Which monthly subscription service do you highly recommend and why?

Nebula. It’s a video streaming service that is ad free and directly supports the creators.

https://nebula.tv/

It's crazy that we live in a time where you have to add to your answer that it is ad free
I also have a Nebula subscription and recommend it as well. $60/yr or a $300 lifetime subscription.
- Frequently you can get discount codes from the creators on there. I think I paid $20 this year.
As a fan of Jet Lag and the crew, it pains me how expensive it is outside the US.

Um subscription to what? Is none an ok answer?

I pay for my fibre, and my phone. They're indispensable.
Oh and a VPN
I can see why people pay subscriptions for media, but people who pay subscriptions for software or services are a massive problem. If people refused to use a service as soon as it turned to a subscription model, the idea would've died out
Nope, folks are fucking stupid
- What’s wrong with paying a subscription for a service that requires resources to continuously operate, such as email hosting?
- I don't think of phones as subscriptions but ok, yeah, they are somewhat needed, so fine, especially if you use it enough.

A bus pass maybe, that way you can just get on and not have to fumble around paying the fare when you board.

I live in the Los Angeles area and have a car but yes, I have the bus pass on my phone for when I don't want to drive or just have a short trip in town. It's great!
- Maybe it’s just my area but there’s also like, a 25% chance the reader won’t work and you’ll just get a free ride if you try to pay with your phone rather than cash. It makes hopping on the bus a fun gamble!

A reputable VPN, preferably with port forwarding (I use AirVPN, $5/mo and I have no problems with it.)

A Usenet provider and indexer (Newshosting is reasonable; nzbgeek offers a lifetime subscription)

Do you use the VPN to hide your traffic or to access foreign streaming sites?
- Yes. And to watch porn when I'm visiting family in Texas.
- Yo, we don't ask that kind of questions here!
- Narc

Paying the subscription for The Great Courses is absolutely insane value if its something you use regularly. Its not a credit system like Audible, its literally unlimited streaming of university level courses for 20$ a month (or like 12$ if you pay annually). The individual courses can cost upwards of 100$ so even if you only take one course every two months you still haven't lost money.

It's infinite learning, i cant shill hard enough.

my library gives them to me for free through hoopla
- Thats awesome! Do they offer the whole catalogue?
Oh this seems like something I'd be interested in for sure. Thank you!
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/
- You bet! It's even better if you have a braindead job like I do, then you can spend all day learning and getting paid for it.
Youtube and OCW have infinite amounts of that, why pay some company?
- Because they don't want to sift through tons of garbage to find the good stuff. I presume.

YouTube Premium. I watch a lot of content on YT. I work from home and will generally have something on in the background while I work, so I'm easily consuming 10+ hours of content a day. It's honestly worth it for me, if for nothing else than to avoid the cat-and-mouse hellscape of adblocking. I'd rather pay $25 each month and have everyone in my family have an ad-free experience on all their devices no matter where they are or what network they're using, than having to help them troubleshoot browser extensions and DNS settings and PiHoles and all that.

Edit: Absolutely insane that people are upset that I pay for a service I make use out of, lmao

It also pays the creators better than ads ever did or ever will.
Sure you could pay them all individually, but that gets tedius real fast when you like hundreds of channels.
- Yeah, I've got a lot of channels I subscribe to. I don't know the total count right now, but last I checked it was 100+. Some of them are daily/weekly uploaders, but I think a majority of them are much less frequent. If I had the means, I'd rather financially support those creators directly, but that's just impossible for me right now. So at the very least, I'm making my views more valuable to them.
It's funny to me that people have such a problem with YouTube Premium. There are a LOT of reasons to criticize YouTube/Google, but YouTube Premium is about as close as it gets to the platonic ideal of a video subscription service. It completely banishes any ads you'd get without paying, and it provides the creators you watch with more value than someone watching without premium. If showing ads is unacceptable, and paying to not see ads is unacceptable, then what's the alternative? People have to make a living, and servers don't run on magic.
- It's funny to me that people have such a problem with YouTube Premium.
  Just means you don’t see or agree with their point of view.
  YouTube Premium is about as close as it gets to the platonic ideal of a video subscription service. It completely banishes any ads you'd get without paying
  I don’t understand what you mean here (could be because English isn’t my native language). For YouTube premium, you still need to pay. So how does it banishes ads without paying?
  Anyway, you still get in-video sponsors which doesn’t get automatically skipped by YouTube’s “premium”. A lot of people (included myself) find premium expensive for what it is. I, personally, don’t need the whole package for €15-20/monthly. It could’ve been like €5/monthly to remove ads.
  Sure one could use advantage of currencies but ain’t worth it when there’s uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock for Firefox, SmartTube for TV, uYou+ for iOS and ReVanced for Android.
  If showing ads is unacceptable, and paying to not see ads is unacceptable, then what's the alternative?
  It is not that’s “unacceptable”, it is the price and ‘value’ you get out of it.
  People have to make a living, and servers don't run on magic.
  Google/ YouTube (whatever) as a company are immensely rich. Toning down the price or change their tactics won’t hurt them so much. But of course they won’t, I would not either because eventually there are people who will gladly pay the €15/monthly. So why change?
I had did a premium trial and totally agree. I am always suprised by the people who expect a service as big as youtube to be entirely free.
As predatory and invasive as google is, its still a small miracle that theres a free add supported tier.
I subscribe to YouTube Premium because I do watch a lot of YouTube plus you get YouTube Music included. I wanted to switch to Spotify but after years without seeing ads on YouTube, I don't think I can go back.

Having your own domain is pretty cool, even if it's just a single page with some text and links to social media profiles.

Premiumize. I dont fully understand. But they have server farms thst will download your torrent, and then you download the file from them. Its faster and your IP doesn't see it as a torrent. You also dont have to leave ypir PC on if there's only one seeder. If somone else has downloaded thst torrent before its already in the farm and you visit download it from them.

However the main thing is they integrate into Kodi and my new fave Stremio. So you can just stream anything anytime without all the torrent stuff I just mentioned.

Proton Mail. High quality mail service where they don't mine your emails for data to sell. It's like 4-5 bucks a month depending on how you pay and it's been worth every penny.

They are always giving you goodies as a bonus for being a subscriber. I second the proton subscription

PBS, specifically the Passport that you can get through your local PBS. You get tons of content and you support public broadcasting

Dropout and MeansTV

Dropout is a mostly improv streaming service, very high quality entertainment and a chemistry between performers only seen between people who love each other, it's like watching a friend group of very prepared comedians. It's about 6 bucks a month and password sharing is encourages

MeansTv is a worker owned streaming service aiming to provide information and entertainment tailored for a class conscious audience, it's mostly documentaries but they're really good and i've seen many ideas from all the left spectrum, it's about 10 bucks a month

public library

here the subscription fee for one year is about as expensive as a single book.

Your highest quality local newspaper (includes online).

A privacy-respecting mail service: I use mailbox.org since it follows email standards, but I think many ppl like Proton mail/Tutanota. Recommend because they are privacy-respecting, and self-hosting email is way too difficult
More of a yearly subscription per-se, but a personal domain from any domain registrar. Recommend because why not? There are so many cool things one can do with a domain: custom email, your own blog, professional website for job, ...
A VPS from Linode (or any reliable provider). Recommend because some things are better done on a VPS... and I want a public-facing IP that is not directly from my bedroom
I used to have subscriptions to the local arcade. Recommend because I basically get cardio workout on the DDR machine (and it costs less than a gym. And easier to cancel)

Protonmail is great, it comes with cloud storage, a really good password manager, and a very fast VPN. The linux experience is mid for their apps, but great on MacOS or Windows.

I have two:

di.fm for all your electronic genres music needs (with bonus rock, classical and jazz streams).
Kagi for a search engine that actually tries to give you proper results.

Been listening to digitally imported since the winamp days! Never subscribed though. Good stuff!
- Yeah, they've been around for ages and are still excellent. I'm also very glad they still support actual audio streams and don't require some stupid app.
  (No affiliation just a happy customer.)

http://404media.co

Outstanding journalism from four independently-minded journalists doing their own thing.

Thanks for sharing, looks great.

Volumio - Multiroom audio service. You install the os on a pi and hook up some speakers. The basic streamer is free for local files on a single device at a time. I paid $200 for a lifetime pass a few years ago. That gets you multiroom synced audio like Sonos and lets you add in streaming services.

Qobuz - Music streaming service. Much higher quality than Spotify, no shitty MQA like Tidal. They will have articles diving into a genre, band or record label with links to notable albums. It's "station" playlists and similar artist recommendations are garbage but I'm more of an album person.

Fyi, Tidal dropped MQA in July and moved to using FLAC. https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/06/tidal-officially-dumps-mqa/ I like Qobuz too, and I support and encourage their mission in the streaming world. But personally I find more of my favourite artists are available on Tidal than on Qobuz. Unfortunately I find the tidal "station"-style playlists are also garbage. Nobody has a chance to effectively compete with Spotify's algorithm on that front.
I like Qobuz, but it's worth noting Tidal has discontinued their usage of MQA in favour of FLAC across the board.
I've never heard of Qobuz before but just signed up for the 30 day trial. Thank you!
Never heard of Qobuz. Been looking to replace yt music. Their algorithm is trash.
- Ugh I miss play music. It was such a good service. YT music was a joke as a replacement.

GeForce now. As long as you have streaming speed Internet you can play so many games, at such high quality.

Microsoft game pass, I haven't tried it with the above because I don't have great Internet (I've got grandfathered into the intro price of GeForce now, I'm not canceling it, I'll have better Internet some day), but it's better than browsing games at my blockbuster/warehouse/Hollywood video back in the day.

YouTube premium. I've only listen to ads when I've first turned on a new phone, every time I do I count my money as well spent. Add in YouTube music (much better than Spotify imo) and I'm good for 95% of my media input.

A hundred bucks a month on various content creators. Not listening to ads in my podcasts, not having to fast forward and rewind, and supporting the people who make my life happier, it's a win win.

For Microsoft Game Pass I look for deals on cdkeys.com or eneba.com and get Ultimate for $6-7/month. Been doing it for years.

Monthly Donation to Lemmy Dev or to your favorite FOSS dev.

You know why!

My own domain name, on which I host a whole array of services (such as this Lemmy server). Bitwarden is also cool, I pay for it even tho I self host it to support development. But even if one doesn't self host, it's still worth it. Only 10€ per year for such an epic service. A VPS at Hetzner is definetly worth it. A relatively cheap service for all the stuff you can do on it.

Having my Nextcloud instance for file storage, podcast, syncing my phone and photos, etc.

Tidal for music is 10x better than Spotify if you need music streaming. Otherwise buy albums on bandcamp.

More like a yearly subscription, but Down Dog. Keeps me active and I never get bored with them because the app is very customizable!

Do you do the yoga or which classes do you do?
- I only use it for yoga, but a friend also uses it for meditation and rotations

Just tried free version of Pycharm and definitely going to pay for it.

I have been paying jet brains for years for pycharm and will continue to for maybe forever.

If you like rock and roll then I recommend Night Flight streaming service. They were running a deal if you paid for the year it cost less than $5 a month

I'll check it out thanks!

So far I have yet to have many problems with the cheapest ProtonVPN plan, which I think it roughly $9.99USD a month. Their Linux application is nowhere near as nice looking as the winblows application, but at least it works.

Deutschlandticket JugendBW. It's the Deutschlandticket for students in bw for 1€ a day. It is a single ticket for every public transportation (bus, tram, train, ...) expect the long-distance trains.

That's a good deal!

People not coprotations.

In other words, things like Patreon or FOSS projects, where you subscribe to a "person/small group" to support whatever they do.