• cobysev@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    My dad was paying an annual subscription for several Ring cameras around his house. I replaced them with Eufy Security cameras, because you can store the video feed locally and not have to pay any subscription at all.

    Then my dad passed away in January and I’ve spent this year closing all his accounts and switching bills over to my name. A few days ago, I got a reminder email in his account that he was about to be charged several hundred dollars for another year subscription to Ring. Even though he hasn’t had active cameras with them for almost a year now. Glad I caught it!

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    I’ll spend 6 hours researching whether I really wanna spend $1.99 on a Steam game that’s 90% off for the first time after I nearly bought it 4 times before at 50% off.

    Then when my cell phone bill comes and I’m like “Yeah, I’m definitely overpaying by like $70 here…” I go “Well, too late for this one, I’ll handle it sometime in the next 30 days.”

    • TwilightKiddy@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      A switch to per minute, per megabyte plan made me a lot more concious about spending money on my phone. If I want something to watch/listen to during a trip, I download it beforehand. I almost never use any minutes, only communicating via the mobile data. With autodownloading of pictures disabled in all my chat apps, it runs about 50 MB per month, which charges me less than 50 cents.

      • DesolateMood@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Generally more convenient (automatic updates and easy downloading on anything that has steam) and more than that, he probably wants to support the devs

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        I was a game developer for a while. I’ll sometimes buy a game just because I want to see the devs keep making cool stuff, with no intention of actually playing it.

        If it’s a corpo AAA title where private equity has already demolished the dev team and there’s no chance my $50 will make it past the publisher and financiers’ cut, I have no compunctions about pirating.

        But that’s pretty rare for me. Indie games are where it’s at. Maybe a F2P live service game here and there.

        • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          I mean, you can do both. Pirate it for trying if you’re not sure if you want to play it or unsure if it’s a worthwhile investment and then spend the money on a legit copy. Helped me get like three copies of Slay the Spire back in the day lol