Services I Recommend
NOTE: This list will grow (or shrink) over time. Keep an eye on it periodically if you want to see updated summaries from me.
I’m a sucker for overhyped services and products. The bigger the promise (and more unlikely it is to be true), the more I’m sucked into the marketing pitch. I wish this weren’t the case because I often find myself frustrated when reality doesn’t match my expectations, but it’s a fact about myself that I’ve accepted long ago.
It isn’t all doom and gloom though! Every once in a while a service or product comes along that not only lives up to my expectations, but exceeds them. Although rare, there are a select few services that I’ve come across that make me exceptionally happy. Please enjoy the following list of “services that don’t suck” - I will happily shill for them seeing as they restored some amount (albeit small) of faith in company promises.
Kagi
I could write an entire article on why I like Kagi so much. If you haven’t heard of Kagi, (first crawl out from under your rock) they are a paid search engine service. The concept of paying for searches might be off-putting at first, but bear with me.
In order to justify spending money on searches, it’s first important to understand just how much that data is worth. Proton (the company behind ProtonMail and other services) has a great blog article enumerating the total cost of your data to companies like Google and Facebook. In short, if you live in the US then Google is making roughly $393 per year from your search data. It’s important to realize just how much you’re handing over to these companies for free, and even more important to understand that they don’t have your best interests in mind.
Without going too far into a privacy rant, we’ll assume that you agree with the premise that limiting the amount of data Google collects from you is important.
I’ve tried many alternative search engines (Brave, Mojeek, etc.), but never found one that continually offered quality results. My searches are usually simple in nature, and revolve around technical or niche topics. Google used to be fine for the bulk of my searches, but the quality of the results declined significantly over the last couple of years. Funded-by-ads sites and AI generated content consistently plagued the top results, which was less than useful when trying to find answers to niche problems such as “wine 8 issues with the battlenet launcher on freebsd”. Naturally I began looking for alternatives, and stumbled across Kagi.
I was initially opposed to paying for searches. It’s yet another subscription for something that has always been free. However after giving the free trial a shot, I realized the service was worth every penny. For $10 a month I have zero issues finding meaningful results to queries such as my FreeBSD question above. Most importantly, the best results are listed first! (What a novel idea). There are plenty of levers to pull, such as: down-ranking certain sites, “lenses” to scope searches, and helpful icons to let you know if the article is behind a paywall or uses a bunch of trackers. I have had no issue finding the results I need quickly, and I’ve discovered plenty of high-quality, smaller blog sites in the process. Kagi is what Google used to be, but better.
Kagi promises not to sell your data, and I have no reason to doubt them. Their business model is sound, and their devs/founder are real people that you can talk to on Discord. Although not the most scientific test, I usually judge a site based on how many queries are blocked by uBlock Origin. When visiting Kagi or any of its search pages, the total number of blocked queries is 0. Alternatively, the same search on Google results in 25 (and counting!) blocked queries. That’s enough proof for me!
I could write more about Kagi, but they have their own blog and their features are regularly documented much more coherently in their changelog. I highly recommend giving their free trial a shot. The cost per year may seem high, but is less than the total cost of your data. Kagi has a good breakdown of this on their site.
SourceHut
SourceHut (SrHt) is a suite of tools for hosting, building, and deploying projects of all kinds. You can think of it like a GitHub competitor, but that wouldn’t quite be doing it justice. I’m a fairly light user when it comes to SrHt features - I mostly use it to store files, configurations, and a few side projects - however I do also host this blog site through the pages feature. If your project requires CI/CD, IRC, or mailing lists, SourceHut has you covered.
The service currently costs me $2 per month. I believe it is still technically in beta and payment may be optional (not sure if this is still the case), but the subscription fee still makes SourceHut a steal even if you only ever use it for its site hosting feature. Yes, it is another case of paying for a service where alternatives are free, but if you value your privacy and want to deal with a support team that actually cares about you and your issues, the cost is completely justifiable.
The interface itself is bare-bones if you’re coming from a JS heavy site such as GitHub, but once you get the hang of the workflow it’s very refreshing. The site works completely without JS and boasts no tracking or advertising - something I greatly appreciate. When running it through my scientific “uBlock trackers” test, I can happily report nothing is flagged or blocked while using any of the SrHt services. The documentation is great, and I get a sense that the team behind SourceHut actually respects their users. I’ve only had to contact them once regarding a temporary email service issue, but the support was helpful without coming off condescending (something that can’t be said for quite a few other services I’ve tried).
Probably the biggest difference you’ll notice when working on software through SourceHut is that they use a git-send-email workflow. I won’t get into the details of it here, but the team was kind enough to throw together a site and automated service that walks you through getting started with the git-send-email workflow. You can find the tutorial here. I highly recommend giving this workflow a chance - it makes so much more sense to send patches instead of forcing all of your users and contributors to clone your entire repository in order to contribute tiny tweaks.
I don’t have too much else to say about SourceHut; they’re a solid service that has “just worked” for the year or so that I’ve been using them. Occasionally I’ll branch out and explore some of their other offerings, and those also “just work”. They do exactly what they say they will and, even though my uses are simple, they have caused me zero grief. All of this plus a focus on user privacy and respect makes SourceHut an easy recommendation from me.
US Mobile
US Mobile is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) for Verizon, T-Mobile, and (soon) ATT&T. For those that may not be familiar with this concept, you can think of MVNOs as “renting” space on the one of the big 3 providers’ towers and reselling it to consumers at a discounted rate. This almost always results in massive savings for the consumer.
Sounds great, but what’s the catch? The catch is that you usually give up perks, benefits, and run the risk of having your speeds throttled if you blow past your allotted “premium data” amount. The benefits you give up are usually discounted “partnered” services (such as Spotify), or discounts on new phones through trade-ins (which are usually scams when you factor in the expensive phone plan you’re required to buy to get the discount). MVNOs make the most sense for people who just want service, and don’t necessarily care about “easy” upgrades every year or two.
NOTE: A common criticism I see of MVNOs is that there is no easy way to upgrade your phone. If you’re willing to be a little creative, there are plenty of places that will allow you to trade in your phone without locking yourself into a carrier. Usually the manufacturers will allow direct trade-ins, and there are also 3rd parties (such as BestBuy) that offer trade-in programs. Don’t be fooled by the big carrier marketing - you will lose money on their trade-in deals 99% of the time.
I switched from a postpaid Verizon plan to a US Mobile prepaid plan about a year ago and the service provided has been indistinguishable from my experience on Verizon - the highest compliment you can give an MVNO. Making that switch allowed me to save literal hundreds on my phone plan. I moved from a ~$60 per month unlimited plan to paying only $180 per year ($15 per month) for unlimited data with US Mobile. The plan uses the same Verizon towers, so my experience has been identical.
The catch is that my unlimited plan with US Mobile grants me 10gbs of “premium” data, after which my speeds will be throttled. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life where I’ve used more than 5gbs of data in a single month, so this is perfectly acceptable to me. If you find yourself using more than 10gbs of data per month and want to avoid throttling, then take a look at some of their other unlimited tiers - they will still easily beat the competition in terms of price.
Price aside, having the ability to switch between multiple providers' towers is really nice. When traveling to an area that had better T-Mobile coverage, I contacted US Mobile support and was able to easily switch to the GSM network for a period of time. Once I was back, I switched back to Verizon (Warp network) and everything was back to normal. The flexibility afforded by this can’t be overstated.
The last thing I’ll say about US Mobile is that their customer service is truly great. I’ve only ever used the chat feature on their site, but they’ve been able to help me with my requests and questions painlessly every time I’ve contacted them. Their CEO is also extremely active on their subbredit (r/USMobile), and I’ve seen multiple occasions where features and offerings have been implemented based on direct user feedback. That kind of customer interaction is unheard of for service providers these days.
I highly recommend checking US Mobile out. They’ll give you a nice free trial period, but if you’re interested in signing up full time you can give my referral code a shot:
https://www.usmobile.com/referrals?referrer=eaf3c74c61e819b&name=Ben
Get in touch with me at dev@mailcd.com!