Workflow Changes and Services Evaluations
My workflow is going to be changing a bit, and this is as good of a time as any to review my current setup and services I'm using (not necessarily related to the new Mac) and see if I'm needlessly throwing money away or not. First, let's start with a list of some of the tech services I'm paying for:
- $70.00 / year: Office365 with 1TB of OneDrive
- $50.00 / year: Fastmail – email hosting
- $64.00 / year: Mullvad VPN (5 Euro / month)
- $72.00 / year: Write.as – Blog hosting
Breaking It Down
Office365
This is the first service coming up for renewal, besides Mullvad which is monthly only. Over the course of the last year, I've not really touched any of the Office apps, and the only thing really in use at the moment is OneDrive. Given I've got a Mac coming, I think I want something a little less Microsoft-centric and with Apple's office apps giving me what I potentially need, I think I can whittle this down and just look for online file storage. I do have iCloud for my iPad and iPhone, so that might be an option here. iCloud+ 200GB would come out to $36.00 / year, which isn't too bad and is just about half of what I'm paying now.
Fastmail + Mullvad
Both of these services work fine for me, and initially I was contemplating the idea of moving over to Proton (includes: 500GB space shared between Drive, Calendar and Mail and VPN) to combine the services, but I'd actually end up spending ~$10.00 more per month if I went that route. I may look at some other VPN providers and see what kind of pricing I can find. Fastmail seems fine, so the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking I'll just stay put.
Write.as
I just recently switched over here from a static site setup I was using, and honestly I'm paying for the convenience. The static site cost me nothing and was hosted over on Netlify, and honestly I'm thinking about that again especially as I look into getting a better handle on my budget since my move. As much as I like the interface, I'm definitely considering a migration back over to the static site generation side of the fence.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, I've got some things to think about and research. My goal is to be paying for services and getting everything out of them I can. That is, not paying for something and never using it (I'm looking at you O365). I'll post an update after I've done some research and made some decisions regarding what comes next.