Posteo email (Germany).
They’re one of the cheapest privacy focused email providers at 1 euro a month, offer very cheap plan upgrades based on what you actually use/need, run off 100% renewable energy, and have a really nice simple and intuitive interface.
Tuta is probably a bit more private overall, but if you only use email for mundane stuff and just want to prevent my data from being sold to advertisers, posteo fulfills that need with minimal expense very well.
Definitely not looking back having switched to Qobuz for streaming music. The quality is higher and the pay-per-stream beats most competitors as far as I can make out.
People lament the loss of podcasts but I never liked Spotify for podcasts, preferring to just get an RSS feed and use the podcast app of my choice.
Also a shout out to Le Chat, which is super fast and entirely adequate for everything I used to use ChatGPT for. ChatGPT grabs all the headlines with Deepseek and Gemini close behind but nobody outside my circle seems to have heard of Le Chat.
Losing podcast is in itself a good reason to drop Spotify.
Screw them and their ridiculous attempt to become the podcast chokepoint.
I fell in love with Mapy.cz (Google Maps alternative) It’s a wonderful replacement for Google Maps when you’re out walking or hiking.
I’ve had so many times that I trusted Mapy by walking down a path or alley that looked abandoned and/or prohibited, only to arrive at wonderful hidden places on the trail or in the city, free of any other traveller/tourist. Never got shivved either!
Every walkable path is on Mapy, hardened or not. And if it’s worth the trouble you’ll see the trail colours/codes next to the path so you don’t have to do any planning before walking. The app also let’s you track your route so you can see where you’ve been walking, how fast, how long, etc. And you can also download offline maps. The only thing I feel is flawed, is their navigation, which I prefer not to use.
I also love DeepL for translation, but there was a recent post about it, so I won’t mention it further.
I think it’s worth pointing out that mapy.cz is a frontend for uses data from Openstreetmap, so the quality of the data will vary depending on if people have contributed in the area (please contribute if you spot anything missing), and there are other ways to access the same data.
Contabo for Virtual Private Servers.
The smallest instance is under 5€/month when billed annually and has 4 vCPU cores, 4GB RAM, 100GB NVMe storage, and 32TB of outbound traffic.
Yeaaah that’s kind of a weak spot. For the lowest tier I was talking about it’s only 200 Mbit/s. It grows in increments of 200 Mbit/s each tier, until the Cloud VPS 10C where it tops out at 1 Gbit/s. On that tier you have 10 cores, 32GB RAM and 300GB NVMe at 27,85€/month when billed annually.
For my personal use and some project prototyping though, I haven’t had any problems with the smallest tier.
