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.

Kagi. Search that actually works, with no ads. Worth every penny.

In the world of music production Reaper is an insanely good deal with a fantastically refreshing licensing system.

TeraCopy if you move lots of data around.

However, even with a pro license, I still got an ad notification in my task area recently pushing their other software. Fucking hate advertisements that go out of their way to interrupt you.

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.

Edit: looks like both these programs are just straight up fully featured and freely available now.

Moonreader Pro. It's an ebook readers for Android. The Pro/paid version has any feature you could ask for:

• reads just about any file format (epub/mobi/pdf/etc)
• has text-to-speech (everything can now be an audio book)
• you can add annotations/notes/bookmarks (and color code them)
• the annotations/notes/etc will sync to a remote server (Dropbox, your own self-hosted webdav, etc)
• it can pull/fetch books from your own remote server
• where you are in the book is also synced to the remote server, meaning you can read on your phone, but switch to a tablet and immediately continue.

Any feature, I wish an ebook reader would have - moon reader delivered (but finding these features is not intuitive).

Jetbrains Intellij IDEA Ultimate. 100% worth the price.

I know many would not agree, but for me it's 1Password. I use it dozens of times a day - not just for passwords, but also for credit cards, social security numbers, notes, and maybe the most useful, SSH keys. My whole family is covered for $5/month, a laughably low sum.

I paid for a copy of the Torque app on android. It lets you use bluetooth OBD2 adapters to connect to your car's ECU for reading live engine data and trouble codes. The pro paid version unlocks a lot more customization for data logging screens, allows you to save live data logs to your phone, and enables a wider range of readable codes... Makes a huge difference diagnosing weird engine issues in cars 1996 and newer.

donate the money to somebody who runs a fediverse server. running servers costs money every month, and that can't be eliminated either because hardware can't be optimized out of existence.

It’s FOSS software but I use it so much I donate to support it. FreeCAD. Yeah its interface isn’t the best. But compared to Fusion for my workflow it’s so much bettwr

DaVinci Resolve.

The software is free but not FOSS and on Linux paying for the h.264 support is nice.

Keen live is a good alternative but it feels like an advanced form of movie maker to me and lacks polish. If you learn it KDEN Live can be powerful.

BeyondCompare. I've used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.

Symphonium, a music app for android (maybe also iOS, dunno). I've tried so many other apps for both local and remote music, none of them come even close - I particularly like the pre-caching and rolling cache features, as there are some places I go regularly where connection is spotty, and they allow me to stream pretty much uninterrupted from my subsonic server.

For writers working on bigger projects : scrivener

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.

Reaper.

Balatro on me iPhone

Procreate on iPad. Cheap and the best art studio you can ever buy

Just a teensy iOS/macos extension, but Vinegar is awesome for watching YouTube.

I would have said the Affinity suite of stuff, but they recently sold out to Canva, and fuuuuuuuck them.

Excluding mobile apps that I've paid to make ad-free, there's only two that I'm subscribed to so I guess they're worth the money.

Other is Protonmail and other I wont tell.

If you use Android I highly recommend Niagara launcher. It's different in the best ways and very polished. I tried it for a while and happily paid for the lifetime license.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bitpit.launcher

Personally: Synergy (a formerly OSS software KVM). GlassWire.

Professionally: IntelliJ. Datadog.

I do not use MacOS anymore but when I did I have bought Pixelmator, it's really good. Atleast when I have used it, the company behind it was bought by Apple since then.

Wish there would be something similar for Linux :( Gimp is like the opposite of intuitive.

I would say for myself;

• Real-Debrid (RD).
• VPN (if RD isn’t enough).
• DayOne Diary.

MakeMKV