I understand worrying about burn rate and all that, but when the entire service costs the same as a single cup of coffee per month, it might just not matter. How well it works, what features it provides, and how well it interfaces with the rest of the cloud services you're using are much, much more important concerns than saving a buck a month.
Well, not always. As a student, you don’t want to spend 4$ for a cloud console, plus 4$ for cloud IRC, plus 20$ for a VPS, plus 12$ for your phone contract, plus 120$ for a new phone every 2 years...
I – like most people – don’t let useless devices run on standby either, costing me upwards of 30$ a year for a TV on standby.
As a student, I don’t buy totally overpriced coffee that costs that much either.
You're well past the point of diminishing returns where it makes sense for you to focus your efforts more on increasing income rather than reducing expenditures further. If saving $1 per month is significant to you then it sounds like you've already cut your expenditures to the bone, and there's no more blood to squeeze from that stone. Even working a single hour per week at a part-time job would have better returns than extreme penny-pinching on unplugging appliances and rewriting entire applications to save a few bucks per month. I'm a frugal person, but not illogically so, and I know that income has no ceiling but expenditures definitely have a floor.
I’m a student, I have not much time to work during the day, and jobs during the night are not exactly growing on trees.
Also, I’d still cut expenditures equally. Even my parents – both of which have studied law – do this. Actually, most people I know do. Why waste money on useless devices if it takes only seconds to unplug them?
If you're capable of rewriting essential subscription web-based services from scratch instead of paying a few bucks a month for them, you're basically do have a part-time job at night, except that your few-$-per-month savings aren't paying you anything close to what you're worth. Rather than spending your time doing this, you should be doing some programming that actually pays you a good wage.
You really believe "most people" use socket strips and a remote control to turn their tv's on and off each time? In the words of respected philosopher Nelson (from The Simpsons), "Ha Ha"
Germany, for example (Where I live). Most people don’t live in the US, and for most people wasting 1.20$ for a product where you save one or two lines of code to integrate it is not okay.
I seriously rewrote several web products myself that I'd have to normally pay 4$ or so per month for. I took over development for the QuasselDroid Android client because I could not afford IRCCloud. I ended up rewriting all the features of Reddit Gold last night as a browser extension because I can’t afford wasting money on Reddit Gold.
It’s problematic wasting money in one place, but for a dozen services at once? Nope, that’s gonna bankrupt a student who has no income except for a small grant.
That’s typical for most of the EU. A group of 500 million people. More than the US. Meaning, there are more people unplugging TVs to save money than there people who are able to waste their money on Starbucks coffees.
And if more people are unplugging their TVs to save money than there are people wasting money on Starbucks coffees, then maybe, just maybe, saving 1.20$ per month on a VPS is worth it.
(Used OVH for several years, but my server with them has an uptime of 1034 days as of today, so customer service might very well be useless - I've never had a reason to talk to them)
We paid OVH for the renewal of our company's domain name several weeks before its expiration. This domain hosted our google apps for business and more. We received an invoice and bank statements for that. OVH never renewed with the registry.
We only got to know about this because of a standard email warning from the country's registry (not OVH as a registrar) itself about quarantaine and expiry!
We spent over eight hours over several days talking to OVH. I have been able to verify that the problem was on the side of OVH only, and not on the registry's side at all.
In the end, we made a direct payment to the registry to make sure the domain was not deleted.