[fhd2]

It is tough.

For my company, it's easy: I pay for the tooling my devs need. Overly simplified, I only pay 50-65 % of that, because expenses lower taxes. And compared to salaries, a few hundred $ is not a big deal. If I think about the time it saves us and how much money we can make in that time, it's a no brainer. Even just having people enjoy their work more pays off.

There's opportunity cost. Ad supported services are not overly incentivised to provide a quality product in the long run, so it's a safe assumption to make that they will waste your time to some degree, at least as they mature and enshittify. Some are great, eventually they all become bad, in my experience. It can be smart to use free stuff while it's still good, with an eye on migrating.

I don't know how much sense it makes to apply this opportunity cost thinking to your personal time. I don't really do that, but I do try to reduce time spent on anything that annoys me, and to do more stuff that brings me joy or pride, even if it's not economical. Life is short.