Here’s my Web-services budget

The annual exercise of adding up my business expenses so I can plug those totals into my taxes gave me an excuse to do an extra and overdue round of math: calculating how much I spend a year on various Web services to do my job.

The result turned out to be higher than I thought–even though I left out such non-interactive services as this domain-name registration ($25 for two years) and having it mapped to this blog ($13 a year). But in looking over these costs, I’m also not sure I could do much about them.

Google One

Yes, I pay Google for my e-mail–the work account hosted there overran its 15 gigabytes of free storage a few years ago. I now pay $19.99 a year for 100 GB. That’s a reasonable price, especially compared to the $1.99 monthly rate I was first offered, and that I took too long to drop in favor of the newer, cheaper yearly plan.

Microsoft Office 365

Getting a Windows laptop let me to opting for Microsoft’s cloud-storage service, mainly as a cheap backup and synchronization option. The $69.99 annual cost also lets me put Microsoft Office on one computer, but I’ve been using the free, open-source LibreOffice suite for so long, I have yet to install Office on my HP. Oops.

Evernote Premium

This is my second-longest-running subscription–I’ve been paying for the premium version of my note-taking app since 2015. Over that time, the cost has increased from $45 to $69.99. That’s made me think about dropping this and switching to Microsoft’s OneNote. But even though Microsoft owns LinkedIn, it’s Evernote that not only scans business cards but checks LinkedIn to fill in contact info for each person.

Flickr Pro

I’ve been paying for extra storage at this photo-sharing site since late 2011–back when the free version of Flickr offered a punitively-limited storage quota. This cost, too, has increased from $44.95 for two years to $49.99 a year. But now that Yahoo has sold the site to the photography hub SmugMug, the free tier once again requires serious compromises. And $50 a year doesn’t seem that bad, not when I’m supporting an indie-Web property instead of giving still more time to Facebook or Google.

Private Internet Access

I signed up for this virtual-private-network service two years ago at a discounted rate of $59.95 for two years, courtesy of a deal offered at Techdirt. Absent that discount, I’d pay $69.95, so I will reassess my options when this runs out in a few months. Not paying for a VPN service, however, is not an option; how else am I supposed to keep up on American news when I’m in Europe?

LastPass Premium

I decided to pay for the full-feature version of this password manager last year, and I’m already reconsidering that. Three reasons why: The free version of LastPass remains great, the premium version implements U2F two-step verification in a particularly inflexible way, and the company announced last month that the cost of Premium will increase from $24 a year to $36.

Combined and with multi-year costs annualized, all of these services added up to $258.96 last year. I suspect this total compares favorably to what we spend on news and entertainment subscriptions–but that’s not math I care to do right now.

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Weekly output: FCC broadband labels, Office 365 vs. Google for Work, Revolv’s shutdown, device upgrade fees

This week saw the completion of one rite of spring: attending a Nats home opener. Another, doing our taxes, is in progress. I haven’t even started a third: mowing the lawn for the first time since last year.

Yahoo Tech FCC broadband-labels post4/5/2016: FCC’s new “nutrition labels” for broadband services leave out a few ingredients, Yahoo Tech

I had some fun with the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed broadband labels by noting how they didn’t cover such broadband pain points as the amount of time you may have to spend talking a rep off the ledge before he’ll consent to your closing your account.

4/7/2016: Battle in the Clouds: Google Apps for Work Vs. Office 365, CDW

This basic comparison of Google and Microsoft’s cloud productivity services ran at a few different CDW sites, including the one linked to from here.

4/7/2016: As Google shuts down Revolv, anxiety about the Internet of Things gears up, Yahoo Tech

I was far along into a different topic when I realized that we hadn’t run anything about the impending shutdown of a once-promising smart-home hub–and that other stories on Nest’s move had glossed over how tech-news sites waited a good two months to cover it.

4/10/2016: Fees at AT&T and Verizon are no upgrade, USA Today

This was another case of my setting aside one topic to cover another. This may have been the only story on this issue to clarify that AT&T won’t charge you its “device upgrade fee” if you move your old phone’s SIM card into a new device purchased from anybody besides AT&T.