I have been reading about internet privacy for a long time. As time went on, I got a vpn subcription, a custom domain, a paid email hosting, etc. No regrets on the services themselves.
I recently had this conversation with a colleague of mine, complaining about the rising cost of everything including internet subscription services: netflix, spotify, youtube, you name it. I could simply disregard my colleague’s complaints as I didn’t have any of those and know the ways of obtaining materials. However, once I start adding up the privacy related services I’m willingly paying instead… they also add up into a considerable amount.
So, do you pay for anything privacy related, how much do you pay in total, and is it affordable for you? For example, many VPN providers offer yearly subscriptions around 40-50 USD.
- ~$20/year domain name
- €12/year Tutanota mail
- ~$idk yet/year energy costs of a self-hosted server (an old laptop lying around the house) which handles:
- Backup solution
- File hosting
- Wireguard VPN Tunnel
- Other free and open-source services which allow me to own my data locally.
- Sometimes €5 Mullvad VPN for if I’m traveling internationally. Otherwise Tor or my home VPN would suffice.
- 12€/year for a domain incl. backup mx and sending relay for emails
- 10€/year for encrypted backup
- Energy cost of my NAS (unknown yet)
- 48€/year for a ways service
So just under 6€/month + electricity.
I pay $110 total with $50 going to Proton for email and the other $60 going to kagi.con
@shortwavesurfer @rar any advantage in using kagi instead of various searxNG/whoogle instances that are free to use? Also, brave’s search engine is getting better.
I do like SearxNG and used it, but many public instanxes get rate limited by ddg, google, and several others due to being a proxy fir many more searches than an average user would need. This makes the results from that instance very nearly useless. I am still testing Kagi and added enough for a 2 month subscription after my free trial ends. Since it is paid there are no ads at all, targeted or generalized. Plus they now accept crypto as payment so i can use a burner email and pay without giving up my identity and they are okay with it.
Sadly, no. I used Trocador to do the exchange and set the output address to the address they told me.
@shortwavesurfer unbelievable that some corpos turn to subpar solutions like LN. Many people can’t get that working (re: SethforPrivacy’s recent tweet).
Monero could’ve easily supplanted bitcoin for use in paying kagi, or to ivpn for that matter. Ivpn has recently announced a small-time vpn subscription service, and they also announced they will take LN payments for it. Good luck getting it working.
I know. Its totally nuts. But at least kagi’s excuse is they turn it back into worthless fiat and bitcoin is easier to turn into USD. Bleh. It would be much better if they held onto it. However, accepting crypto is a good first step anyway.
