Pay for the thing or you are the thing
The rule: every product has one master. Free products have two, you and the advertiser, and when they fight, you lose.
Paid products can still rot, but only when a second master shows up: shareholders, growth targets, a merger.
Paid stuff that stayed good:
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Costco. Membership fees are nearly all of the profit; the goods are sold at almost cost. Renewal rate around 90%. The customer is the product's only customer, so the hot dog has been $1.50 since 1985. 🌭
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Kagi. Search you pay for, no ads, no tracking, and the results got better as Google's got worse. The whole company is one sentence: you pay, we search.
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Fastmail, Proton, Mullvad. Email and VPN with a bill. Mullvad takes cash in an envelope and does not know who you are. Nobody can sell what nobody stored. ✉️
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Bandcamp. Artists keep 80 to 85%. Fridays they keep 100%. Twenty years, still not enshittified, because the buyer and the maker are the only two people in the room.
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1Password, Obsidian, Tailscale, Basecamp. Small paid tools built by companies that talk about profit, not valuation. Basecamp has said no to growth for twenty years and still exists.
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Signal. Not sold, funded by donations and one billionaire's guilt. No ads possible by design: it cannot read your messages. 🔐
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Nebula. Streaming owned by the creators who fill it. No algorithm to please, because the people being pleased own the shelves.
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The Guardian, Ars Technica, Wikipedia. Reader-funded. When readers pay, the reader is the audience; when advertisers pay, the reader is the inventory.
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A domain name and an email address you own. The cheapest paid thing on earth, and the only address nobody can take from you.