Take my money! Some of my favorite tools, and why I pay for them

Everyone loves a generous free tier. There are loads of free tools I use to get my work done and I love recommending free tools for others to use. A quick search of articles and newsletters. I've written shows 99 mentions of the word free. I'm no stranger to the free tier. And most of all, I'm a huge fan of products that use a free tier to prove their value, and then convert me to a paying customer. I thought it might be interesting to share some products that I do pay for.

Uh, like most developers, I'm pretty sensitive to price. I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for services based on the value they provide to me. But I'm also quick to cancel a subscription. If I feel like I'm not getting my money's worth. So with that in mind, here's a few tools that I do pay for and why I think they're worth it.

Let's start with transistor.fm for $19 a month. I get unlimited shows and episodes and up to 20,000 downloads a month. I've been using transistor.fm to host my podcasts for a few years now. Over the years, I've used a few other hosting services for podcasts, but I found transistors the best

fit for me. Killer features. Transistor does many things amazingly well, but these are among my favorite features. First off, it's easy to use. Starting a new show, takes a few minutes, upload your episode and you'll be off to the races in no time. Transistor also never breaks. Not once have I needed to worry about my podcast feed being down. The team adds thoughtful features to make my life easier. Pretty regularly, too.

For example, you can add guests to individual podcast episodes for better SEO. And, you know, I love SEO. They have great HTML and beds to share episodes and shows on your website as well. Transistor also makes it dead easy to get your show listed on all the major podcast directories. This is a task that's fairly time-intensive otherwise. And loads of other podcasters don't do it, which is a huge mistake. You don't want your show only to be listed on apple podcasts? Do you.

Being the nightmare developer that I am. I tend to tinker around with things when I have them available to me. So I've also sent the transistor team, a few support requests while poking around with the transistor API. And they've always been quick to respond and super helpful. If you're thinking about starting your own podcast and want to give transistor a shot, check out the links in the show notes to get my referral link for 15% off your first year at transistor dot AFM.

Up next descript. For 12 bucks a month, I get 10 hours of podcast transcription each month and 20 hours of screen recording time. Descript also lets you, I loved the script because it lets you edit audio and video files. Like they were a text document. I'll say that again? Descript lets you edit audio and video files. Like they were a text document. It's wild. I was an early adopter of descript and I've been using it to edit podcasts and videos for years now. Among its killer features.

Do you say? Um, and ah, a lot when you're speaking, do you tend to stutter? Descript can automatically remove that for you. Do you want to add a section of your podcast where you're talking about a product, but you don't want to rerecord the whole episode. Descript can do that for you. Do you want to add a video to your podcast episode? Descript can do that for you.

Descript can export video in portrait or landscape mode and it makes it trivial to create content for Instagram, Tik, TOK, and YouTube. I also really love their audio gram feature, which you can use to make close caption clips from podcasts for social media. If you're ready to make audio and video editing, feel like magic head on over to the show notes and check out my link to give

Descript a shot. Finally, let's talk about Backblaze Backblaze is automated cloud backups for your computer for 18 bucks a month, I get unlimited backups of the two computers that my wife and I use having a backup of your computer is one of those things that many people don't think about until it's too late. I've been on the short end of that sick one too many times in my life. So I take a military mindset to backups.

Two is one, one is not, I have my computer backed up locally to a Nass or network attached storage device using time machine. And I use Backblaze as a cloud backup for my computer's hard drive. It's a set it and forget it kind of service. And I've been using it for years. Among back pleases killer features. Well, you install it once and it does its magic.

If you ever have a catastrophic event and need to restore your data from a backup, you can download your files directly from the web, or they'll send you a USB hard drive with all your data on it for free. As long as you ship it back to them. Within 30 days, it's a super thoughtful feature. It's a great service and it's well worth it for peace of mind. If you're not already backing up your computer, you probably should be.

So try Backblaze by using the referral link I provided in the show notes for a month of free service. And that's it. This is a quick one. I'm actually headed out to take some time off from work this week to recharge and spend some time in the sun. It's something I try to do regularly to take care of myself, work life, and everything else can be a lot to handle. And it's important for me to take time to recharge. I hope you're able to do the same from time to time.

Until next time, be excellent to each other. Stay positive and love your life. Thanks so much for listening to tiny improvements. I'll catch you next time.