Do I believe that privacy should be a commodity that I need to purchase? In a perfect world, no. It should be an inalienable right, just as clean food, fresh water, and shelter should be. Sadly we don’t exist in a perfect world.
Do I believe all privacy preserving tools should be free as in beer? No. People work hard to make these tools and deserve to be compensated.
I believe in making recurring annual contributions to projects that improve my daily security, privacy and anonymity .
Linux Mint
Proton mail & VPN
GrapheneOS
KEEPASS password manager
AEGIS authenticator
THUNDERBIRD email client
FUTO keyboard
Yes.
If corporations are able to offer a free service without you paying for the money, that doesn’t mean no revenue is made.
And these are not necessarily a discreet set, plenty of these can be happening at the same time. If you aren’t sure where the money comes from, then you should be questioning if you are the product, and if that matters for you.
I personally steer away from “free” services, and have for a while. Email, VPN, Browser, OS, Backups, even if I can get them for free, I’ll pay for them with recurring donations or by subscribing to “pro tiers”. It can add up if you don’t have a job or have trouble making ends meet, so ideally, privacy should be provided for free, and by default, but unfortunately that’s not really easy or possible in many real-world scenarios.
I agree. People have become way too spoiled with free apps and such, and act like being asked to pay for software is some sort of front.
The people outting all the work into that software have families to support too!
mullvad VPN - monthly
iodéOS Premium - yearly
njal.la (private domain name) - yearly
disroot nextcloud - yearly (donation)
i keep the amount I pay minimal. most of what you can do in terms of privacy is related to opsec and not the paid tools you use. top of my head, pay for a vpn, mail, domain & that’s it.
I won’t say which tools, but I spend about $30/mo on privacy / online services.
$287.76USD for 24 month Proton Duo.
Hopefully some other Cloud Storage providers mature in the meantime.
I pay for Mullvad. Beyond just privacy it’s useful for accessing geo-restricted content and services and using Youtube without an account these days. I also support GrapheneOS and Signal with donations when I can.
I pay for Proton Mail Plus, IVPN, iCloud+ w/ADP, and Signal Backups (previously I just donated to Signal).
If we don’t financially support privacy services then eventually we won’t have them.
Nothing is free. Privacy is worth paying for.
I operate a Tor relay and regularly donate to the Tor Project.
I pay for quite a few or donate as I’d like to keep them operating and/or hopefully remove the need to become scummy.
Yeah, let’s go!
I ponder for a while before committing to a service. What would my realistic use case be, what would I actually benefit from? Listing pros and cons, wondering what I have spent time on in the past, would I like to dabble in this or that, what do I already have, what I don’t, and comparing services with each other. Sitting on not pulling the trigger on a subscription for some time.
I didn’t, for example, take the Tuta Legendary deal of 3€ annual subscription. I just don’t need all of that. That is on taking a stance against going for stuff I do not need, even if it’d be an amazing deal.
I pay for Proton VPN (VPN+) and Tuta (Revolutionary) and I tend to get a lot of usage out of the services I pay for.
Up front it can be a hit for the budget, but spread around months, the monthly cost of the services ends up being 2.147€ + 3€.
Notesnook (Essential, 1.78€) could be the next one I pay for since I get a lot of use out of it, and would benefit from the paid offerings.
Keeping these guys around is a great thing. Support the ones who’s mission you believe in, I tend to say. Haven’t donated, yet, but some day I will. I believe this, because I’m exactly the kind of person to help others!
Some additional things that I’ve given energy to think through:
Cudy devices with openWRT support, so I can degress to using the router of a service provider as a bridge. Pi-hole, advanced internet settings, new stuff to learn, more secure (updates), more private, yay!
Cudy is a simple option since they support openWRT openly, and they are not that expensive, and are well available. They have some shenanigans going on with differentiating between v1 and v2 (you have to ask the store which one it is). This is an issue because currently only the v1 (WR3000 -line) supports openWRT.
(one could get a Cudy for a one time payment of 45-65€)
Install Linux (insert some Intermediate friendly distro X) on my old laptop and run services with that. Naturally, if that’s up and running I miraculously have a new world on my hands: the world of self-hosting. I could do so much!
(power costs of an inefficient-ish (i5 CPU 35w TDP) laptop from around 2010)
I seemingly lied about not being host email myself. I got podman stalwart running on an oracle cloud free instance, have everything PGP encrypted with my secret key never having touched the server, uploaded a disk encryption key to oracle (I think this means they can decrypt still?), and have been using their relay service to send emails.
From what I can tell, oracle relay does not store or data mine the outgoing emails, but I’m looking into if I can get a free ipv6 tunnel set to send emails. Oracle blocks outgoing port 25 and I haven’t been able to get in contact with anyone to unblock it, nor is it clear they would be willing to do so. I figure, if I get the ipv6 tunnel working, I could at least send from ipv6 to an alias service, but it’s possible I could get gmail to accept an ipv6 address. Unfortunately tuta, proton, and some places like yahoo and AOL accept ipv4 only.
It’s been enlightening, but, once my $7 domain expires I might just get a mailbox.org address to forward to a locally hosted email server. If I’m having to rely on smtp relay for outgoing emails then I might as well get the privacy respecting email for $12 to act as both inbound and outbound relay. The oracle relay is 100% reliable however and allows 100 free emails per day, which is more than I’ll send.
What surprises me is that I think my emails might actually be more secure this way than a pro service. I am not more skilled than them, but I’m able to lock things down and monitor to an extent they can’t. I’m the only user I have to worry about, after all, while I can use the very latest software without having to migrate any old data. I’m not sure I could sustain this level of attention for potentially decades though.
I agree with many responses here. And yes, I definitely pay for privacy-respecting services, for many of the same reasons I’ve seen here.
But I also wanted to add that not only does paying for private services cover the undeniable costs of the service, but it also supports companies who are doing the right things. And I think others have said that.
Something I don’t think has been said, which is related but important, is that it also establishes a clear market for privacy-respecting products. People will pay for privacy… build it and they will come.
Ideally, privacy is the default and so you’re just paying for the service because the service costs money to develop and to run. Privacy should be a given, so in that sense, you’re not paying for privacy per se, you’re paying because the service can’t be run for free.
I will say that it’s good to have a limited free tier, like Proton has, to get people to try it - and to make it available on some minimum level for people who can’t afford it otherwise. It’s basically subsidized by higher-tier users who subscribe - or sometimes by the enterprise version of something, and they give it away for personal use. But that’s not always possible.
I pay for:
Each of these services offers exceptional value for the price in my opinion. We are often cynical about the state of today’s internet (and for good reasons), but I think it’s important to also acknowledge that there are companies and individuals still fighting for a safe, secure and private web. Every dollar going to these services is 100% worth it!
I do pay for my email provider and support Signal with a monthly donation.
I also run a lot of digital infrastructure myself on my own servers at home and I’m paying rent for some virtual private servers in a data center.
Free services that are not supported by donations are always “bait”. At best, they exist to allow people to try a service and pay when they start relying on it; at worst, they turn the user into the product or combine both revenue models.
The question “should service X be free“ is a naive question. For any service somebody has to pay. The only question is: Who and how?
I paid for FUTO Voice from FUTO organization.
I still pay for Firefox Relay since it’s debut. Though personally I avoid supporting organizations like Mozilla that I find are Far Left activist with disgusting taste/views. On top of how the corporation has handled Firefox over the last 5 or so years where theyve tried to be more like Chrome in the least best ways and ignored or treated their longtime OG users. However, Im already ingrained and huge procrastinator so havent migrated to something either more neutral and that is more fiscally responsible.
I also paid for Ghostery Add-On at one point but I think it is at some point felt it not really needed over other toolsets that can do their same job.
I regularly pay for a variety of VPNs but of course. That’s a given. Although Id say I have a mix of regular and privacy-focused ones depending on content im shooting for.
I used to pay for NextCloud DNS but the devs just let it languish for several years that I stopped, but luckily for me there is not shortage of DNS solution out there.
I pay for several AdGuard products as I use including their regular suite of AdGuard products with a family plan license. As I use it on the majority of my phones or for my routers and I dont have a souped up custom router yet and Im too procrastinate-y to use that RaspPi2/3 I bought many 5 years ago for Pi hole.
These arent payments but I regularly donate to projects:
I’ve donated to an instance of the Invidious a few times but I dont heavily rely on Invidious to be honest. I just like that someone kept theirs up reliably for times that I did need it.
Ive donated more than a number of times to NewPipe. It pretty much is my replacement for Youtube especially on older devices.
Ive donated to Aurora Android Store because it’s cool.
So yeah I think those that have money are not opposed to paying for certain things if the price is reasonable and the ability to give that money is viable (ie some thing Ive wanted to donate/pay for only accepted crypto….which I dont use)
I appreciate this thread.
So much good information posted already… I’ll be sure to check back again!