I usually hate paying for subscriptions. But there have been a few things where the monthly subscription has more than proven its weight in gold. The recent one is Codex, which continues to blow me away.

I've been using ChatGPT for about two years now for book planning, Excel spreadsheets, project brainstorming, and the like. When Codex was introduced, I initially dismissed it as something which only serious developers would use. Boy, was I wrong.

Here is a very small selection of the things it has made for me:

1. A desktop RSS feed reader for MacOS.

1. A failed login detector app for my Macbook.

1. A crypto price monitor MacOS app.

1. A photo metadata wiper MacOS app.

1. An Amazon price tracker MacOS app.

1. A sync/mirror script for my removable SSD drives.

1. An audio file metadata editor for MacOS.

1. LOTS of Python scripts, covering stuff like image compression and conversion, wi-fi connection checker, subtitles generator, website broken links checker, password generator, website sitemap generator, video compressor, and website metadata generator.

1. LOTS of webpages for my site. Its design skills are stunning.

1. An auto-complete search engine for my website.

1. A cookie consent banner for my website.

1. A database to keep track of my books (not mine).

1. A media player, inspired by Winamp (the best audio player ever).

1. A video player.

1. A spreadsheet on Google Sheets, which pulls my book publishing revenue data from Book Report, and then Codex performs deep analysis on that data.

1. A photos duplicate detector app.

1. An Analytics page on my website to replace Simple Analytics.

1. A mailing list, via Amazon AWS, to replace Mailerlite.

1. Book download landing pages, to replace Bookfunnel.

Codex is pricey ($100 a month), but it's proving to be great value for money. I really do hope they start lowering prices soon, considering the stiff competition they're up against, with places like Claude. I tried Claude too recently, but didn't find it compelling enough to switch.