If my personal behavior is any indication, things are looking up for subscription web services.

When I went out on my own last fall, I decided to give various hosted services a try. I used mostly the free trial accounts. For the services I have stuck with, I have gradually hit the limits of the free plans, and in some cases, of the low-cost plans. I’m spending far more on these services than I ever thought.

Basecamp for to-do lists, notes, and reference documents

I’m now paying $49/month for Basecamp, and using it to coordinate all my projects. If you had asked me six months ago if I would pay $600 a year for a service like this, I would have said “no way.” But as I came to depend on the service more and more, I needed the capabilities of the next tier, and while I still find the price a little painful, I don’t want to do without it.

Everything I’m working on, whether a customer project, an internal business project, or even a personal or hobby project, gets a Basecamp project. I use the to-do lists extensively to keep track of what I need to do, and the writeboards to store notes and reference information related to the project. As simple as Basecamp is, there’s still features there I’m not using at all (like milestones). In a few cases, I’m using it to collaborate with others, but mostly I’m using it as a personal tool. This isn’t quite how 37signals envisioned it being used, I don’t think, but I find it very useful.

Freshbooks for client financial interactions

The other service I’ve come to depend on is FreshBooks. I thought I would get by with the free service, but I quickly hit its limits. I’m now paying $14/month.

FreshBooks takes care of all my financial interactions with my clients. I use it to track my time, send invoices, and track payments. Clients can log in and see the time tracking and review current and past invoices. They recently added a feature for estimates and quotes, which I expect to begin using soon. And for my hosting clients, FreshBooks automatically sends monthly invoices. This is a great time-saver and well worth the monthly fee.

Google for email and calendar

I’ve come to depend on Google not only for my email, but also for my calendar. Having a shared calendar for our family has proven to be extremely useful. I’m still getting this for free; Google now offers the option of paying $50/year/user, but I haven’t seen any compelling reason to do so. This illustrates the perils of making the free service too attractive—it lets you build a large customer base, but it can be hard to convert them to paying customers. In Google’s case, this is ok, since they can monetize the email, at least, with advertising.

Next up: offline access

Overall, I’ve been very happy using hosted services. I go back and forth between a few different computers, and it is very helpful having whatever I need wherever I am. And having a single place where all my notes go makes it a lot easier to keep track of things.

My one frustration with this is the lack of ofliine access. Sometimes I’m on a plane, or (more commonly for me) in a location without Internet access. Sometimes the services are down. Sometimes my Internet connection is down. I would really like to have all of my hosted information seamlessly synchronized to each computer, so I could access it offline when needed. I don’t expect it to be long before this capability is common: consider, for example, Google Gears, Joyent’s Slingshot, and Adobe’s AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly known as Apollo).