What I look for in a paid service, and what I get from these is a reliable, out-of-my-way, "premium" (I feel that the service is working to make things best for me) solution to _one_ problem I have, with good support that actually cares, if applicable. All of them will never misbehave, or make me think "did it work" or "how do I turn this off, it's annoying!". Usually, I don't have to learn much. _They are tools_.

Linode gets me a box with a clear, clean, full-featured control panel, good specs and network, and every year or so, I'll magically get upgraded, so that I feel I'm always getting the best for my money (even if other services are cheaper). Problem solved: "I need a Ubuntu box".

Cloudflare will cache my site -- making it faster for clients and lighter for me --, handle DNS and get me A+ TLS (and other services I don't actually use) at the turn of a button. Problem solved: "My site is slow" + SSL as a bonus.

Freshbooks lets me track my time, invoices and payments with 0 learning curve, I'm busy working after all. Big colored buttons will tell me what to do, and if I can't still figure it out, support will do that for me. Problem solved: "I need to send clients invoices".

DreamHost hosts anything, unlimited. Power-user friendly, I never thought "I wish they allowed/supported that". For small websites, obv. Problem solved: "I need to host this sites/domains/DNS/mailboxes for my clients".

GitHub is how I'm trained to manage projects, for my private ones. PRs, Markdown, clear git views. Also, GitHub Pages is the best static hosting platform I ever used. Problem solved: "I need manage my project" + static hosting as a bonus.

FastMail simply handles my mail. Mail is a horrible thing to deal with on your own, but I rely on it, so I want to pay for it. I get my domain with TLS delivery, a support line with devs, and nice power-user tools. It's fast, compatible, reliable and has a nice web interface, I don't need anything else. Problem solved: "I need to receive and send mail".

Pinboard just saves my favorites, and lets me search through them when I need (full-text search). No useless social stuff on top of that. Also, it will store a copy of everything I bookmarked, so that it does not get lost. Problem solved: "I remember reading about that somewhere, let's look it up".

Amazon.it Prime is just the free shipping part, it makes shopping oh-so-much-more enjoyable. Problem solved: "I want that item".

Instapaper... well I don't actually NEED this one, but it's a nice way to read articles and they will store/index them for me once I read them (see Pinboard) and it's dirty cheap.

AWS works. I have 25.000 req/min on my Heartbleed test API? Fine, spin up that Elastic Load Balancer in front of 15 of those EC2 machines, store logs in that S3 bucket, use that DynamoDB as cache. Or, I have this blockchain to analyze, let's spin up that 3 big EC2 machines. Problem solved: "I need to scale this service".

Gandi sells me any domain for a reasonable price, without bugging me with those AwEs0m3 Features!!!1!!1 I could buy for just 9.99$. "No bullshit" indeed. (Maybe they should drop those web hosting offer emails, they are on the edge of annoying, but being plain text and one-off makes them bearable.) Problem solved: "I want that domain".

1Password stores and generates my passwords and identities safely, with a native easy-to-use interface that is not too intrusive. I used Lastpass for a while but I closed those ugly bars that screw up the page layout too many times, and they like HTML too much, the 1P native interface is much more smooth. Also, you can't trick 1Password to autocompile unless I trigger the hotkey, it feels safer. Problem solved: "These bloody password".

Sublime Text is a nice editor with a good community, and I'm a programmer, I spend most of my time inside it, possibly making money. It's a no-brainer to get the best available. Also, it's easy to use to the unexperienced, and you can get fairly productive going on. Problem solved: "I want to write code, TODAY. And be faster tomorrow."

Dash. Oh my God I <3 Dash. Can I pay it more? Double? 5 times more? Programming is looking up docs, some of us get entire vertical screens for that. Dash will get me any docs I want for any language (or Go package, since Beta!) with a single global hotkey and blazing fast fuzzy search. Did I mention "offline"!? I would not be programming on this airplane without it and it makes me much more fast and focused (since there is a separate space for docs, I get less distracted) in what I do every day. Problem solved: "How do I use that function again?"

Tweetbot is Twitter done right: 140 characters, images. Simple gestures and good feedback; offline tweets. No fuss, just... tweets. If I have to waste time, at least let's do it efficiently!

Finally, Tarsnap. Tarsnap makes archiving (I keep there old clients' data, too) and backing up data feel as if it was local, with the peace of mind of knowing that it's being compressed, deduplicated (I don't have to figure out what synchronized or incremental means, and I get to backup stuff as often as I want, yay!), replicated on the "cloud" (on S3 I mean) and encrypted at the state of the art, by open source code. Also, key management is so clean: printable text files, tiered permissions and no account management after key generation, I love that. Btw, yes I would pay some more for it, no I like the geek-to-geek feel even if I understand the business fuss, yes I'd LOVE auto-refilling, please take my money if I run low. And thanks for it!

Did I address your question or did you mean something different?

P.S. A problem I'd like to see solved by a single service (instead of HipChat+Hangout+Flowdock+IrcCloud+Skype+Viber) is "I need to chat/speak with this person (that might not use the service already) and I want indexed logs/recordings".