For me, that would be Secure CRT. I have yet to find a terminal emulator that matches its feature set. If you regularly manage hundreds of machines using various connection protocols (serial and ssh mostly in my case) It’s worth the $$$, and so far there hasn’t been any subscription nonsense. I liked using it at work so much I forked over the dough to have it at home.
None of the free alternatives do everything I need.
I’ll also mention a few iOS apps. One is Sun Surveyor. It’s an AR app that shows you the position of the sun, moon, and galactic center at any given time. The other would have to be Radarscope. It’s a weather radar app, but it’s a really good weather radar app.
EDIT:
This one’s debatable, but I use it all the time. Plasticity is 3D modelling software that attempts to bridge the gap between practical CAD programs and software meant for 3D artists like Blender. It’s not cheap considering Blender is free, but it’s buy once use forever, and at (I think) $150 it’s within reach of an individual hobbyist who knows what they want and is willing to pay for it.
Propellerhead’s Reason.
It’s some of the best audio engineering software that exists and as I understand, impossible to pirate.
As a day one user since release in 2000 (and before that Rebirth and Recycle)…
It can be pirated, lately eats resources, crashes a lot, overpriced plugins, audio crackling no matter what buffer settings after updates and to this day doesn’t have any ootb support for MIDI routing. After 20 years, and 400+ projects later I ditched that software. It became unreliable, used to be rock solid.
Propellerhead got aquired by an investment company, and Ernst left…became Reason Studios and then went downhill slowly. Last version I bought was Reason 12 upgrade and got more and more disappointed, stopped using it almost 2 years ago after another crash losing ideas.
Now on Studio One, also paid.
I am on Reason 3.0. Zero issues ever.
Didn’t have any issues with that either (from memory.) Lightweight and solid. Until version 8 Reason was pretty good.
I only use Reason sometimes as a plugin now into Studio One. It does have some unique features I still like to use, but as a main sequencer I would not recommend any version later than 8, which you can’t buy.
My advice for beginners to start with Reaper and it comes very cheap and full featured compared to most major DAW’s.
I am from the Steinberg era back in the 80s with a C64/Amiga, 90s with Cubase on Atari and PC…that is why I switched to Studio One. Suits me best, and the Artist 5 version came free with the Presonus controller (that I did not need) for an extra 20€ on the normal software price.
They have some really shitty practices: https://youtu.be/YAx3yCNomkg
Same happened to me with Recycle, Reason Studio’s stopped online activation. I still have the official, useless CD-Rom. So I have the 2.1 version that I did not pay for.