I don’t get how we are in the year 2025, most advanced technology we have ever had in human existence… And everything is behind a paywall. Literally everything. Whenever I search the web for a solution as an individual person, not a business or Mega Corporation, just a simple person trying to do a few creative things… Everything is behind a paywall
For example, I want to create a logo image for a personal Tableau dashboard that has a transparent background. Just a struggling person trying to find work and show what I’m capable of making. You know what I find? Everything is behind a payroll. One of the first results on Google that can actually help you is canva! But everything on canva is behind a paywall! You want to resize your document? Transparent background? Paywall. Okay then what if I go to a website to remove the background? There’s lots of them on the Internet that say they are free. Sorry, those are all behind paywalls as well. You have to upload your image to them and then by credits but they don’t tell you that when you get to the website…
Also, editing PDF files… Year 2025, you cannot possibly edit a PDF file for free, and most of the PDF readers out there or PDF viewers have some sort of clickbait this is free! Except that is not free, it’s behind a paywall and you’ll find that out eventually…
I think we are all very excited to see what AI can finally do for Humanity because I am so damn sick of everything being
You seem to be hurt by modern tech, take this, it will give you strength.
Bless you good sir, bless you
What’s infuriating to me is how casual the paywalls have become. Everyone wants a slice, even the folks who make cheat tables for singleplayer video games have an early access patreon. If you’re not getting a paycheck you better make it a side hustle.
Don’t forget to tip your friend when you laugh at their joke, they aren’t doing it for free.
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If it ain’t foss it is a toss
Seriously though the enshitification has been great for community projects
Gimp or krita are free and can do what you are looking for image editing and transparent background.
Free webapps? And who pay for the hosting? You are looking for the wrong target.
Lots of free PDF editing tools. Even web ones of you self host those (Stirling PDF anyone?).
Photopea also!
Honestly web browsers are the best editing tools. Simple and effective
I think many people underestimate how much money it costs to run and maintain stuff. Especially webapps.
Dude- I refuse to pay 13 dollars A MONTH, just to sext a robot.
(ok context cus what i just said is wild) I roleplay with a character bot, not character AI but a lesser known one, I only do it cus I really enjoy writing and storytelling but not always can I do that with another person, so I just do it with a bot (no I dont sext the bot I just thought it was funny to say). It works great and has a lotta features, but bro- If I wanna use the other AI text models, it requires premium. I wasnt opposed to it till I saw the pricing. THIRTEEN WHOLE ASS DOLLARS A MONTH nahhh bro thats the same price as Discord Nitro, wtf- 😭 I still support them by buying “energy” or whatever but I am NOT paying no 13 bucks for that- jeeeesus. idk micro transactions used to be reasonable, but now its just- eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…
Depends on the webapp, traffic, etc. I have an EC2 instance and my own domain that runs me a solid $7 a month. It’s just a tiny little web server. If your web app is structured in a way that the client does the processing, your hosting costs can be pretty cheap.
For instance, rather than editing a PDF on a server, if your web app provides all of the tools to edit the PDF in the client’s browser, the server doesn’t need to be particularly robust. Basically it just needs to hand out those tools to the client.
I can explain it easily for you… For 14.95 a month.
*$1495 a month
Why do you expect to receive someone else’s work for free? Part of the reason the web has become so enshitified is that no one is willing to pay for anything anymore. We all expect everything to be “ad supported”, and then we act shocked when everything is covered in ads.
That said, there are usually open source alternatives for most software packages out there. They may not have complete feature parity or have quite the same slick UI as the commercial products. But, they do tend to be both free in terms of cost and ads. E.g for image editing, there is Gimp. It’s not going to replace Adobe Photoshop in professional spaces anytime soon. But, for a home user who isn’t willing to shell out the Adobe Tax, it’s a reasonable choice.
But, the reason so much is paywalled is because everything takes time and money to create. Someone has to pay that cost. Maybe it’s advertisers, maybe it’s a dedicated team of volunteers. But increasingly, creators are asking users to pay directly.
sometimes the shit they make you pay for is just stupid. Like- right now I’m fed up with all search engines right now- EXCEPT FOR ONE, and that’s Kagi “Oh use Kagi, Use kagi bro, its great, its awesome!”
Mofcker I go to the page and signed up or whatever, the thing is amazing, it actually is straight up. BUT LOW AND FUCKING BEHOLD- “if you want more than 100 search attempts, you have to subscribe to us :3” The prices aint bad at all but WHY THE FUCK WOULD I WANNA PAY TO USE A SEARCH ENGINE??! Sorry for the caps lock but good lord! Is that gonna become a new mainstream thing for all search engines to do now?! What if google started doing that shit!? “Oh we’ll let you search whatever you want as many times as you want, but its all going to be things kinda related to your searches. If you want exact answers and real accuracy, you have to pay us 25 a month, but if you want us to not sell your data, then you need to pay 50 a month.” WTF??!
its not the fact that you gotta pay for stuff now, its the fact that you’ll subscribe to service only to find out you gotta go through 4 different subscription types just to get the full experience; and none of them have the option of you just buying it one time permanently. One person made an audio splitter website and its fuckin awesome. I don’t have to pay for SHIT and its so good that I use it when making music, but for some reason everything else wants me to pay? And sometimes It’s not even that good, I’ll just pay for something and get scammed outta my own money. Shit like that drives people to Piracy. remember when Netflix was just simple?? “Pay this amount a month and you can watch whatever you want, when you want, and get 0 ads.” NOW it’ll make you pay for the service, AND THERES STILL ADS, and to get 0 ads and watch all the movies you want you gotta go through several fucking subscription tiers, not only that but some stuff is only available on OTHER streaming services, which are ALSO behind 13 different paywalls… This is why I just started pirating things unless its truly worth it. OFC I dont pirate from small devs or creators, thats just dumb. But mf If I can get Kagi for free I’m gonna. Since when the fuck did I have to PAY to search the internet?
I have seen ads on the internet for over twenty years. The enshitification is not because of ads, but because of the will of a few big companies to extract as much money from the internet as possible, without wanting to give anything in return and without even contributing in any way.
Edit: the OP however, should really learn to use a free photoshop alternative for the logo creation thing.
For the most part none of the apps work properly.
We used to make all sorts of things just for the joy in making it, and it cost money to do it.
Sometimes you work for free because of passion. Like a personal project.
Many of those apps were built on things produced and distributed for free. I would say they are, usually, just a fancy front end on some OSS library. That’s not without value, good interfaces are hard, but lets not pretend they’re doing all the work themselves, and they certainly aren’t eager to reinvest any of that money into the free software that made their shit possible.
Because simply making a functional and well-liked product doesn’t generate enough money for the greedy pigs of the world.
- Ads
- make the free version of the service thats highly functional on its own and that make the REALLY cool features something you have to buy. I much prefer it if websites or apps just had one-time purchases rather than forcing me to pay rent money every damn month just to have a sparkly font color over my name.
Some products do this thing where you help out with certain stuff while using it, they give you coins that allow you to engage with more stuff. Voice.AI is like that, if you activate it in settings, it lets you use your pc as a way to train the AI once its idle in exchange for coins
I think you’re complaining that google ranks shitty products higher. Use a better search engine, add +opensource to your query?
Logo: Inkscape?
Pdf editing: libreoffice?
they all suck, i tried, only one I found to be genuinly decent and that was Kagi… But apparently I ALSO need a subscription to use it.
first results on Google
That’s your first problem. Higher ranked results on Google are either ads or “reputable” organizations (corporations). Google isn’t there to help you, it’s to help them.
Does Foxit no longer have a free PDF editor? Apple computers have a built in PDF editor. I mean, it depends on what you mean by “editor” though. If you want to manipulate the elements of a PDF, that’s obviously an advanced function. Yeah. It’s called capitalism. womp womp.
You might find some useful tools here. It’s mostly a list of self-hosted tools but there’s some web tools there too. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#software
This might be helpful for what you’ve described https://www.photopea.com/ and you can try searching https://alternativeto.net/ for alternatives.
Generally, it just seems like you need to work on your skills to search the internet for what you need. AI is very helpful but not 100% reliable.
goated comment.
As others have mentioned, if it was all free, it would be riddled with ads. You really only have two options, ublock and customize your blocked elements, or pay.
Piracy is always free~
I was mainly talking about paywalled sites like news articles.
oh.
Yea thats infuriating to me to tbh. Why tf do I gotta pay to read good information? why cant they just pay they’re own journalists???
It’s basically the evolution (or devolution?) of the Internet in a capitalist global economy. This is just the next step in the effort to profit off digital Data and communications.
Back in the early 2000s pretty much everything was free to use, and revenue came from passive ads. Then ad blindness and ad blockers kicked in, revenue went down, and the cat and mouse game began of companies trying to find ways of getting clicks and views while the consumer didn’t want to do that. This has escalated over the last 20-odd years.
We’re now at a point where paywalls are fairly effective (for now). So that’s what’s being pushed. Plus, subscriptions and everything-as-a-service is in vogue right now.
I expect that will end when the money-making enshitification of the Internet reaches a critical mass and the economy nosedives for various reasons.
Interesting insight and I have experienced what you talk about in the earlier years. I really feel like we need some sort of free community of tools and resources we can pay for together as a community either through ads or subscription or something that has a bunch of incredible tools people can use. Like $15 a month to cover all server costs for a bunch of free programs any of us could use
I’ve been pretty impressed with OnlyOffice for PDFs
Would recommend Foxit over onlyoffice for pdfs since onlyoffice has Russian ties. If you wanna go full FOSS, you probably care about data sovereignty. Libreoffice is pretty good for other office application needs.
Russian based.
Open Source and selfhostable.
I mean, the basic answer to that question is because server storage costs something and the people offering these services/websites either don’t want to make a loss or straight up want to make a profit.
PDF editing truly sucks, 100% agree with you on that
