Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

[Galaco]

Recently my wife and I have recently been trying to organize our lives together a little more, and consolidate+manage the tools and services we use use.

For example, we have a family email address (for shared bills, banking etc) and have use cases for a VPN so we pay for a ProtonMail Family subscription to include both. We also pay for 1Password Family (until ProtonMail's ProtonPass is good enough). I was considering paying for Notion so we could manage our various existing Apple notes, lists etc in a shared space (although I think it's overpriced for this use case).

This got me wondering what other software or tools are out there that have found their niche amongst bringing families value. What software (or hardware) have you bought/maintained a subscription for that has had a positive impact to your family life?

[leonidasv]

Kagi, a paid search engine.

I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking.

Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains from results in one click - a refreshing experience. The AI quick answer is on par with Bing's (more accurate than Google's), but the best feature is the possibility of banning/re-ranking websites (such as those SEO-spam ones).

This feature is probably the one any family member will find useful: prioritising websites they like the most and blocking/down-ranking those they dislike. For example, I hate Pinterest and have banned it. My girlfriend, on the other hand, loves it and gave a better ranking. Guess that's what customisation is for...

The lenses are probably also family-worthy, since you can quickly create personalised results pages for good sources for homework research, safe online games for children, trustworthy news for your grandma, etc. But I've never used it extensively yet.

There's also some minor features (auto-login link for anonymous tabs, bangs, news, etc) that you pretty much expect from a search engine nowadays, too. IMO, the most complete and efficient search engine I've used so far.

[binwiederhier]

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences.

I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as my default in the browser.

Maybe I'll give it another go in a few months, but for now it's not for me.

[BrandoElFollito]

My own family dashboard. I did not purchase it but wrote myself and it was a life changer.

It is an always-on screen (during the day) where everything family oriented happens: all our calendars merged for today and tomorrow (and important events within 6 days), weather, when kids are back from school, info when I am on my way back from work, various alerts on stuff breaking at home, etc.

When I finally installed it, my wife told me to get rid of this monstrosity. After a few days I just switched it off one evening and the morning after it was chaos at home. Switched back and fast forward to 7 years and there we are.

Probably the most useful thing I built in my life.

[BrandoElFollito]

OK, taken the unexpected comments :) I will do a longer write-up here and point to this block to join the comments together.

The aim of this dashboard is to be always-on with the following information displayed (a link to an image of the dashboard, there is not much available at this moment: https://imgur.com/a/pHSIBcO)

- current time and date

- current temperature as seen by Netatmo in my neighborhood

- estimations for rain in the next 60 minutes - from Météo France

- weather forecast for today and tomorrow

- all family calendar merged for today and tomorrow + specific events within 6 days

- alerts when there is a water leak, or when something is broken, or when flowers need water

- when are kids coming from school today and tomorrow

- information when I am driving or biking from the office with estimated arrival time

This is powered by a keyboard- and mouse-less old Raspberry Pi and displayed on an old screen mounted on a wall (one day it will be neatly mounted IN the wall. One day.). It is displayed with

I am not a developer but wanted to do the software part anyway myself. There were several changes over the last 7 or 8 years. Initially I wrote a backend that would query the information from the various sources but I ended up with a purely client-based SPA that connects to Home Assistant, which in turn retrieves all the information and keps state.

The frontend was the opportunity to learn JS/TS/Vue and I rewrote it three times to learn Quasar and recently to move to a pure Vue3/Vite/TailwindCSS frontend. It was a fun trip. It helped me enormously to also learn how to interact with APIs in less-ideal conditions.

I also tried to directly use the dashboarding capabilities provided by Home Assistant but I did not really like everything. I may revise this one day if I get a touch screen (a touch monitor) because then it makes sense to use the widgets HA has natively.

Coming up next: the ability to have several screens switched by a button

[theshrike79]

We're going to need some details :)

I tried doing this with an Android tablet, but the screen is just way too small. Now there are really nicely sized (15.6") USB-C -powered displays for around $100 that could be paired with pretty much any Raspberry Pi to do the same.

Or I could just shove an old 24-27" inch display on the wall with a VESA mount...

[endisneigh]

Seems like a fun project but couldn’t you do the same thing easily with a shared combined calendar and a tablet of your choice displaying said calendar?

[morjom]

Care to detail it a bit more? How much did you use frameworks if at all etc (you did say you wrote it yourself so probably no framework, or?)

[dugmartin]

I’m planning on using MagicMirror (https://magicmirror.builders/) to do this in my kitchen but without the mirror part (just a TV mounted in a niche on the wall). Did you build your software from scratch?

[seanlane]

- Bitwarden: Been great for sharing passwords and other secrets. We moved to it from LastPass, never tried 1Password, which seems to have a lot of proponents here

- Syncthing, Restic, Backblaze B2: Syncs photos and other files from devices to a NAS, then Restic to create backups locally and on Backblaze B2. For the in-laws and others, I make sure they're backed up using Google Photos or Apple iCloud

- Jellyfin: Streaming our own movies and shows.

- Tailscale: Connect to the home network from anywhere

- Caddy server: Reverse proxy in front of the services like Jellyfin

- Paperless-NGX: Document repository that's hooked up to the scanner and email accounts to keep things organized.

There's a few other ones that get some use, but we use the above almost daily.

[ivanjermakov]

I was surprised how easy it is to get going with Tailscale. UX is on point, plus very generous free tier. Can recommend.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Google photos, I have all devices syncing photos to one place and now I don’t need to worry about did in-law A remember to backup their phone when they inevitably lose it at the grocery store. Arguably the only remotely important thing we have on our phones is photos and maybe chat history but it’s not earth shattering to lose that. Despite having more photos of ourselves than any other generation ever, It’s still soul crushing to lose family photos.

That said, I’ve been gradually losing trust in Google storage services so I’m searching for alternatives (and not finding anything remotely as good unfortunately).

Key features I live by * search by ocr, object, location, face * multi-platform sync * originals storage * auto-face match * duplicate detection

[yasuocidal]

I have a server, a small project of mine, and i installed nextcloud. Now my whole family and close friends use it to backup our photos. The official app for it is exceptional for syncing (you can set it to ONLY do the sync when charging or other parameters). There are other benefits of nextcloud (contact backup/Calendar/Messaging etc) and you can set it up on a raspberrypi with an external hard drive, throw it near your router (preferably both on a UPS for an "always on" solution) and forget about it. All the management can be done though the web interface (updates, new apps which you could find something helpful to you, etc ) and the installation is pretty easy.

If you decide to go with it, i recommend that you get a domain and set it up as a DDNS through cloudflare.

[muzani]

Not clear if you use it, but there's a family setting to Google One too at no extra charge. So my wife gets the extra space for the same payment. We use about the same amount of space for photos, so it saved us from each having our own subscription.

I'm not sure if this is related to having a YouTube family subscription but it worked seamlessly for us.

[climb_stealth]

I have been paying for and running ente.io on the side for similar reasons. It works pretty well on Android. On iOS it's not quite set and forget yet. But I feel like it's getting there bit by bit.

I don't trust Google Photos to be there for us in the long run. That said I have been paying for it and using it for years without a major gripe.

[pcdoodle]

I would not trust google for longevity of service or privacy of my photos.

[barbazoo]

I've been running Immich alongside G Photos and it's great all things considered.

[eddieroger]

Todoist. My wife and I can share lists, assign tasks, track completion, all sorts of stuff. It’s not perfect, but I’m really mostly happy with it.

Also, setting up an iCloud family. Most of the sharing stuff we can do can be done without being in a family unit, but it makes it that much easier since it makes assumptions about who I wish to share with. From there, native Notes, Calendar, all that stuff has made our life so much easier.

Agree with 1Password family. Being able to send direct links and not passwords is amazing.

Interestingly, a theme here is that these tools allow me to have work stuff and personal stuff alongside each other, but still somewhat isolated. I think that’s more than a coincidence.

[lstamour]

1Password family has been hard to get everyone on… one or two people yes, but not the entire family.

YouTube Premium is probably the only thing everyone in the family uses significantly and frequently… but mostly because they don’t notice it. Netflix, Disney+ maybe go without saying. Alexa/Google/HomePods too, mostly for music playback. Spotify Premium has excellent family features also.

Background but storage from Google One, Apple and Microsoft Office are also frequently used and relied on.

For me the hardest part is actually telling family what they could have access to - I wish there was something like https://duo.com/assets/img/leadin-images/sso_leadin_img.jpg but included all the content, apps and subscriptions we share, regardless of service provider. Whatever it is, it has to have tight integration with mobile and desktop computers so I and others can push notifications like, “Amy just signed up for NYTimes, add a shortcut and saved password?” Or a banner appears or customized Kagi results that could say, “Listen on Spotify,” if that’s what we have signed up for would be nice.

I’m thinking it might work like Apple’s notifications for health and/or activity sharing, where you get to see what others do, but instead you get to see what you have access to via the family, etc.

I tried setting up enterprise style accounts and domains and even a Google Site for this purpose and it went nowhere. Everyone already has logins and identities and half the problem is no one wants to visit “yet another website” just to find out what’s new. I haven’t tried making an app with push notifications and installing it on everyone’s devices with a web browser extension, but I also have to admit, I’m tempted to develop such a thing. Might also be useful for very small startups, etc.

[theshrike79]

I tried the Todoist thing, but it was way too expensive for what we needed it for.

Now we're using OurGroceries for grocery lists and just plain iOS Reminders for other stuff

[bazmattaz]

Can you explain the direct links feature of 1password please, I haven’t heard of that

[Eggsellence]

I've been Todoist user for many years, premium user as of this year. As well as reminders, tasks, and appointments, I use it to quickly take notes, record thoughts, etc.

It's been great until this week when I hit their ridiculously low limit: 300. That's not many tasks/notes, especially as each sub task is counted individually too.

Why is it so low? I'm a paying user. I'm probably burdening their servers with all of 10kB of text! It's such a gut punch, it makes me regret paying for it a little, just because of how petty and hostile it comes across and because of how needlessly disruptive it is to my usage.

If anyone from Todoist happens to see this, please bump that up by an order of magnitude or two. For premium users, at least. It's awful. It breaks your product for me.

[hypertexthero]

I don’t have to, but I pay for Open Broadcaster Studio’s software through their Patreon page because learning to use it to stream was fun, made me learn valuable skills, and helped me make new friends and keep in touch with old ones.

https://obsproject.com/

https://www.patreon.com/obsproject/overview

[rumblestrut]

Not family wide but very personal: MacroFactor. It healed my relationship with food, and helped me lose 60 lbs. Worth every penny ($12/month subscription).

[jolux]

Huge fan of this app. It's really changed how I think about eating on a fundamental level. In particular I learned very quickly I wasn't eating enough protein, and since adding more protein into my diet I'm much less tired and also believe I'm thinking more clearly.

[syncbehind]

Recently learned that my insurance pays for Noom subscriptions. I've been using that, and have found it to be similarly beneficial for myself. Have you used that one before?

I'd never heard of macrofactor until now.

[dinkleberg]

MacroFactor is where it’s at. It is so much better than MyFitnessPal.

[chasd00]

We all (family of 4) have iPhones and use FindMy to see where everyone is and when they’re going to be home to time dinner. We also have a family chat on iMessage that really comes in handy.

[Bielecki]

My family use Google Location Sharing for the same purposes. Chat is on WhatsApp, just because my parents has a lot of friends there so I just adapted to them.

[simbolit]

So you are using FM not as an emergency tool, but generally? Does that mean in your family everyone (potentially) always knows where everyone else is? Is there a rule for when/if it's appropriate to turn FM off?

Please don't read this as me judging; if that works for you, great, I'd (as far as i understand it) not want that, but it's not my life.

[BrandoElFollito]

Bitwarden. I have an easy way to exchange a huge amount of data (not only passwords) across my family with specific access rights to objects.

[klondike_klive]

Ugh that reminds me I've been promising for ages to migrate all my partner's passwords over from the ridiculously overpriced LastPass.

Out of interest, how do you use Bitwarden day-to-day - browser extension?

[nytesky]

Family email address? Does that forward to all or both of you? I hobbled together a forwarding list with a gmail account set to forward auto to one of us, and the a filter to forward on a broad flag to the other, but something can skip the filter. A proper mailing list for family would be nice.

iCloud storage, Google plus, family setup so I don’t have to clean out inboxes or photo libraries too often for a family of 5. We do the Find My, shared notes, calendars and task in iCloud, but projects like vacation planing will be a Google doc since iCloud doc sharing is a bit squirrelly.

Shared password manager is key.

I would like notion, but there’s a fair bit of lockin with that format, and after Evernote I’m wary of building on sand.

[betterprojects]

Depending on the email service provider, for domain emails, you can create a group email that forwards to all parties added to the group.

So you can create a group email address such as [e-mail] that forwards to both [e-mail] and [e-mail] and any other family members that’s part of the group. This is how we have it setup.

[ljnelson]

AnyList (https://www.anylist.com/). Streamlines grocery shopping and the paid version is absolutely worth the money. ~$15/year for a family.

[Descon]

Love anylist - bummer about Google assistant dropping them. Almost enough to make me switch to alexa

[avs733]

Completely agree. We tried a number of others and settled on that.

We also use it as a quick todo list for things that don’t go into the family asana

Other note- asana, mostly for repeating and long term scheduled tasks has been a huge family boon for us

[garciasn]

We have been using AnyList for what seems like 10+ years now and I, too, recommend it to anyone and everyone.

We had the pay-for version for a year or two but it works just fine without as well!

[michaelhoney]

We use AnyList (https://www.anylist.com) for grocery shopping. Much as we like to imagine we are wide-ranging eaters, we eat similar ingredients every week.

AnyList lets us make shopping lists easily, add items as they run low (with previous items available to us, and check them off as we shop. There are some more sophisticated features we don't use like recipe imports and meal planning.

We also have lists for eg the hardware store, which notify us when we are nearby. And I use it for eg making packing lists for overnight trips.

[bazmattaz]

Just downloaded that app and it’s quite cool. It’s nearly what I’m looking for. I love the import a recipe function. I’m defo gonna try into it for a while and see how I get on.

[jcynix]

Joplin (free, but sponsored) in combination with a Storagebox at Hetzner. Joplin allows us to share notes, shopping lists, to do lists, etc via Webdav between our various devices (mobile phones, laptops, desktops).

https://joplinapp.org and https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box

[yashvg]

Privacy.com - let's you easily make virtual burner cards that you can use for free trials and not worry about having to cancel the subscription on time.

[simbolit]

Please be aware that while this might (!) work in the US, in many other jurisdictions not canceling a subscription makes you still liable to pay, even if your card is gone; welcome to the wonderful world of debt collection.

IANAL

[Moldoteck]

Not purchased, but installed pihole-vpn combo so we got rid of most ads on all our devices. Another nice thing is pixel og+syncthing combo - unlimited original quality uploads to google photos Office 365 family so that we got 1Tb each in cloud

[IntToDouble]

Our twist on the family email is to have $[e-mail] point to a Google Group that for the moment, only goes to the adults in the room. Makes sorting/labeling things significantly easier.

$[e-mail], $[e-mail], $[e-mail], etc.

[danjc]

Does it bother you that the list won't sort correctly when you hit HOUSE10 or are you already padding a 0 on there?

[SleepilyLimping]

I don't have a family, but self-hosting Actual Budget via Docker helped me provide a budget app for my friends who I converted to YNAB4, and who I didn't want to point to subscribing to "New YNAB" which is less useful.

I like being able to just host things on my Synology NAS, set up usernames for people, and go "here's a reverse proxy'd URL, go nuts." While it makes me responsible for their data in a way, it feels like I'm helping.

[zeagle]

We also do the email thing but as an alias to sends it to both our inboxes. That is a great 'life hack' for flights, car rentals, reservations, important purchases, etc.

I purchased foldersync for android to copy nightly photos off the phones to our nas to \name\yyyymm\ to backup our photos without relying on 3rd party sync. Solves the issue of losing videos/photos if a phone breaks. http://photos/ can browse them with photoview.

For me free software is more valuable: keepass, seafile, and paperlessngx with a printer that scans to it with a button and a [e-mail] has made a huge difference particularly to be paperless and has WAF.

I purchased an airgradient indoor + outdoor after multiple plugs here and it is helpful for deciding if we should open windows as sensitive to forest fire smoke so it also counts. (I will say it had damage when it arrived and it's been annoying having to reach out a couple times to see if it can be replaced.)

Finally, I recently added lunchmoney.app for finances but time will tell if it is more than a novelty.

[Moldoteck]

Why not syncthing for photo copy?

[msadowski]

We bought Tody before they changed to a subscription model. The app allows you to create a task list for cleaning of each of the rooms with a desired repetition period for a given task (for example mop the kitchen floor every 3 weeks). I found that having a list of tasks that are overdue in the house helps a lot with the mental burden of cleaning.

[KolenCh]

Adobe CC. This enables our family tradition to produce photo books for our important events and vacations of our life. In the past we used softwares provided by photo book companies but all of them either phased out their software or being acquired. (They might be rebranded softwares by someone else, seems to be written in Java.)

Since then after I finished doing photo retouching with Lightroom Classic, my wife would use Photoshop and InDesign to design the photo book.

Other Adobe CC apps are at times very useful such as Premiere for Video editing videos we took during a vacation.

Investing into a system like this can be very expensive, not in the $ sense but more like time invested and vendor lock in. Once you invested the time to train in this tools it is very costly to migrate away from it as you become more busy with life. But then it is also very hard to find an alternative that does everything I need from Adobe. Adobe is an ecosystem and is an easy path to start.

[wink]

We have this problem as well, but realistically - how often do you need or even look at the digital originals of photo books? Yes, the work invested would be lost but we let those print once and still have the original photos. As long as the service does not shut down or change software while you are working on a photo book (hey, it only happened once due to... procrastination). it shouldn't really matter.

[julianz]

Notion - I moved from Evernote so for the most part I still use it like Evernote, although I'm adopting the more complex features as I find them useful.

Microsoft Office Family pack - I keep an eye out for discounts on this through the year so I don't think I've ever paid the sticker price. 1TB of storage for 6 users is a good thing, the kids know where to store their stuff, and Office is sometimes handy as well.

Affinity Photo - I'm never going to pay Adobe for a Photoshop subscription, and this competitor gets better over time.

Currently trying to migrate away from our password manager but need to find the time and energy to give 1Password a go.

We also use Keep Notes for general lists and shopping stuff - packing lists for trips away are really useful, as well as lists of jobs around the house.

[jhinds]

Tody (https://todyapp.com/) an app for household chores. It makes it easy to create chores to do, tune the cadence to do them at, and divide them up by room and by person. It keeps chores more fair and balanced between my wife and I and helps out with those chores that need to happen every few weeks or months and you forget about them. I also am the type of person that needs a clean inbox or 0 unread messages so it definitely works for my brain. I'm sure there are alternatives or systems that work just as well or better but it works well for us so sticking with it until it doesn't.

[28304283409234]

The second we could afford it, even before we had kids, we got a cleaning person to do our cleaning. Best money we ever spent.

[personjerry]

Piggybacking onto this thread, does anyone use software or any services for their parenting that they find invaluable? I imagine mentors and services like Kumon are popular with this crowd? How about the non-academic front?

[conductr]

> How about the non-academic front?

We limited it to coloring apps until they have an opinion at which point it will be a game and followed by whatever game their friends are playing (we haven't opened up multiplayer, they are still just playing individually then bragging about it to each other at school. It's a small glimpse into my NES days, except I was a bit older.)

Either way, ours get about 10 minutes a week but that's up from 'only on airplanes and in airports' last year

[adastra22]

> I imagine mentors and services like Kumon are popular with this crowd?

Not in my bubble at least.

[in_cahoots]

I pay for a fitness app and a meditation app. I’m such a better parent when I’m not constantly burnt out and at the end of my rope.

[RonanOD]

My 16 year old son is autistic and mostly nonverbal. He has been making some great progress on this app lately: https://speakforyourself.org/ That being said, as a parent you really have to work with him on it. It isn't easy to build it into his daily routine. It also helps to have his teachers on board with it. That is why I think he has improved on so much recently. It is also very expensive at $300 but, in terms of making a difference to his life, it is well worth it.

[28304283409234]

ElementaryOS as I use it daily and saves me tons of time.

Bitwarden. A few private domains and dns hosting at Gandi.net. Tried namesilo but when compared to gandi it is just unusable.

Fastmail does our family email.

Recently got a Spotify family plan replacing our Tidal. And though I love tidal, Spotify has jumped leaps and bounds feature wise.

We paid for Todoist but didn’t use any of the paid features so stopped doing that. Plus Todoist does not show ticked items in a decent way. How do I know what child took out the trash? I don’t.

Minecraft. Four accounts.

Nextcloud, gitlab, Firefox, pihole, pivpn, are the main free software that have a positive impact on family life.

[botulidze]

Spotify Duo. Works across all the variety of devices we have, jam group sessions are fantastic feature when riding the car together and their weekly discovery consistently brings in a lot of new music.

[apricot13]

We use todoist synced with Alexa through ifttt. For the more complicated things we use clickup so I can get all into the details and he just gets a list or an email once a day with any tasks!

1password team account since it was cheaper when I signed up.

We don't bother with shared a calendar anymore, we kept missing events, so we just send invites to each other.

Occasionally we'll have a shared apple note but that process is painful to get setup! Still looking into a good solution for notes tbh Evernote would have been perfect but I've lost trust in them tbh

[daft_pink]

Flow Club is a virtual coworking website and it's been the best thing for my productivity. It's been the biggest positive impact for me in my life. I just find it keeps me on task and makes me a lot more productive vs the gtd rabbit hole that I fell down before.

I really like Superhuman and Obsidian as well. I used to use notion, but I find obsidian to just work a lot faster and be more free form.

I pay for the Chatgpt subscription and we love it. Grammarly is pretty good but my wife mostly uses it.

Youtube Premium for no commercials is also really awesome.

[theshrike79]

I'm still split between Notion and Obsidian.

On the other hand Notion makes it super easy for me to share a set of stuff with my family, like recipes or travel plans

On the other hand Obsidian's markdown-formatting is more for me

[alxmng]

Using Apple/iCloud for everything, and getting rid of other services and software. One low monthly payment. Seamless integration between devices. Easy sharing of purchases, photos, or other media. Apple has an app for everything we need (notes, reminders, calendar, browsing, music, videos, password manager, photos, videos, etc.) No need for shared email as we use a shared bank account, and Apple Pay/Wallet supports shared cards (Apple Card also has a co-owner/family support).

[vthommeret]

YNAB

[codazoda]

I’ve never used this. Instead, the best thing my wife and I did was create a “bills” and “play” account. My recurring bills come out of the bills account and everything is paid automatically. My discretionary funds go in the “play” account and I feel free to spend that until it’s gone. This is handled with automatic deposits.

Later I added savings accounts to the list but the first two are the cornerstone of my budgeting.

[evantravers]

This a thousand times. The number of times my spouse has said "hey, can I buy… oh wait. We've enough in the budget. Cool."

[fastball]

I used YNAB before but much prefer LunchMoney[1] (the thing that got me to switch initially was better multi-currency support, since I generally make money in one currency, hold it in another, and spend it in a third). My referral link[2] will get you 1 month free ;)

[1] https://lunchmoney.app

[2] https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=b19iwkvc

[eclipticplane]

We swapped YNAB for Tiller and never went back.

[toastercat]

I'm still using YNAB4. Total game changer for me since I started years ago.

[bigstrat2003]

Came here to say this exact thing. We aren't perfect, but YNAB has really helped my wife and me to get our finances more in hand. It's probably the best money I've ever spent on software.

[jsbrux]

Second to YNAB. I’m sad they’ve raised the price, but 99% of our budget and finance strife is gone due 100% to YNAB. Plus the deal to have free budgets for your older kids? Very nice.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

1password,YNAB for finances, migadu for email. I am evaluating kagi again, but it's really frustrating using it with Italian language.

Also evaluating chatgpt, it's actually pretty good at some tasks.

Logseq, it's open source but i donate for it. Just mind blowing, brought me away from notion. When my wife asks "where did you put..." i check my #location tag. Same for food recipes, or how tall my daughter was 2 months ago, and so on.

[Cameri]

- Bitwarden: took a couple of “lost my password” to convince everyone to use it - Bring: we collaborate on shopping list with this - ChatGPT Plus: we use it for work and even to organize our meals for camping - Home Assistant: useful automations around the home - Splitwise: great way to split bills back when I lived with a roommate… Now mostly use it for trips with friends & family

[bilekas]

This is an interesting thread as a lot of the comments mention services as opposed to software straight out. That said i bought the lifetime membership of jetbrains IDE. I think it was worth the money personally.

Services based i would have to say Spotify. It's been a game changer for me over the years with an unhealthy habit of hoarding music.

[muzani]

I was an unhealthy hoarder of music too. Went JOOX > Spotify > YouTube Music as far as it goes. YT is great as it includes songs that are only posted on YT (mainly covers), but also you get no ads on the video version of YT. I kind of want to support Spotify as the little guy but they haven't been kind to paying users.

[tonyedgecombe]

Quicken, although I've switched to Ledger since. Being able to track my spending made it a lot easier to keep on top of my finances. It's why I was comfortable starting a business 25 years ago with two young children and why I've been able to retire at a relatively young age.

[Finnucane]

Having a family plan for 1Password means I can access my mother's list and help her with some online stuff. And it's not just because she's 83. Some of the services she has to use are actually bad. I'm an old nerd and I was cursing her bank's website; it sucks.

[sbalamurugan]

I went all in on apple ecosystem this year after literally 13 years of using android.

Wife and I got iPhone 14 Pro, Apple Watch 8 and AirPods Pro. Got HomePod mini and Apple TV for home. We got bunch of home kit compatible tech at home (baby monitor, smart plugs, bulbs etc). We also subscribe to apple one family. The results are fantastic.

Everything works with everything else, which is impossible to explain without experiencing it. For example, none of the Apple ads/promotions will tell you that if you connect your phone with carplay and ask for directions, your watch will also be automatically a part of it and show you next turns. The watch will also gently vibrate when you are approaching a turn. This requires no configuration. It just works as is. We can ask my homepod to switch off the tv. We can use either of our phones or watches as remote to the TV. The video from baby monitor can be seen on our phones or TV (as pip), or on our watches if needed.

Usually every evening, we put the baby to sleep, switch on the TV, put on our AirPods, put the baby monitor video pip on top right corner of the TV and play a TV shows directly to our AirPods which can connect simultaneously to the TV. Again no config needed, it just works as it is. All we have to do is to login with our accounts (Even this is easy since you do it through phone)

I download shows/tv to my Mac, drag and drop to Apple TV app, they show up on the main TV over wifi. No casting etc. They just look and play as if they are streaming from Apple TV. I can put my phone on a stand, FaceTime with my family on the TV directly using my phone's camera and mic. It looks and works stunning - https://images.macrumors.com/t/0gxYFSdAW32RTme9jwsKnVnYidA=/.... iMessage and FaceTime are much much more reliable than WhatsApp and much higher quality. All my files are synced up between all my devices without any pain. I can copy text on my phone, and just paste it in my laptop and vice versa. I can right click on my Mac to insert image from iPhone Camera. You can use your iPhone camera on your laptop for teams/zoom calls. When we both leave the home, everything (lights, fans, AC etc) switches off and the entrance lights switch on when we come back automatically. we can control all apple home devices from any of our phones, watch, Siri on AirPods, home pod, MacBooks, etc. and every one of the device with microphone responds to "Hey Siri" keyword.

I don't know about Apple hardware as standalone devices, but the who ecosystem is just bloody brilliant. I just cannot go back to the old way of sitting and configuring each device and bluetooth pairing etc. Since we made this switch in March my productivity has gone through the roof.

[theshrike79]

Pro app tip for media consumption on the Apple ecosystem: Infuse (https://apps.apple.com/fi/app/infuse-video-player/id11362209...)

It can play media off pretty much anything. I use it to connect to multiple Plex instances (I have a System :D) and I've added a few local folders along with OneDrive and Dropbox to it.

It has apps for macOS, tvOS iPadOS and iOS that sync between each other.

So in your case you could just use Infuse on Apple TV and connect it to a directory on your Mac, then play stuff directly from that share.

[eddieroger]

I spent the last ten years pushing my family this way (my nuclear family, then as I got married, my wife joined the fold), and it pays off so well. My initial push was support - I can better support iPhones or Macs because that's what I had and they're all the same. No remembering what GPU is installed for which Control Panel option when HDMI isn't working, or being able to navigate to the exact weird section in Settings->General on iPhone by looking at mine. Since then, iCloud sharing has made sending notes and other enabled content so easy. They just don't advertise that stuff, and I don't know why.

[AnonC]

> I download shows/tv to my Mac, drag and drop to Apple TV app, they show up on the main TV over wifi. No casting etc. They just look and play as if they are streaming from Apple TV.

I presume these are shows that you’ve downloaded/bought from Apple? If yes, then I’m guessing it’s just synced from your purchases and is downloading and playing from there.

Or does Apple somehow allow shows/movies from other sources to be downloaded and played on the TV App (like a VLC equivalent)? I doubt Apple would enable something like this.

[itsdrewmiller]

I hate paying subscriptions for anything, but I have found Greenlight to be worth it for managing allowances, letting my kids build their financial competency, and keeping an eye on their spending.

[jnaina]

Otter.ai

Audio transcription with auto summarization. Saves me tons of time and edfort.

[28304283409234]

I don’t understand the downvotes. Looks pretty cool!

[fullstick]

Through our insurance we got an item called Ting that Monday's monitors our home electric wiring for irregular behavior that leads to house fires. It provide a peace of mind.

[tikkun]

Spotify premium, superhuman, YouTube premium, airtable, chatgpt/gpt, 1Password, otter, sublime text, rewind

I’d miss each of them if I couldn’t access them and had to switch to an alternative

[JoshTriplett]

Software I wish I could pay for: Firefox Sync. I use it every day, to send tabs between my phone and computer, and to sync passwords between devices.

[harrygeez]

Well you can donate to Mozilla

[rroohhiitthh]

Youtube Premium Family plan. I think this has genuinely saved us hours of screen time from watching ads, on personal devices and on the living room TV

[atum47]

back in the day I had to buy a GPS software for my "smart phone", more like a palm with phone capabilities. A HTC model with windows 7 (i guess). Was the first time I felt confident in driving cross state by myself.

The whole time I was think "this thing can predict the future" cause I could see sharp turns and straight roads before hand. Simpler times...

[funkyavocado]

IPTVX on AppleTV for IPTV streaming. The interface is so nice it makes IPTV streaming feel like using Netflix.

[difu_disciple]

I have replaced 1password with Apple’s family password sharing feature that’s present in the new updates.

[dieselgate]

Ross-tech VCDS for VW fuel pump timing

edit: to be fair the software is free but bought the obd2 adapter

[iancmceachern]

Trip it is great for traveling

[johnea]

Hyper Space Delivery Boy!!!

My son and I had a great time with it when he was 6...

[iamthejuan]

Lifetime license of Wallet by budgetbakers.

[kmano8]

Fantastical family plan, hands down.

[kstrauser]

How are you using it that makes it worthwhile for you? I used Fantastical for a long time until their recent rate hike. All of our family scheduling works nicely through shared iCloud calendars, though.

[aprdm]

1password , fastmail, joplin

[g4mbt]

YNAB (you need a budget)

[gumballindie]

In my case it’s more about the software i _didn’t_ purchase. Removed windows and got rid of macos. Switched to linux. Couldnt be happier.