I wonder if sometime in the future, there is going to be subscription fatigue.
I just cancelled Netflix because I'm also paying for Amazon Prime. Netflix hasn't had anything worth watching for a good few months but it took me longer than that to go in and cancel it. But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
Patreon's another one. Really cool idea, but everyone with a Youtube or a blog or a Twitch stream is pushing it. So it's a case of subscribing to one person for $10 a month or 5 people for $2 each.
After that, you can get a monthly subscription of underwear, shaving stuff, make up, etc. at which point it seems like a purely wasteful cash grab.
The problem is, even with the increased competition, prices are only increasing.
I expect someone will make a site or app or service for managing this, which lets you maintain a "want to watch" list with optional priorities.
For each streaming service, the app would tell you which if the items you want are on that service, and how many total hours of content that is. You can use this to help decide which, if any, streaming services you should subscribe to for each month.
I have no idea where one would get the data for such an app, but this site [1] seems to have it, so I infer that it is possible to get it. They have a paid API, so maybe they could even be used as the data source.
Awesome.
I can deal with a large one time payment. A bunch of random 5 dollar a payments a month isn't going to float. I crawl through my credit card statements looking for oddities. And it just bugs me.
I too share the subscription fatigue, and avoid subscriptions as much as possible. I prefer to pay once, up front.
Bank of America has discontinued this service, and I haven't setup a new workflow, which is disappointing. but I mean, it is one solution.
I guess I should mention that I am poor-ish. Right now I am getting lumber from a reclaimed lumber place and making furniture in a Amish style. Then my sister paints and distresses it. So if a bunch of random five dollar charges hit my account at once and I am not expecting them it could be a problem.
In some ways, I agree. In others, I don't. I mean, the problem is largely in the difficulty of unsubscribing. If that were easier to manage (and virtual cards are one way to deal with that) I think it's not such a problem, and even has some advantages. But you could easily argue that this difficulty of unsubscribing is built into the business model; people who sell subscription based services know that the harder it is to unsubscribe, the more money they will make, so... incentives are not, as it were, aligned, and that tends to lead to suboptimal outcomes.
I think there are valid arguments for the subscription model; I know before buying a car, I rent all of the models I'm considering, for a week or more. This is often harder with things like software, which don't have as strong of ownership protections as physical goods, meaning I usually can't rent software to try it out, if it's not sold on a subscription plan. I'd consider renting a car permanently, (except that it's either massively expensive or massively inflexible; getting out of a lease, as far as I can tell, is way harder than selling a car, and renting cars outside of a lease is uneconomical. I feel the same way about commercial real-estate; usually the penalties for breaking a lease seem a lot worse than just selling the goddamn building a year into ownership. And this is possibly your objection; if you have perfect knowledge of your future needs, buying software up front is probably a lot cheaper. But, without the ability to sell the software when you are done, it's not really comparable.)
>If you're wealthy enough to put money for couple years worth of service into a virtual CC for every service you can use, you're probably wealthy enough to manage all this stuff for you anyway.
I think wealthy people would be willing to pay for an easier solution to this. I would. the virtual credit card solution is clumsy because the software is bad (I haven't actually gotten the capital one solution suggested earlier setup, it might be great, but the citi solutions and the now defunct bank of America solutions require flash and are... clumsy) - the problem isn't the money; for all the virtual credit card solutions I've tried, the payment goes to your regular credit card, so you don't need to sink any capital, it's just work
(but, of course, this is mostly about how difficult it is to cancel subscription services. If it were easy, this wouldn't be a problem. - I think this is our major point of disagreement.)
I was readying a long comment addressing your individual points, but I realized I can compress it all to this:
The overall reason why I prefer ownership of durable goods over subscriptions (and the planned obsolescence economy) is reduction of variance in opportunities and quality of life. At the time when I have the means, I can buy something. If I have less means or that something is very expensive (e.g. a new car, a house), I can convert it into a "subscription" myself using my bank, via various forms of loans and installment payments. And then when I go broke, I can still use the thing I own, perhaps to help myself get out of the predicament. Subscriptions bundle this all together, making the utility directly dependent on my cash flow, prevent me from optimizing the value I derive from them (through ToS that limit a lot of non-standard use cases), and deprive me from the ability to use a good in the time of crisis.
As long as I felt that they tried I would be alright.
Our wonderful journey wouldn't cut it. But a simple, we went broke would be cool.
Yup. Two years contracts, automatically renewed, with three months notice period for cancellation, cancellation by post (yes, by a papper letter), no early cancellations. Reverting the monthly direct debit transaction to "give a hint" to the predatory "service provider" triggers furious response from their accounting and customer service, and transaction cancellation fees. It's hard to imagine how the setup could be even more predatory for a customer. Fuck, even the memory of dealing with this raises my adrenaline level.