The gratitude subscriptions, 2025

Last year, I decided to give back, in a small way, the amount I receive from projects, services, apps, or people through a “gratitude subscription.” Every month, a contribution of around €10 as a thank you for using it, for the information, or for existence itself¹. I repeated the experiment.

This is my donation list for 2025, with repeat donations from last year marked with an asterisk. This year, too, I hope to share what I appreciate so you can appreciate it too.

• January. €10.40 to the Wikimedia Foundation for their enormous work in supporting knowledge. I don’t use it excessively, but I’m sure that many services that use it drink without restraint from their water. It’s my little contribution. My gratitude.

• February. $11 (~€10.61) to Bjørn Erik Pedersen, lead developer of Hugo, the framework — that I love — with which this blog is built. I really appreciate his work. My gratitude. ✱

• March. €10 to Devol, an Italian group of IT professionals. They are engaged in the development of a decentralized, private, secure, and reliable web, and are responsible for maintaining the Mastodon.uno instance, which holds my Mastodon account. I no longer use the FreshRSS service, but my appreciation for the work they did remains. My gratitude. ✱

• April. €10 to Reus Salini, lead developer of the PodTube.me service, which lets you turn YouTube channels into podcasts. It became a paid service later this year, but the donation I made allowed me to use a minimal amount of the service—more than enough for my needs at the moment. My gratitude.

• May. $10 (€9.25) to Alex Rodionov, lead developer of Maccy, the best clipboard manager for macOS I’ve ever used. My gratitude. ✱

• June. €10 to Jordan Baird, lead developer of Ice App, powerful menu bar management tool for macOS. Frankly, I then stopped using it, mostly because I changed Macs and no longer installed it, not because of inefficiency. A very useful tool. My gratitude.

• July. $11.70 (€9.95) to the Debian Project (via SPI). I don’t use Linux extensively anymore, except for a Raspberry Pi I have at home. I wanted to donate for all the joy it’s brought me over the past few years. My gratitude.

• August. €10 to Francesco Tucci for his podcast Pillole Di Bit, capable of explaining complex technology briefly and in simple terms. My gratitude. ✱

• September. €12 to Manuel Moreale, for his hard work spreading the pleasure to have a blog, and for his People & Blog project. My gratitude. ✱

• October. €10 to the Too Big To Fail Podcast, an Italian podcast about personal finance, told with hilarious professionalism. My gratitude.

• November. €10 to Cyberduck, the best FTP (and SFTP, WebDav, S3, Backblaze, Google Drive, …) client for macOS with the most beautiful icon in the entire Apple application landscape. My gratitude.

• December. €10 to Leandro Facchinetti, lead developer of Kill the Newsletter!, the service that I use to read my subscribed newsletters in my RSS client. My gratitude. ✱

Thanks to all.