They haven't, but some still sell beer by pints. I can go to a store right now (well not right now, it's past 10 PM) and buy a pint sized beer and a 0.5l beer from the same company.

Azure, GCP, OCI

They're no bulwark against ads, but how is a free service supposed to be sustained? Free only works if it's offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.

All depends on whether the company providing the service is public too I guess. As soon as it's public, you have shareholders to please and then you HAVE to squeeze every cent out of your customers. Tale as old as time.

I'll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn't enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It's still a fiver a month and you can't pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.

Yeah that sucks. No business wants to help its own customers never need it again.

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. There's plenty of tech that improves our lives, but anything that does is usually subtle stuff we don't think about. It's the "loud" tech that sucks. Things you notice using.

Example, if ever a friend needs money quickly (or I need to borrow money from a friend), it takes like a minute to log into the bank app and post a SEPA instant transfer. Maybe less. It's amazingly convenient and available for every bank in my country.

Search engines aren't as good as Google used to be, but I still find information very fast compared to when I didn't have Internet access.

GPS is great. Remember when you had to use a paper map book and buy an update every year to stay up to date? I do. GPS wasn't that common in my country in my childhood because it was expensive to buy a device.

Closest thing I've seen is Plex, not sure if that'll do it for you

I'm really enjoying Bad Monkey right now. Might be the first time I find Vince Vaughn relatable, but that might just be because I'm also a lazy sarcastic prick.

The last days of Ptolemy Gray was a good one.

I didn't think I'd like The Morning Show, but I ended up getting pretty invested, as there's a lot of office politics.

Acapulco is funny and I love that in his rose-tinted glasses memories, the resort is literally pink.

Honorable mentions: Shantaram, City on Fire, The Silo... And there have been others I've enjoyed. There was a period where I had a solid 5 shows to watch every week, all on Apple TV.

Ha maybe it was a student project

People here will probably soon start thinking I'm an Apple shill with all the comments I make, but IMO, TV+ has tons of great original content. Definitely recommend taking a peek at their shows. And the movies.

Of course, nobody says you have to pay for it. Yarr!

Facebook 15 years ago wasn't all that bad tbh. It was nice being able to write to just about anyone you met in real life.

It'd already been getting worse for a while, but to me, the 2016 US election was when things got super obvious. Same with reddit. Can't believe it's been 8 years already.

Essentially something like NextCloud without all the jank?

I think Owncloud Infinite Scale might be a solution. But if you want easy install and maintenance-free, I don't think any self-hosted solution is viable.

So I read your comment and did some research. Mint seemed like the best example that a small team could reasonably get started on.

Some of the original people behind Mint founded Monarch and the CEO put out a very reasonable article on why your best bet would be to replace it with a subscription based alternative. Essentially - since anything free is eventually going to become an ad company, the company will never have your best interests in mind.

I hate the subscription model, but I somewhat agree - unless we're talking about offline software, there's always maintenance involved, also further development. If your software is ad-supported, it's on shakier ground.

I don't think we're likely to see another Mint. The more functionality you want, the more expensive it is to develop. BUT if what you're looking for is just the core functionality then yes, that could reasonably be ad supported, or even free and open source.