What "premium platforms" have a decent "Free" experience?

Hey gang,

So, lately, I've cut down on many of my premium platforms, simply due to lack of interest, or monetary issues. I've noticed that a lot of platforms "free" options are pretty miserable. I mean, of course they are, cause how would they make money otherwise? They WANT you to pay for premium so that they can carry on making stuff.

However, a lot of "free" platforms are so miserable that they're kinda unusable.

Spotify is terrible, giving you an ad after every THREE songs. It doesn't matter the length of the songs either, it feels like. I can listen to three 25 minutes songs, or 3 90s songs, and the ads come in. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the same five ads, over and over, on repeat.

Twitch is diabolical if you don't have turbo, which nobody does. It used to be if you had Amazon Prime, you had no ads, but for some asinine reason, they removed that feature, presumably by making the standard twitch experience so unpleasant that you'll watch the same 2/3 channels all the time. I will admit that I use an add-on for Twitch that removes all ads, forever, but the fact that I have to do this kinda stinks.

Youtube is terrible. I wanted to watch a 12 minute video on my IPad the other day, and there would've been, if I didn't skip, 14 minutes of ads in a 12 minute video. With ad-blocker on a computer, it's manageable, but for the average internet user these days (phones), it's shocking.

Giantbomb is pretty bad. I won't dog on the site we're on, but the free user experience is pretty bare bones.

I guess the best ones are the ones most closely linked to our every day lives. Google is a terrible company, and it's only "free" because they take your data as a price, but at least the actual user experience is decent.

What do you think? Are there many free services that you can think of that are comparable to their premium model?

As far as video platforms go, Crunchyroll is pretty generous on its free content, and I've also found that the new NBC/Universal platform Peacock has a decent amount of stuff available for free.

With music, I haven't used it in a very long time, but Pandora at least used to be a decent free music option. Unfortunately though, Spotify (or Apple Music) is pretty much the only game in town for on-demand listening of songs/albums. You can also find a lot of songs on YouTube if there's one in particular that you really want to hear, but it's far from ideal.

They're free for a reason so what you're saying doesn't surprise me in the slightest. As for YouTube on iOS you can just use an ad blocker and then use the site through Safari or any other web browser and you're ad free. There are also Siri Shortcuts you can use to force Picture in Picture to work without having to pay Google's BS fee.