the cost of being online
last updated 0 minutes ago
online goddess' post about the cost of blogging got me thinking around my internet connectivity and budgeting/personal finance special interests!
whilst i know and believe getting online can be relatively very cheap in the UK, i know for most people it's not, and "speedy and reliable" and "affordable and/or cheap" are often in contention in a lot of countries.
graph is from the ITU in case you're interested. they have lots of cool data.
apologies for the graph so early in proceedings but i wanted to tell you something, wait!!!! the blue figures in the top right are the global averages, so you can see how skewed the costs are here! mobile data (i didn't know mobile broadband was the official name, it feels very futuristic?) costs over 13 times as much in africa as it does everywhere else1.
for concrete numbers in my case:
- i have a google pixel 9 with an unlimited 5G data (i may not need this right now but on multiple occasions its saved me a lot of money on data top ups so i get it out of habit and paranoia). I pay about £50 a month for the privilege, including a payment plan on the device.
- i have a personal macbook that i used for work at one point, so is also a bit overspecced for my specific needs but any day now i'm gonna get my butt into the correct gear for YouTube, right, and so it's useful for that, okay? in the region of £3k, bought a few years ago.
- our broadband connection somehow costs around £100 a month (and still won't let me stream myself researching on youtube comfortably, grumble, but then again neither could my mobile broadband)
- i spend way too much on my vanity domain, i'm embarrassed to say the number on here ha ha ha ha.
- i have a newsletter on buttondown, it costs $9 a month.
- i have my main outward facing email on tuta, which costs around £8 a month
- just cancelled a canva subscription, but that was around £12 a month.
- sadly i pay google for backup/photo/email storage, one is on its way to being turned off, the other i need to work out where i'm migration to, probably around £15 a month.
- i think i paid for bearblog once in the early days, maybe £30*?
it's hard to seperate what is a cost of being online, what's a cost of being a human who works in the technology industry, and what's a cost of having extremely online hobbies at times! i have way too many patreon subs for instance, but i didn't include stuff that's not for connection with others, posting or literal internet connection.
what has being online cost you? do you feel like it's too expensive? i'd love to know!
this is my third post in my writing month challenge, which i decided is "one post for each day of november".
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i assume it being gross national income skews the data in ways i can't anticipate, i don't do sums anymore, feel free to tell me the ITU should be using other measures, genuinely. very interested.↩