I was going through my Wal-Mart+ subscription plan that I got for free and I saw their offers. One of which was EMeals, that was a 60-day trial. I thought that this was like Blue Apron or other meal delivery services so I thought I’d take a crack at it and hope that it would get me on a path to eat better.
Turns out, it’s just a meal planner. And it’s absurd to me why and how would anyone pay for something when there are countless and countless recipes and meal planners readily available for free. Who’d the fuck would want to pay for a planner? That’s like paying for a calendar app.
Adobe. Someone said they pay $60 a month for it, and are locked in for the year, which they didn’t even know about! All for editing photos. Just editing photos.
It amazes me the amount of people that think theres no alternative to adobe, just for their casual use. I know that for professional it has some features that no other has.
I recently purchased Affinity photo, which did most of what I used to use Adobe for. No subscription, one time purchase, and I’ll likely never need to worry about that again.
I tried gimp a few times and found it frustrating to use.
Holdup. It’s $60 a month for the adobe suite, which give you access to like 30 aps, including a video editor, DreamWorks, illustrator and a whole bunch more. It’s only $20 a month for thw photo suite, which gives you lightroom, photoshop, and bridge. The $60, a month for the suite is absolutely worth it depending on what you are doing.
Bottled water to drink at home.
Not every country has safe tap water
And even if it does, it might taste horrible.
Even Los Angeles tap water isn’t safe to drink, as I understand it. Flynt, Michigan, too.
Ok, so: bottled water to drink at home in countries with safe drinking water.
I have a worst example, people who showered with said bottled water when we had a water supply issue in my town…
Much better)
Not every home in countries with safe tap water have safe tap water at home
Not even every state, look at Flint, MI …
When you put tap water in a bottle and put it in the freezer, so you’d have a cold bottle of water for an entire summer day, the water from the tap tastes “saltier” for some reason, while bottled “spring” water doesn’t. The “saltier” taste is kinda unpleasant 🤷♂️
Also my city has some chemical spill into the river where the city gets the water supply from, they gave out a emergency alert very late, and the city wasn’t really transparent about that whole ordeal, some people in my city are already doubting the safety of the tap water, reminds me of Flint, Michigan, so I kinda just don’t like the tap water 😖
Undersink filter with a dedicated drinking water tap. Removes the chlorine taste that is probably what makes you think salty. You can get the whole setup for $75 and install it yourself. The filters are $40ish and last 6-12 months.
Some fridges have cold filtered water taps built in.
This drives me insane. The 5 gal jugs are so cheap to refill and keep using. I used one of those with a hand pump and a thin 1.5 gal jugs for my fridge for constant cold water when I lived where tap water wasn’t doable. It was like 10¢ a gallon to refill the jugs and I always had delicious cold water at the ready. There is absolutely no need to create so much waste
Becareful, because if you don’t clean the jugs, they will eventually not be safe to drink out of
As an American, Turbo Tax. I’ve been using FreeTaxUSA for almost 20 years with no problems, without paying for filing software.
But if I weren’t American, my answer would probably be: tax software.
Most countries don’t have tax software.
They have a website usually. A free one, from the government. That calculates their taxes for them. You just have to check if it is correct from your side.
How are they at dealing with investments?
For my simple needs (mortgage, 401k, couple different IRAs, and a managed investment account) it did great.
It’s funny that the IRS has now been offering their own tax-free service. Intuit thought they could strong-arm people but even the IRS thought “no bruh, you’re crazy”.
I just never saw the appeal of paying for tax software/services, well maybe I can see it in services because there’s still a lot of people that have trouble with filing taxes and they may be in unique tax situations that they don’t understand.
But Tax Software makes it stupid easy to understand so it should not be something we pay for.
Do they do imports from like betterment and vanguard?
In many other countries (such as mine) you dont use tax software. The government figures out what you owe or overpaid. Because they have all the info they need to know that.
Tax return filings in the US. There are free options provided by the paid companies… So that they can prevent real changes.
Kinda like pharmaceutical companies when the public demands cheaper prices. The pharmaceutical companies fight back with “what if instead of that we set up some programs that people can use for cheaper medicine! Win win! Then you don’t have to make any real changes that might hurt us?”
Same with taxes. The accounting software companies and advisors companies said “wait hold on, you don’t need to make taxes simpler and tank our business. Keep them complicated and well offer free alternatives that are just as easy as our paid services that people can pick if they don’t want to pay! Win win!”
Which obviously I think is a crap solution. However if you are paying for someone to do your taxes you should stop. There are a lot of easy free services out there that make it pretty much effortless. They are just as good as the paid services now.
Tax return filings in the US. There are free options provided by the paid companies… So that they can prevent real changes.
https://directfile.irs.gov/ (Or Google “IRS Direct File” if you don’t trust links)
Directs File goes directly to IRS, without going through a third party company.
If your state doesn’t have direct file, then you’ll have to find a “IRS Partner” that gives a free option:
https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/browse-all-offers/ (Google “IRS Free File Trusted Partners”)
Remember: Government sites always ends in .gov
This year I haven’t worked any traditional employment, but have done various projects for friends in exchange for money.
When I just had a typical job, taxes were almost fire-and-forget easy…but I’m a little worried about that whole process this year to be honest.
A lot of times the free one only covers that “I have a typical job” case…but anything different and they’re like “OH YOU NEED BUSINESS-OWNER PREMIUM PLUS” or something.
(I haven’t started a business and earned maybe 4 figures this year…) 😅
(Conditionally) journals, studies and some books. And, for that matter, most television, film and music.
Particularly when paying is not supporting the creator, only the publisher.
Windows
I paid for my calendar app, cause it had a feature I needed no standard app had plus it’s pretty good in other regards. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m curious the feature.
I had a job with fixed days of a month shifts. And at least at the time, a lot of calendars couldn’t create repeating events for let’s say every fifth Saturday of a month. they all knew first, second, third or fourth but fifth, no luck. And aCalendar+ knew and knows that.
The meal subscription services strike me as premade salads on steroids. You’re paying a premium for all the labor, ingredients, (excessive) packaging, shipping, their profit, etc and you still have to put it together and cook it. It really isn’t that hard to look up a couple of recipes, buy the ingredients (you’d probably be going to the store anyway) and prep for 30 or so minutes a night. If you make full recipes you’ll probably have leftovers so you won’t even have to cook the next day.
Did one for a while. It cut down on grocery store trips and meal planning so it gave some peace of mind, but I prefer either cooking simple meals or large meals (for leftovers) and they were neither. Most were delicious but took anywhere from 30-60 minutes. Most sea portioned for two so I ended up cooking nearly every single night and I hit a wall with it.
I can definitely see why people do it, sometimes the cost is worth the convenience.
I was actually enjoying Blue Apron for a while, mainly because it was stuff that I’d never thought to try making before, but the amount of trash generated from each box delivered was too much for my conscience. I wish they didn’t use so many plastic wrappers and had some way of returning the boxes with the insulation.
And it’s way too much charge for the quality of the meat and produce. They give ground pork at beef steak prices and the produce isn’t as carefully selected as I would have picked.
The insulation alone with them and Hello Fresh had me hang them up for good after a couple tries. It was nice to try recipes I wouldn’t think to search online for but yeah, that packaging situation was god-awful.
I agree for the big ones, but we have a local one I’ve subscribed to a few times, for a couple months at a time.
They pull all the ingredients from local farms, do local delivery or pickup at farmer’s markets, and they’re minimal on packaging, and they reuse the bags and ice packs. I haven’t done it in a while but it was pretty nice and it was helpful to break out of the routine of the same meals week in and out.
Water
As somebody who grew up with perfect tap water and then moved to Detroit, I used to think this.
Edit: I guess I should say I still think this for a lot of places. When I got my parents house the first thing I do is drink a big cup of their amazing tap water.
Hear hear. When I rented the water was great, didn’t use a filter. Out where my parents live, their water is brown occasionally.
Where can you get free water? Unless you have a well or something.
Where I am the cost of water is rolled into the local authority tax. It’s not metered, so it feels free. It’s pretty good water too.
I think this persons means bottled water.
Tap water is so cheap it might as well be free, and it’s probably included in the rent in a lot of places.
I guess it’s not free in places that need to have a revolution first?
Slightly more expensive in places with local water scarcity, like the American southwest. But yeah, we still need a revolution
Antiviruses
Ad-free internet stuff.
Computer Operating Systems
A lot of Software actually
- Books
- Porn
- Streaming Services
- Bottled Water (if you have access/the means of purchasing a filter)
- “Buy now, play later.” Just buy it later and avoid the fees.
- A lot of “Courses.” There are so many free resources online.
Yes, porn is free, but the companies that host it are utter garbage. They pay next to nothing, claim ownership of the content, and don’t care if a person is being exploited. Finding a person that you think is awesome/sexy and supporting their content means custom tailored and personal fun-times; that the adult content creator is the one who gets paid; and that it’s unlikely they’re being forced/pimped/trafficked.
Free porn is perfectly cromulent and there’s a lot of variety; but if you can afford it, supporting a person is better overall. I used to create erotic cosplay photography for a living, so I’m all too familiar with how screwed up things are for sex workers.
Gray market license keys for software. The money you’re paying for these will never make it to the developer, so you might as well pirate.
It’s more convenient to have a license. I only buy those when the developer is being scummy
On that same idea, camrips sold out of the back of a car. I knew someone who bragged about being able to get them and I always thought they looked like ass. They just liked acting like they had hood connections.
A lot of them don’t even lie about it as much if you read between the lines. GreenManGaming, HumbleBundle are the exceptions to that.
But places like CDKeys, G2A .etc yeah you can’t be assured that anything you buy from them is going back to the developer. If the developers so much even hears the existence of these kinds of sites, they’d be protesting to have them shut down.
Then there’s people paying for pirated software in CDs/DVDs
Social media.
I do not get people who still pay for cable tv. My dad pays like 120 dollars a month for it and the programming is horrible, the ads are insane, all the best sports shit is on streaming services now, I do not understand it at all.
Inertia?
Or is there some local channel that they like that doesn’t have a youtube presence?No. And they also have Netflix. So they understand streaming shit. It boggles my mind
How technical is your dad?
Also honestly. Sometimes it’s a lot nicer to just push a button and have something come on.
One of the main reasons I use Plex is their random feature. “Wanna watch a syndicated episodic show and don’t care which ep? Press random” vs other streaming services you have to actually choose an episode.
Not very at all
I’d like to see a clever implementation of one-button “channel surfing” in an app like Plex.
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