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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Wip3out 2097
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.
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.
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.
This is an outbound application firewall for MacOS that allows you to block applications from phoning home. It blocks outgoing traffic rather than incoming traffic, which can be toggled within the firewall settings. It has a time-limited trial period, but I did the one-time-purchase for 9 $ and it served me well since I bought it in - I think it was in 2021 - originally to keep a not-so-legally-obtained Photoshop Suite from connecting to their servers. The app is not intrusive, no annoying pop ups or the like. The app launches automatically at system start up. Occaional updates (bug fixes or to match with the latest OS version) are included with the licence.
Today I use it to block a pirated version of SketchUp (the only remaining software I have installed that has been pirated) from calling home, als well as Affinity 2 (and, probably in the future) the now free Affinity 3 (since it was aquired by Canva).
I consider this app worth its money.
Have you ever used Little Snitch? It’s another great MacOS app that has an outbound firewall. It’s been updated to include a DNS ad-blocker too.
I’ve been very happy with it for many years, but I’m always open to trying out alternatives. Thanks for sharing!
I did once. It was back in the days when all of my software was pirated - even Little Snitch (where you had to add Little Snitch itself to its blocking rules, to prevent it from phoning home). As far as I can remember, it was too expensive to buy - at least for a permanently broke student at that time. Later I discovered Radio Silence. I wrote that I had RS from 2021 onward, but I think I already had it in 2018. Not 100% sure.
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.
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.
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.
This would have been mine. I generally only donate rather than buy software, but reaper is an exception.
There are games I pay for, but only on Nintendo consoles. Aside from that, it’s strictly write it myself or go without.
I definitely should donate to more FOSS projects, though.
Divemate, better than keeping logs in different apps if you change computers. Android only, sorry. If you chew the fruit you gotta find something else.
Plex Media Sever used to be great and well worth the lifetime pass. With the recent UI changes I would drop kick it if I could. Sadly the other options just don’t work right with large libraries.
Torque pro is nice especially if you have a turbo charged vehicle. Free is fine if you just need to check codes.
I feel like there are a lot of people who hate on Plex here, but for me it’s really been super solid so I always try to advocate for it. JF wasn’t for me. Buy once/use forever, great capable interface, great apps (downloads work perfectly now), and I never need to fiddle with it. I replace a Synology package every few weeks when they release a new version and it just keeps ticking.
I paid $89 for it on sale, and I’d definitely groan if I had to pay $250 for it today, but I’d still pay it. I’m just glad they’re paying hardworking folks to make the software I’ve used EVERY DAY for years. It’s the buy-once-cry-once model we wished every other software vendor would go back to.
I agree it’s super stake and works well. The new UI for TV’s is a fail.
There is a school of design thought that says you should be able to navigate to what you need in 3 clicks or less. Old school windows xp is an example, most everything needed was start, mouse over programs and click to access it. It you used it frequently it was start, click on the program. The longest was start, control panel, and then the app you needed.
Plex’s new UI has me hitting the back button so many times it’s faster to exit and come back in when before it was a simple scroll left and move around. To get to movies I have to move up then click multiple times and move down to browse instead of just moving let and clicking movies. As soon as anything else is able to support my library and allow me to use an old school plex interface like what the web browser still does Plex is dead to me. They have already stated the new UI is the future and they are going to eventually move to a more roku type model to profit from streaming. If they would keep the old UI available for people who prefer it I would stick around. They also split the android app so you his need 3 different apps if you have video, audio, and picture libraries.
I feel you on the UI changes, I’ve definitely noticed the extra clicks, and there is also a bit of a weird pattern when navigating between the main content area and the top bar where the selector wants to go to the left navigation pane.
I still feel fortunate every time I open up Plex that it exists, and I’m sure that their devs hear enough criticism on the internet that I try to leave something positive for them to find. So until the day that Plex operates anything close to the miserable experience that is a Roku in 2026, I’ll keep using it. I maintain perfect metadata and file naming for just that day.
