pandora does not allow updating without installing an unsupported iOS.<p>The &quot;licensing model&quot; most major platforms are pursuing is alarming; when my Mac Pro 5,1 goes out, I&#x27;m not sure what I&#x27;ll do without my long-ago pirated edition of CreativeSuite4.<p>----<p>Reading about all the menstruation cycle tracking apps, and the criminal&#x2F;civil vulnerabilities some women may&#x2F;will face in some jurisdictions... is just alarming. Already, the data mined from these apps can be pretty &quot;choice&quot; for advertisers (e.g. hormonal cravings &amp;c).

I think banks should implement a feature where you can navigate to a tab on their website that shows you all repeating charges you have been paying for, maybe even giving estimates of total future cost. This would be very easy for them to implement. I have written to my credit union suggesting this.<p>This is one advantage of having an app-store manage my subscriptions - I am the person who forgets what all I am subscribed to.

Related: Substack and other paid newsletters are bringing the same energy. I have just one subscription (Stratechery, which my old job paid for and which I will let lapse) but I&#x27;m gobsmacked at how many there are. Many are actually _good_ and I would like to read them, but they&#x27;re not $100 &#x2F; year worth of good, and yet that&#x27;s like the price people default to.<p>I&#x27;m all for peeps getting what the market will support, and I love that random obsessive genius oddballs can now theoretically make a living by going direct to their 1000 true fans, but to me the value isn&#x27;t there, and I suspect most others are in the same boat. I hate myself for saying this, but I think it&#x27;s time to re-bundle.

I find subscriptions interesting. Basically any business that wants to survive since forever used subscriptions.<p>The term subscription for monthly or yearly payments labeled as that just receives a lot of hate.<p>But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise. Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.

Due to the screwy way credit works in the US I just use one card but have several (free) ones. Cancelling the others would make my credit worse; if I don’t use them for a while two companies have reduced the credit lines and I have heard others can be cancelled due to non use.<p>So I distributed my subscriptions among them (in my case news, video, apps, clown subscriptions); every month I get a reminder to consider the spend. When I had everything on one card I had only one bill to pay but these subscriptions were buried in everything else.

It reminded me of a youtube video were a chief was explaining how to cut vegetable quickly. One of the comment said: &quot;I can cook diner with what this guy throws away&quot;.<p>Well years ago, I used to live an entire month on what this guy spend yearly on subscriptions.<p>I could now afford all this, but it still seems odd to me to spend so much on this.<p>I guess old habits die hard.

A cheap way I’ve been keeping subscriptions from getting away from me is to log each one in a spreadsheet with name, type (monthly, annual), amount, and renewal date.<p>Using this, I can find things to cancel when I want to sign up for something new. It also helps point out opportunities for annualizing monthly subscriptions I want to keep for additional savings.

&gt; didn&#x27;t think my list was particularly egregious. There&#x27;s Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a few more<p>At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a <i>weather app</i> not egregious?<p>Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people&#x27;s irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn&#x27;t pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 &#x2F; year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can&#x27;t know whether the author really needs 2TB.

I&#x27;m surprised there isn&#x27;t a straightforward financial app that could tell you all this information with an intuitive graph.<p>I&#x27;d pay $9.99 a month for that.

Two things from this article stick out to me:<p>1) The author was paying for both Bear and Craft. To me, they serve the same purpose - Markdown notes editors with a sync component. I tried both out (and liked both) but have since settled on Obsidian because I like being able to see my notes as .md files on a device I own.<p>2) The author mentioned Microsoft Office was a lifetime purchase in 2021 which confused me - are they are referring to Office 2019 instead of Office 365? I don&#x27;t believe O365 offers a lifetime option.

A lot of times what people dont realize when they get sticker shock from these recurring revenue models is what the price of the software would have been if the company wasn&#x27;t willing to accept a future cashflow instead of the full discounted present value.<p>I think people don&#x27;t really realize how expensive life has gotten because most of us dont pay full price for anything anymore. Even the idea of $12 a month for a heated seat ruffles some feathers, but many balk at the idea of paying $1200[1] upfront for a heated seat. Perhaps because they don&#x27;t have $1200, but they do have a (presumed) income stream of $12 a month.<p>Ultimately I presume the internal rates of returns really benefit the companies (eg, maybe discounted using credit card rates)<p>[1]: (made up number to illustrate the point)

Yup. YNAB says my &quot;software subscriptions&quot; averages out to $92 a month, and that doesn&#x27;t include Apple music, Spotify, Audible, Kayo, Prime, and Stan, which would be around $90 a month also, off the top of my head.<p>Not sure if I should include Prime, since I signed up for the shipping, but I do watch it more often than I watch Stan.<p>I should probably go back to torrents. I just wish I could buy&#x2F;rent individual shows and movies like you do on iTunes, but each platform has such a limited range of content, I no longer feel like we&#x27;ve made any real progress from the old days where you&#x27;d have one big subscription to Foxtel or similar.

I&#x27;m a big fan of privacy.com: they provide me with a spend-limited debit card number that varies by vendor. I use them especially for newspaper subscriptions that make it difficult to cancel and have balloon renewal payments.

If you’re deciding to buy a subscription you should calculate the price for 2 or 3 years. So it is comparable to other things you buy. New phone (I will use it for 3 years): 1000$. Some weather app, 2.99 per month, so 107$ for 3 years, is it really worth it?

Wow, this person is wild, so much wasted money. I don’t have any digital subscription. Any, I’m not kidding. My only automatically recurring expenses are utilities: phone, internet (both subsidized by my employer) and electric. I can’t say my life has been impacted at all and I am certainly not a hermit or anything like that. My girlfriend and I live completely normal lives in a major US city. Most of the stuff is just junk.

A CEO I worked with a while back just cancelled her CC every few months. Then she&#x27;d resubscribe to things she was still using. She said she didn&#x27;t have time to cancel all those subscriptions individually. I thought it was poor form since a lot of services bill at the end of the month and would never get that last months due.

Love reading this discussion, even though it feels to be primarily limited to unix&#x2F;linux users in a US-centered echo-chamber. (I&#x27;m in Europe)<p>Regardless of what the author is spending his money on, I think he is along the median of subscription spend in most of Europe. (counting software and services(streaming, podcast, amazon prime))<p>I&#x27;m not a huge fan of subscription-by-default myself but it has grown on me for certain apps&#x2F;services. I used to pay $xxxx for a software package and now pay a price per month and getting way more updates, and I can easily cancel at any given time, and resume when I need to with the latest version.<p>As a professional user, I&#x27;m amazed at the amount of people not willing to pay for their daily tools, but I guess that&#x27;s another discussion.

&gt; My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year<p>Maybe I&#x27;m the crazy one, but how is this a lot? First, almost all of the apps are used by multiple people (Apple One Premier, the VPN, MLB, NHL, etc.). Second, let&#x27;s assume a family of four with a US average salary of $55k for both parents. We end up with a household income of $110k, so the subscriptions are 1.3% of gross income. This is barely a blip on your financial radar.<p>If your household income is $200k or above (which, let&#x27;s face it, most HNers probably do earn), worrying about these subscriptions (which in this case would be &lt;0.6% of your gross income) would literally not even be worth thinking about.<p>I know HN has a thing for penny pinching, but if you&#x27;re trying to build wealth, this ain&#x27;t it.

Is it unusual that I have zero subscriptions to anything?

I would be embarrassed to post a list like that. This &quot;consooming&quot; just for the sake of it. Like part of their identity is paying for subscription services. I wish I had the writing skills to fully elaborate on why this irks me so much.

My subscriptions amount to b2 for backup (&lt;1$ a month), a Linode for projects&#x2F;experiments from time to time (5$&#x2F;month). Everything else I&#x27;d rather pay a flat fee to own it or find a free alternative.<p>The author&#x27;s list is ridiculous.

I pay for my VPN, one health app and one productivity app. I&#x27;ve left a ton of software behind. I moved to self hosting, piracy, and free software alternatives that are good enough.

Things like buying coffee (a hot cup of coffee while out and about) is not something I started doing before I had a full-time job. It would have been mad of me to do that as a student.

I’m finishing up making my family a GAAP family (kinda joking, but mostly serious). I’m doing this to understand where my money comes from and where it goes. Think YNAB, but including paychecks, etc. against a family of four. Built with some hand crafted software on top of hledger, too.<p>Anyway, we’re at about $80&#x2F;mo, largely dominated by Apple One and Google Cloud subscriptions (though I’d love to move off the latter, but lock-in). What really gets me is the cell phone bill, though.

I don&#x27;t have any subscription aside from utility (including network).<p>I don&#x27;t watch Netflix&#x2F;Disney+ (anymore) as I realized there are too many good free contents out there on YouTube and such, and modern shows are pretty much garbage comparing to X-Files and &quot;Yes (Prime) Minister&quot;. Those two and a few similar old-timers can keep me entertained till death (I&#x27;ll just loop through them every year).<p>I don&#x27;t have music subscription. Actually music subscription is a very alien idea. I buy cheap CD given the chance and they stay with me for a very long time, while subscription service could screw people if they want.<p>The only subscription I really have a motivation to purchase are high quality magazines. I don&#x27;t have any yet because I&#x27;m a bit picky at the moment. I once purchased a year of &quot;Archaeology&quot; but then realized I don&#x27;t really get much from it. It goes a lot more in-depth with books and academic papers. Actually, with the boom of Internet, very few magazines have reason to exist. I really enjoy the PoC GTFO magazine but it&#x27;s free. Anyway I&#x27;ll probably keep spending $0 on magazines and more on books.

I see a lot of potential for the EU* to mandate an API that each company offering software or service subscriptions would have to implement. The goal being that every end user can have a central point where they could see all their subscriptions and cancel them at any point in time.<p>* or any other powerful government body

I use disposable revolut cards for all my subscriptions..<p>Makes me only pay when I use the service in coming months

Yep, they certainly do add up! That&#x27;s why I refuse to subscribe to any app. I will never, ever, subscribe. I&#x27;ve abandoned apps I love when they transitioned to subscriptions.<p>Note that I do subscribe to <i>services</i>. Disney+ and Amazon Prime provide a service. I also subscribe to Deliveries (which is $5&#x2F;yr not $7 as the article states) to track packages. Again it&#x27;s a service not just an app; they actually do something on the backend-- I autoforward package notifications to a special email address and they&#x27;re immediately added to the app. Very convenient.

Most of my subscriptions are for video services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max.. But some of the software subscriptions present there and my current monthly bill comes to little bit over $150&#x2F;month. Well, at least it is what Bobby (iOS app - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;bobby-track-subscriptions&#x2F;id1059152023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;bobby-track-subscriptions&#x2F;id10...</a>) says. The only problem I need not to forget to add&#x2F;update subscriptions. There are apps which will track these things for me, but will require to share access to credit card&#x2F;bank accounts, which I don&#x27;t feel like providing.

I went into the Subscriptions page and found a few subscriptions to cancel.<p>Thank you Apple for making this easy to do, but they&#x27;re the ones who pushed everyone into a subscription model to begin with - by staying stubbornly at 30% for purchases, but 15% for subscriptions.

I just can&#x27;t figure out one thing: why would one ever want to buy a Twitter subscription?

I saved a little money last year by going through my subs and purchasing annual subscriptions where available. I think on sites like Substack and Patreon it&#x27;s determined by the creator, so you might be able to message them and ask for an annual option.<p>I found it odd that my own digital subs, which number precisely 19, have almost no overlap with the author! Only Disney+ (which I don&#x27;t actually pay for) and NordVPN. I guess that&#x27;s a testament to how many digital subscriptions are out there today. And a good sign that people are actually <i>paying</i> for things more now instead of being data-minded into oblivion or force fed grotesque ads.

&gt;At $3&#x2F;coffee (black, nothing fancy) purchased on average four times per week across 4.5 years of school, the total came to roughly $1,700<p>$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K<p>A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.<p>And the best thing is, you don&#x27;t need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.

I had the same idea about saving on coffee around 2003. I started making coffee at home. But I found that a drip coffee maker needs to make a minimum of about 4 cups of coffee to make proper coffee. I was only drinking 2 cups, and I was throwing away 2 cups. This seemed like a giant waste too. I used this to justify a fully automatic espresso machine that makes a variety of coffee drinks one cup at a time without extra waste. The payoff (in savings) of the fancy machine was quite long but totally worth it in the long run. The first machine was done after about 12 years and I&#x27;m on a second one now.

I recently build a importer for Beancount to allow me to import AppStore orders into beancount to analyze my subscription situation there. From my experience I want to accuse Apple has make this particularly difficult against user to do this kind of analysis easily.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chazeon&#x2F;beancount-extra&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;importers&#x2F;itunes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chazeon&#x2F;beancount-extra&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;impor...</a>

Highly recommend an app like truebill or something that analyzes your bank account! I found subscriptions to things I had totally forgot about etc. and saved a significant amount of money right away.

For some services, my friends and I are sharing accounts, even if it&#x27;s not intended by the services. It works very well for streaming services (I&#x27;m fine paying €4 a month for Netflix even though I rarely use it), but with two very close friends (who I trust a lot), I&#x27;m also sharing a YNAB account because YNAB&#x27;s subscription prices have become ridiculous.<p>All in all, I pay &quot;only&quot; about €35 a month total for all my subscription services even though I use quite a few.

Hardware is also turning into a subscription-like model. You can&#x27;t upgrade a component on your iPhone or Android without needing to purchase a new phone. With Macbooks, you can no longer update the hard drive, battery, and RAM. You must purchase a new Macbook. Remember the recent story about BMW charging for heated seats in South Korea, another hardware as a subscription idea.<p>I read that Apple is considering a subscription model for iPhone devices. That will formalize what is already implicit.

With this many subscriptions, no wonder piracy is up, not to mention free and open source alternatives to many of these apps, such as with weather, productivity or note-taking apps.

I&#x27;ve become more open to paying for subscriptions over the years—especially for apps that continue to release updates or provide new content.<p>Just to add another data point, I&#x27;m currently at $858.21&#x2F;year:<p><i>Music, TV</i> Apple One (Family): $19.95&#x2F;month Amazon Prime: $139&#x2F;year Formula 1 TV: $79.99&#x2F;year<p><i>Fitness</i> OpenSnow: $29.99&#x2F;year AllTrails: $29.99&#x2F;year Strava: $59.99&#x2F;year Strong: $29.99&#x2F;year<p><i>Learning</i> Lingvist: $9.99&#x2F;month Waking Up: $99.99&#x2F;year<p><i>Misc</i> VSCO: $29.99&#x2F;year

What I don&#x27;t see anyone discussing is the value that the subscriptions are providing. Isn&#x27;t that the real justification we should be looking for? Rather than just saying &quot;life-time fee vs subscription&quot;?<p>For a time I was subscribed to Nuraphones (headphones). I had no problem with the subscription because I was getting value from the headphones. Sure, I looked at the cost of paying outright vs monthly, and the monthly made sense to me.

That’s why I have a personal finance spreadsheet.<p>Also I despise subscriptions

Say you are building an app or service, does anyone have rules of thumb to setting subscription amounts or tier levels?<p>As a consumer I like subscriptions because I can easily calculate, “how much time and effort do I spend doing X, is it worth $_____ a month for that?”<p>My career has been enterprise software for internal apps so I’ve never sold software before. Setting costs feels like a WAG (at least initially).

Subscription model should be abandoned and replaced by paying for actual time using&#x2F;consuming. Many useless apps would die immediately, scammers would be reduced and innovation would grow up.<p>More subscription = more consumerism = less time for creativity. And more work to pay all subscriptions. It&#x27;s a trap.

What I usually do these days is subscribe to a streaming service when I want to watch something then immediately cancel my sub. If I need to extend that it’s a couple button presses away. I generally find I do not. The only service that sucks with this is Netflix, as they often delete inactive accounts.

This is a simple hack, but I just put everything that is recurring on a single credit card (auto insurance, cell phone, app subscriptions, etc)… it really strikes home to see how much your monthly nut is. It also helps to not have these charges buried in amongst Ubers, lattes, lunches, etc.

&gt;The findings shook me. My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year<p>I want to know how much you earn yearly.<p>So let&#x27;s assume this person makes $50k&#x2F;y after taxes. How is 3% of your yearly income paid for stuff you use shocking? It&#x27;s really not that much...

I tend to try to cancel some of mine a few times a year and renew the next I need them. That might be a two weeks (save 5%), a month (save 10%) or more.<p>This is also another reason (besides the credit card savings) why SAAS companies offering yearly deals really makes sense.

Currently I’m working on a app that helps you keep track of your spending including subscriptions. I myself ran into this problem of what&#x2F;where my money is going.<p>Keeping track of spending habits is hard to see just from looking at your bank transactions.

This list is particularly egregious.<p>I have a Netflix and Amazon prime subscription and that’s about it.

We came to a similar calculus, nearly the same cost of unattended subscriptions. Dropped the obvious ones, and for entertainment, we usually have 1 a month, and actively decide what we&#x27;re going to bing watch.

I tend to avoid subscription services. But it means I watch more Asian drama than US TV. &quot;Log in with your television provider?&quot; What television provider?

Somewhere along the line I automatically started internally multiplying monthly payments into yearly payments. It really helps when I&#x27;m in the decision stage.

I currently have two online service subscriptions: Posteo (e-mail) for €1.20&#x2F;month, and a VPS for €5&#x2F;month.

&gt; Twitter: $36&#x2F;year<p>Why is he paying for Twitter?

BMW sells heated seat subscriptions to car owners, starting with $18 a month.

A good reminder - thank you for sharing.

I&#x27;m surprised that this crowd in particular is so incensed by someone paying $125 bucks a month for their software. If anyone knows how much it costs to make good software and run a company that operates and maintains, I&#x27;d think it would be HN.

Stupid title. Re-do.

That is an unreal amount of money to be spending on subscriptions. I can&#x27;t imagine paying more for software every month than my mortgage.

I don&#x27;t understand, 1,700 per year is nothing.<p>You&#x27;d need to spend twice that amount just to acquire decent coffee equipment. Then waste a huge amount of time teaching yourself how to source good beans, make good coffee, not mentioning the time needed to execute and clean up even when you have achieved mastery.<p>No, buying from a coffee shop with trained baristas making coffee all day is a much better deal, unless you&#x27;re in need of a new hobby.

Kudos to OP for spring cleaning, but the idea of many of these being subscription services to begin with is outrageous to me.<p>Software as a service rarely makes sense on a scale of 1.<p>- 1Password (Family): $59&#x2F;year. Replace with a shared spreadsheet.<p>- Bear: $20&#x2F;year. A markdown editor for Apple devices.<p>- CARROT Weather: $40&#x2F;year. For the weather.<p>- Day One: $32&#x2F;year. A personal journal app that runs on &quot;unlimited devices.&quot; Why, unless writing the journal with a team of ghostwriters?<p>- Lost It!: $28&#x2F;year. Supposed to be Lose It!—a weight-loss app? Replace with books: The Blue Zones, Spark, Self-Directed Behavior.<p>- Habitica: $63&#x2F;year. Habit tracking, gamification. Replace with books. These are tactics, not technologies. Learn the tactics once and use them for life.<p>- Ulysses: $67&#x2F;year. A writing app for Macs. What could justify a recurring fee?<p>- Squash 3: $41&#x2F;year. A batch photo editor for Mac for resizing photos. Like the free IrfanView or many others.