$9.99/month | Hacker News Reader

$9.99/month

basicappleguy.com

390 pointssashk476 comments

One practice that's helped me is to always cancel immediately, which translates to only paying for one month. Ie. for spotify, netflix pay for the subscription, immediately jump through the hoops to cancel.

Forgetfulness turns into money savings, and as a bonus I get to review whether I am getting much out of it. Especially for tv like disney/netflix/apple tv, I often run though everything interesting and don't have much else to watch with them.

Also psychologically there's resistance to a boring to do that involves loss. I will put off "go to netflix and figure out how to cancel." So do that work when you are excited to see the new show.

This works really well, especially the year subscriptions - buy, cancel, get the year's worth. If you're using it, you'll notice when it dies and can resubscribe.

This was a few year ago now, but I was caught out by Adobe because they only enabled the 'cancel' button a few weeks before the subscription was about to renew. I contacted support and they said all I could do was wait until the correct time.

This is illegal in the EU.

Send them a letter and an email detailing that you are cancelling your account and kill the payment authorization. Problem solved.

This is so incredibly dark of a pattern that it makes me a bit mad tbh.

I subscribe to the Humble Bundle, where you get 10 PC games per month for $12. The trick is they pick the games, and you may not want to pay that month. You can skip a month whenever you want, but you need to remember to do so. That's their business model, assuming people won't remember to skip.

I'm frickin' iron man when it comes to this. I set a reminder on my phone every single month and haven't missed a pause yet, now over three years.

This is how I use the ever-growing video streaming landscape. As soon as there are a few shows I want to watch on one particular platform, pay for a month of that, cancel immediately. Watch the shows during the month, maybe extend for another one if necessary. Then at some point later do the same with another service - Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, all of 'em.

Alternatively and potentially easier so that you don't need to jump through all of the hoops of finding where they hid the unsubscribe button and futzing around with the app:

use one of those credit card privacy generating services and cancel the card or set limits on the cards use after you create it. it offers super granular control over who has access to how much of your money, how often and for how long.

Capital One credit cards have the virtual card feature built-in. You can use the Eno extension to use them. It even allows for scheduled lock outs of the specific virtual cards. I use it for every subscription service I use.

Is there a way to use the feature without their browser extension?

I have this card, and never used the extension, because I don't want to use a one time use extension.

Now they have added some of the features, in app. You can generate exactly one virtual credit card in app, can lock it from future use, and can delete this card (& thus can get a new one). Can't set the spending limit, can't get more than one virtual card in app, can't limit it to one seller.

The only thing it is good for is, your actual credit card number will never be with seller.

I use it without extension, it’s just more effort. You can use either browser or mobile app to create them.

Yes, the website (where you manage your card, check spending, etc) can create and manage all your virtual cards. In fact it gives you a lot more customization over the virtual cards than the browser extension. But the extension is more convenient, it automatically offers to generate a virtual card on shopping cart pages for you. But I use a combination of both.

This is how I manage subscriptions too. I give every subscription a unique virtual card and I set it to “expire” or deactivate after 24 hours. That way the cards stays active for the initial charge/verification, but then it will not work if the card gets charged at the end of the trial. If I decide to keep the subscription then I just log into the capital one site and reactivate the card (it’s just a simple little iOS style toggle switch) before the trial ends so that it continues.

Do you know by any chance - Is this feature available only in US, or for the Canadian customers too?

You can do this with privacy too. That’s free for 12 debit cards a month

just signed up!

I don't understand your answer, sorry...

Be careful. I would think that you are still on the hook for the subscription cost until you cancel, even if you use a virtual card.

Maybe with Apple they disable your Apple account but otherwise no

Why would you think you don’t have to be on the hook for something you agreed to pay for and didn’t. If you don’t tell them you’re done, they assume you’re not? It seems pretty standard. You wouldn’t open a bar tab, pay $20 and at the $30 of drinks point tell the bartender you only wanted to buy for $20 (and get away with it).

I don’t think they’ll take you to collections but I wouldn’t be surprised if they bill you should you ever re-subscribe.

Whether or not they come after you for what you owe, you still owe it.

You pay the first month, but after that it just gets denied. Every subscription I've seen handles it. Don't use it for a service that charges after usage.

They might "handle it" by deciding that you aren't worth pursuing for the small charge, but that doesn't mean you aren't technically liable for it.

Agreed. I do this too. Instantly cancel every subscription religiously.

Also works with an annual cancellation of my credit card.

I've actually designed my sites so that people can choose whether the plan is autorenewing or not when they sign up, so as to avoid such chicanery.

That seems like a sane decision if you actually care about your customers. I'm glad at least some people are implementing sane choices when enabled to do so. The dark patterns have really taken over in the public facing Internet in the last decade.

Yea, they're platforms focused on becoming more emotionally healthy so I feel more comfortable when people can more clearly consent. While it may lead to less money up front, it may provide much less resentment and much more appreciation in the long term.

We'll see how it plays out in practice :-)

I am doing the same. If I just need it for a month, I will always cancel it immediately after subscribing.

With this, I don't need to set a reminder to cancel it or having to pay for another month if I forget to do so.

I do this too;

I really wish more apps would use the subscription model the 'Due' app uses, not sure if this subscription model has a name... [1]

"When you purchase Due, you unlock every feature today, including any new features that will be introduced in the next one year [.....] The Upgrade Pass is an optional subscription that unlocks features permanently, even after the subscription lapses. Any feature unlocked remains available to you forever."

[1] https://dueapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053244591-Wh...

I wonder if there could be a service/different way to pay such that you pay for a month, it cancels at the end of the month, it renews as soon as you want to use the service again. I guess this is closer to paying pro-rata/per usage.

Is it typical to spend so much on software subscriptions? I pay for Spotify and a cheap VPS if that counts but that's it. I figured the average person probably has one or two media subscriptions (Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc) and nothing else.

I would say that's definitely on the high side. What you're describing is probably on the low side. Of course, many people spend about $100/month on a cable TV bill. It looks like he has a couple of sports subscriptions but doesn't actually seem to be paying for live TV in general.

Of course, many people spend about $100/month on a cable TV bill.

I think $100 may be low these days.

At a neighborhood party around 2017 I asked people what they were paying for their cable service, because I was thinking about switching from satellite. Not one was under $125, and most were in the $175 area. $250 with internet. The big sports fans were well over $300/month.

One guy who considers himself a "professional sports gambler" (when he's not repairing air conditioners 9 to 5) said he was paying over $600/month to feed the wall of six 60-inch TVs in his man cave.

"Hunnert bucks a screen!" he crowed proudly. I ended up keeping my existing service, which I think was in the $35/month range.

I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again. In the UK I just signed up to a £20/month VDSL2 broadband service (approx 65 Mbps, FTTC, unmetered), rolling monthly contract, and £65 up front. The contract guarantees at least around 50 Mbps or they automatically pay compensation. $100/month seems pretty crazy to me. I know the lack of competition and widespread collusion is bad in the US amongst cable companies, but you saying people typically pay 5x more for what seems like similar service to what I'm getting is really eye-opening. Apart from Virgin Media most companies share the OpenReach network that's sort of publicly funded (ish). Yet, the UK isn't exactly known for investing well in public services so I'm still surprised at the gulf in cost.

We're talking about cable TV content. Satellite (DirecTV) costs about the same. But, yes, now that I only have Internet from my cable provider, I also pay about $100/month for that.

There’s a lot of variation in the US. I’m in a 600k city and an area with some kind of COVID program that pays my $20.00 bill. I’m not paying anything for a very reliable 35 mbps.

I'm paying £43/month for 1Gbps symmetrical with Hyperoptic. My current bottleneck is the otherwise very capable Turris Omnia that I use as a router.

Similar speeds, about £24/mo for the FTTC, with bundled phone (pay as you go) and one static IP. SIM only Mobile phone with same provider with unlimited calls and 7GB data for just under £10/mo.

In the UK I just signed up to a £20/month VDSL2 broadband service

Good for you. But I wrote about cable television service, not about internet service. Two different things.

Looking at the exchange rate, I’m paying ~£65/month for 1Gbps unlimited fiber in Canada, which is not exactly known for its cheap internet.

£20 a month for only 65Mbps seems not great to be honest.

Is £500/y really worth a difference you'll rarely notice? Streaming needs 20Mbps max, so it's only large downloads like games which will take an hour or two.

The savings pay for a high end phone every year, or a complete desktop upgrade every other year.

I do a heck of a lot more with my internet connection than just streaming – there was a night-and-day improvement when stepping up from my previous 150 Mbps coax connection. It’s not just “large game downloads”, but moving many gigs of data to remote servers daily as part of my job while both my wife and I are in video calls, while also etc etc. Fast symmetrical fiber is a godsend.

But whether or not these speeds would be meaningfully useful to you personally, the real observation here is just that GP is paying ~4.7x as much on a Megabit per second per month basis – your 20Mbps “I just stream” connection should cost hardly anything, a bad deal however you slice it.

(As an aside: yearly phone replacement?? I buy hardware to last on a much longer timeframe, so it more than balances out)

edit: back of the envelope network stat math – the 7.5TB I moved last month (up+down) would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection for more than the month (34 consecutive days), assuming it was symmetrical (which a connection like that probably isn’t).

Most of that £20 goes to cover the telephone line rental, it's not directly comparable to prices for fiber.

The details of why the bad deal is bad are good color, but don’t really change that it’s not a great deal.

> would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection

The GP was talking about a 50Mbps connection.

Also, I pay the same for a 150Mbps symmetric FTTP (well its fibre to the building and copper Ethernet to the demarc in my flat), with the option to upgrade to 1Gbps symmetric for £43pm. I dont use my home as a backup or major content creation store so for me its not worth the extra.

Either way, it sounds like Canada doesn’t suffer from the same problems as the USA as far as broadband goes.

Yes, when you have a 15x faster Internet connection, it feels like all your Internet-interfacing software has been upgraded. Lots of small interactions go from having delays built in to feeling snappy, if not effectively instant. Small downloads become nothing, medium become small…it’s nice if you do much with computers or phones.

London it’s about £60/mo for 1000/50Mbps DOCSIS from Virgin Media but I think the smaller FTTH companies that require an enabled property are cheaper.

US is a big place. I'm paying $75 for unlimited 1G fiber where I live, and it is not a cheap place in general. I have family living in cheaper places paying <$30 for 50-100Mbps cable broadband. I have other family in the suburbs paying like $300 for decent internet and cable TV, getting ripped off, but essentially not caring because they don't want to deal with changing anything.

Internet sucks in London, UK, yet to get 6.5mb/s or so called ‘Fibre’ internet. It’s 2022 and you can’t get a 200-500mbit plan in Zone 1 of London without going for a business fibre plan and pay a lots of money for digging if you don’t live in some apartment building. Even g.network and Hyperoptic have been digging around my house but my Mews house won’t get connected even while everyone in the Mews indicated interest

The person you're responding to isn't talking about internet service, they're talking about premium sports video packages like NFL Sunday Ticket.

> I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again.

I think you might be remembering conversations about mobile service or something. I live in the US and my gigabit fiber (to my house) is fifty bucks a month. The US is a big place.

The problem in the US is that there is now a $30 federal subsidy for internet. This is ostensibly to support low income people but the effect is that it sets a minimum price anchor. Very few ISPs offer a cheap, low bitrate plan despite few people really needing to have multi-100Mbit service.

Wow I haven’t used cable in over ten years! I have a $30 per month Comcast internet subscription and I get all my stuff through there. I don’t pay for any streaming service except nebula.

I only have cable for internet. But then a couple things like disney plus. Amazon Prime is there as a side effect :-) Since I need to update my mobile phone I'm thinking about using it as a hotspot at home as skipping cable entirely. Not sure how viable that is.

This information comes as a shock to me. My monthly subscriptions are for home internet and spotify alone

If you use 'serious software' (Adobe, Autodesk, Unity, etc) the bill can add up fairly quickly. But that's for professionals and serious hobbyists, and that's powerful software that offers a lot of value to serious users.

And any tech hobbyist can quickly end up with a number of smaller subscriptions (e.g. hosting, backups, AV, password management)

But I've not yet found any mobile-only 'apps' that can justify the usually-overpriced subscriptions.

The upside is that I don't spend too many hours on mobile devices, as so many games/apps have such obnoxious monetisation (see Diablo Immortal, or any 'hypercasual' game with more real-money-gambling ads than actual gameplay), and the 'mobile web' isn't as good as it should be (endless app nags, poor ad-blocking compared to a real computer)

Have you tried Brave browser for Android? Its ad-blocking works extremely well for me.

Or you could download a system-level adblocker and swerve the whole cryptocurrency/BAT thing altogether. There's a lot better solutions for fighting ads than downloading $SOME_GUY's Chromium fork/pet ponzi scheme.

> $SOME_GUY's Chromium fork/pet ponzi scheme.

You mean the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla co-founder?

There's something like a reverse ad hominem I don't have a term for.

"Person made x, so why would you doubt them on y?"

Lots of people latch on to high school achievements as their life passes them by until they realize they haven't done much in a long time and have a mid-life crisis. Some people buy an expensive car. Others start a Chrome fork and crypto scheme.

I'm not saying you shouldn't doubt them, I'm not sure where you got that from. The point is that this is not just "some random person" fork's, it's by someone who has established himself in the industry, so like it or not there IS a reputation behind this brand and piece of (open source) software. If the browser is good or not that's another discussion (which I'm happy to have), but the comment I was answering simply dismissed the idea of using the fork because it's by some random person, and so I pointed out that's not really fair.

What about if someone made a good X, then tried to make another good X? Is that still a midlife crisis

It's called "appeal to authority", and it's a fallacy only in case where the authority is not relevant to the area in question. So, if a Nobel prize winner in literature gives advice on economics or quantum physicists or medicine, then their credentials are irrelevant, and appeal to their authority is a fallacy. If, however, a prominent physicist talks about physics, then it doesn't mean they are necessarily right, but at least the likelihood of them being right is much higher than for a random person from the street. As such, having created successful technical products in the past suggests that it's likely next product may be worth something too. It's not a guarantee, but it's a relevant data point.

> haven't done much in a long time

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

> All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

I think you're giving him too much credit. This is the guy who cursed us with JavaScript and set back Web development by a solid decade, then went on to say "fuck you" to same-sex marriage before getting fired from his newly-attained CEO chair of Mozilla. His contributions to the world at large are more akin to the French: he added a lot of fancy, useless things to the world and then cowered and backpedaled when he was questioned for his beliefs.

> a reverse ad hominem

I think we call this an argument from Ethos. i.e. it leans on what someone is, rather than their persuasiveness (pathos) or how well their argumentation is structured (logos). It is not a particularly strong way to make a case, but it is a way to make a case. If you have a problem with it, you are free to speak of what you feel should be considered instead. I personally think "it's a cryptocurrency and therefore a scam" argumentation is lazy and not very compelling, but perhaps your target audience does not.

Yes, the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla co-founder's Chromium fork/pet ponzi scheme. A literal someguy.

I'm not even a terribly serious hoobyist but I still pay for Adobe's photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) plan. I still haven't had much luck finding another option that works well for organising a photo library.

Especially among people who don't really pay attention to their budget, I'd expect this to be common. Maybe not as extreme as some of the apps are more aimed at professionals, but having seen the amount of money people who really can't afford it drop on useless subscriptions (e.g. antivirus for iOS) despite being told it's useless...

Yeah, I have an Amazon Prime subscription and a VPS for a personal blog, but that's it. I figure most people have like Prime and Netflix, or Disney+ and Spotify. Not all of the above, plus weather app subscriptions, and dozens of other things.

But looking at some of these comments, we appear to be the odd ones out.

Off the top of my head I pay for Amazon Prime, Spotify, Apple iCloud, Office 365, VPS, VPN.

Definitely not normal.

> but I didn't think my list was particularly egregious

Grammarly is $150/year!! How is that not egregious?

My only significant subscriptions are:

1. Netflix 2. Amazon Prime 3. Youtube Premium

All shared with other people.

This guy was paying $40/year for a weather app and was surprised he was spending a ton on subscriptions. How?

>Grammarly is $150/year!! How is that not egregious?

I don't personally find Grammarly useful. But I know people who swear by it and, if it's an application that helps you write maybe every day, $150/year is nothing.

I pay more than that for Lightroom which I also use a lot.

More than that for The New York Times which I read daily.

Etc.

There's definitely a subscription version of "Does it bring you joy?" But there seems to be almost a moralistic pushback on paying for software/services things that you find useful.

I paid three month for grammaly when I was writing my MS thesis. It was useful for the extensive usage. But I canceled afterwards because it is not worth keeping.

> $150/year is nothing

except it is a lot compared to alternatives like a library card and cultivating literacy.

Yeah people shouldn't use tools they find useful.

Of course they should. But they should also consider alternatives.

IMO $150 a year for something you simply should just learn (it's a basic skill). A library card ~$20 a year and you get so many more benefits.

150/yr doesn't sound to egregious for an app you actually use. Of course, it depends on your income, for some people it could be insane, but there are many people earning high 6 figures in tech (no, not me, not yet at least :) or even 7 figures - for them $150/year is like rounding error in their paystub, why would it be egregious? Of course, provided it is really useful for you, otherwise there's no point even for $15/year or 1.5$.

TFA literally ends with them saying they canceled Grammarly! I feel like half of y'all are out here flagellating the author for decisions where the whole point of the article is that they made some bad decisions and fixed them.

Probably well above median and well below average.

Median skewed by the fact that even people with little disposable income have phones with access to the App Store but aren’t dropping $408/year for premium Apple experience.

But the mean is skewed by money is no object users who don’t miss a thousand dollars a month.

I don't think so, I feel like mine are pretty aligned with what my friends have. I pay the AppleCare monthly, a couple smaller things like Peloton and Apple Music. Doesn't add up to that much overall. I do donate $20/mo to Signal, which is my largest software-only app thing, and I see the OP seems to donate to Twitter in a couple ways, so I guess to each their own.

No, the author has no self control. This is a financial issue rather than subscription addiction.

I’m sorry, are you saying that paying for a weather app and 4 different note taking apps is not a good financial decision?

Not all note taking apps are equivalent. I use 3 at the moment and a "sketch app". Mine are all free but the same concept applies.

Agree with this.

Either that or they are very wealthy. I can’t imagine looking at this long list of subscriptions and being satisfied I’m getting value from them all.

Personally, my only subscriptions are for hosting, cloud, music and video.

Most other things can be done for free or without a subscription.

Define "very wealthy" for me on this? Because I'm looking at some of these and going "so that's 50 cents per day. Seems ok for something I use daily". Sure, if I was making 30k/year I'd be reconsidering things, but if you're software engineer in the US, 2000/year isn't an insane amount of money to spend on essentially a full ecosystem of products and services for their phone, desktop, and work computer for them and their family.

Not to mention that the point of the entire article is that they found out they weren't getting satisfactory value from all of them and cut back some! I feel like half of y'all read the post and thought it was a brag about how rich they were instead of a mea culpa about how they realized they were spending too much.

I think it’s more of a personality, principle and preference thing. I’m also very hesitant adding and/or keeping subscription services just because I don’t like the idea of the gradual increase in fixed spend of any kind, but I have lots of friends who are fine with subscribing to lots of things. Each to their own I guess (unless you can’t/shouldn’t afford it and then it’s a different matter of course).

I agree, create a budget and stick to it. It's a good idea to audit every month so you know where your money is going and what you're doing with your money.

I'm a random dude with family and kids.

Spotify, Netflix, Disney, prime, Adobe, jetide, reface (occasionally) toon faces (occasionally), peak,Duolingo. These are the ones I'm consciously aware of.

Various educational services from Monthly to coursera to music ones such as pianote and ultimate guitar and songsterr. Previously stuff like code academy or oreilly etc. YouTube subscription. Half a dozen patron accounts I support (I am well-off enough, and as ex-programmer and ex-photographer sufficiently of content-producing/livelihood mentality , to have the luxury and intent to support the content I consume).

Then there are the ones I only notice when I really think about it or look at yearly transactions - Microsoft office, Google drive, apple Icloud, backup (originally sync.com then back laze and now I Backup or something). 1password. Sometimes nzbmatrix and whatnot. Apple arcade. Geforce now. And it keeps going.

This empathically does not include traditional subscriptions. My father in law lives with us and I am embarrassed at size of our cable bill as that's what he watches all day long.

I guess the question is do these things provide value to you? And what percent of your income is it? I’m guessing the answer is yes and small.

Correct.

Mostly I wanted to indicate you don't have to have extraordinary needs to accumulate subs.

We've gone from cable model to Netflix monopoly (how I miss it) back to myriad subs to get content for broad family.

similarly for software, if you like to fool around with utilities computers, it's not hard to rack up the subs. A file comparison utility wants me to pay yearly fee. Image browsing program wants to be a subscription. Everything wants me to keep paying.

Depends. I used to have close to zero software subscriptions, but now I earn a little more and I can afford to pay for some software even if I technically could do without paid version - e.g. Duolingo, Evernote, Feedly, etc. I do it as a conscious effort to support apps I use - in part so that people that can't afford it still could use the free versions, and so that they continue to exist in general. From pure financial optimization angle, I am likely wasting my money. But I think it makes more likely the apps that I use survive and stay alive, which IMHO is worth a small investment even if I do not use too much of the paid features.

I feel like I’m not a big subscriber to stuff, but I have, off the top of my head:

- YouTube $10/mo and super worth it

- Netflix $15/mo and lately meh

- AppleTV $10/mo and meaning to cancel again

- AMC $10/mo ditto

- Apple Music $10/mo and want to cancel but need to figure out migration

- Adobe $10/mo for PS+LR and pretty happy with it

- DropBox $10/mo and I guess, whatever

- 1Password I forget how much…

- Old-School web hosting about $10/mo

- GitHub $5/mo, tribal membership fee

- Digital newspapers and magazines, probably around $50/mo or maybe double that?

…plus a few obscure software subs that are sort of “pro” and Amazon Prime which is for fast delivery to rural America a few times a year, plus a bunch of domains, plus Patreon including at least one software person. Plus whatever I’m forgetting.

My goal for media is to have one streaming movie/TV service at any one time, and go back to paying for music one album at a time. But who knows if I’ll get there. My monthly software cost will definitely increase soon.

And despite all this, I think I’m pretty conservative and don’t have too many subs. Someone with a good income who subscribes on a whim, probably spends at least double this much.

You can get the iCloud subscription and merge dropbox Apple Music and Apple tv all into a single thing.

You may not consider yourself a big subscriber, but you are paying $1700 a year in subscriptions. That is pretty substantial.

Also YouTube music is pretty decent and replaced Spotify for me. Since you're already paying for it, it may be a good replacement for Apple music.

It's not really that substantial if you're making 170k/year, which isn't an insane salary for a software engineer in the US.

The money is just as substantial, you just don't feel it as much.

Sure, but it's a sliding scale. $1 is a substantial amount to many people, but it's unhealthy for me to feel guilty spending a dollar of groceries. It's only really healthy to consider things in relation to what you can afford in terms of money, time, and physical ability.

I understand (and understood) what you are getting at. But if you don't stop and think about what that same (substantial) money might mean to a person in a different position in society, that is pretty solipsistic.

It’s substantial enough, I could surely think of something costing $850 that I’d rather have than half these, if we take the other half to be “essential.”

My point is that it’s super easy to end up with this kind of expense, or much more, without subscribing to “much.”

Oh sure, and that's the entire point of the article. But even if I look at their MLB subscription and go "I can come up with 10 things I'd rather spend that money on" that's a personal thing of what I like vs. what they like. Who knows what things the author isn't spending money on that you or I are spending money on that they'd think is wasteful of us?

In general, I find it silly to look at anyone else's situation, and outside of extreme situations, try to take a "you're wrong and I know better than you about how your life would be better if you spent your money differently." position.

> It’s substantial enough, I could surely think of something costing $850 that I’d rather have than half these, if we take the other half to be “essential.”

You're look at it as a zero sum game though. The GP may be able to afford all of these and spend $850 on the latest widget too, all without blinking.

ok i know hn hates memes but this one is so relevant: https://i.redd.it/3p9mr4vuxny41.jpg

like i get a lot of hackernews can afford it but i got so many friends who r "broke" while spending like that and won't stop.

I'm surprised too and a lot of their subscriptions seem to fall under the category of leisure/entertainment. Are people really that bored to spend that much on these services. It's even cheaper to start a new hobby.

nah i got 0 subscriptions and will keep it that way. most of my friends got 2-4 (spotify and netflix for most, apple music and disney+ for some or maybe 1 other.)

Software-wise, AllTrails is the only subscription I have.

Most Apple users are bad with money, its a very lucrative user base to target.

One thing I think may be underrated by many:

We cancelled Amazon Prime, and besides the annual fee, we noticed that our household retail spending went down significantly. It turns out that when it takes more than 1-click to buy stuff… we buy less stuff.

As far as convenience, one of the reasons we felt it was time to cancel is that we can just as easily get almost anything we wanted from Amazon direct from the seller or via Target/Best Buy/B&N/B&H. Surprisingly, this is often cheaper than Amazon (and almost never more expensive). While there’s a bit of added friction to think for two seconds which store to check, the benefit of fewer impulse buys seems worth it. Plus, we haven’t ended up with any crappy knockoffs since we bailed on Amazon.

It was the excessive knockoffs that got us to quit our Prime too. Nowadays, I forego the 2 day "free" shipping for peace of mind that the product I get is straight from the vendor and the price difference is negligible.

Yeah shipping logistics as improved dramatically over the years. I live 45 mins from any city and I am constantly surprised with how quickly things arrive, usually with FedEx or UPS. I've had a BBQ arrive from Home Depot next day, and just as quick shipping from Chewy, Best Buy, and Walmart as well -- no membership required!

I try to buy local in town from the hardware store, etc. before buying online. Anyway, happily cancelled Amazon Prime a couple years ago.

This isn't at all surprising when you consider how pushy Amazon is with getting you to sign up to prime - they are clearly getting a lot out of it.

They're not actually, or at least they were not making much money with it. Since they significantly hiked the prices multiple times I'm not sure it's still true.

This kind of calculation is what convinced me to quit smoking before going to university in 1990. Cigarettes were $5 / pack. I smoked a pack a day.

$5 x 365 days x 4 years = $7300.

Given that I was saving up the money beforehand, quitting was the difference between starting school in 1990 or 1991.

I felt like a 'cold turkey' for about three months. But it was so worth it.

> Cigarettes were $5 / pack.

I quit in 1980 ($0.65/pack).

They are now close to $15/pack, in NY. I know, because I have a family member that still smokes.

This does not even touch the cost to health.

That $5 number is suspicious to me, or perhaps just geographically skewed. In early 90s, I went to the store and bought cigarettes for my mom almost daily and I remember it being about $2.

The $5 figure was from northern British Columbia. Cigarettes were much cheaper in the U.S. at the time (Canadians used to bring back a couple of duty-free cartons on a regular basis) and in Ontario, where the government reduced the taxes to counter smuggling.

Edit: in the link below you can see that over the course of 1990, cigarette prices rose from $35 to $48/carton (so $4.80/pack if you bought them by the carton) in 1990. They were, of course, more expensive if you bought individual packs, or if you lived in the north.

https://otru.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/update_may2002.p...

I remember visiting Canada, in the 1970s, and cigarettes were about $4 a pack. Everyone used to buy big cans of Export tobacco, and roll their own. Apparently. pre-rolled cigarettes were taxed heavily, but loose tobacco was not. I think this is still the case, in many nations. I have a friend from UK, who is always smoking hand-rolled "fags."

Oh wow. Yeah definitely a US thing then. Completely makes sense, sadly.

I paid $5/pack for Nat Shermans in SF in 1994/95. IIRC there were super cheap brands for around $2 but they were skanky, Shermans and Dunhills and American Spirits were all around $4-5.

May be a NY thing. I bought Marlboros in Sunnyvale in 2016 and paid $5-6 USD per pack.

NY is insane. It's about taxes. The City is much worse than the 'burbs (about $12/pack, out here).

If I go down to MD or VA, they are about $5 less.

Covid made me quit, I just couldn't get any cigs at all due to lockdown. I was pissed for two weeks, then I just got used to it.

My wife asked me if I would try and quit when she was pregnant. 12 years later, I’m so glad I did. For myself, for being an example for my kids…

My friends who still smoke cigarettes are now seeing the start of some of the typical health complications.

Yep, quit when my first daughter was born. Rough as hell for the first year, but that was now 23 years ago.

Is a pack a day normal? During college I would feel bad that I had smoked three cigarettes a day. I've since switched to cigars, and have about one a month at most.

I don't know if it's still normal. In the 1970s and 1980s smoking a pack a day was fairly typical. Two packs a day was considered excessive, but most people knew someone who smoked that much.

The old quip here:

Doctor: "if you multiply the cost of your cigarettes by your consumption, you'd have enough money to buy a Ferrari."

Smoker: "do you smoke?"

Doctor: "No."

Smoker: "Then where's your Ferrari?"

Doctor: "I used the money to buy things with greater utility than a Ferrari."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I always find these discussions interesting. The risks that the article outlines around losing track of how much you're spending are certainly real, but there's two things that strike me around all of this:

1. I somewhat object to them including things like Disney+ or MLB in this calculation. Sure, it's an app subscription, but you're primarily not paying for an app with its features and development, you're buying access to content that you happen to be receiving and paying for via an app. You wouldn't include subscriptions to products on Amazon as an "app subscription" even if you bought it through the Amazon app.

2. I'm curious to balance the rise of the subscription model with what I see as a generally increased quality and upkeep of many of the apps that are on it. There's obviously exceptions, but apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced. Many of them are on the cutting edge of using new OS features well, for instance Carrot's widget support is amazing. I've totally forgotten the dread of an OS update where half of your programs just stop working for weeks or months, or even forever.

Yeah, while he did categorize the subscriptions, I do think it would be useful to break things down as content, applications, and infrastructure. There's some overlap as with Apple One (which includes both storage and News+ for example), but it probably makes sense to separate out a Disney+ from a Grammarly.

I even see Grammarly as being in an odd category since it's also presumably something they use on a computer and not just an app.

I'd split it up as Content, Services, and Applications. Something like Apple News, The New York Times, or MLB you're buying access via an app to content you could potentially get/consume via non-app means, though likely still paid. Services like a Grammerly or a VPN are an ongoing cost for usage. Applications like a Bear or Carrot Weather are purely optional. You could use Notes and Apple Weather if you wanted, but you're paying an extra X per month to fund the development and upkeep of a tool you find use out of.

The split I think helps you identify what you may want to stop paying for because each of those are slightly different calculations. You could maybe replace Netflix with a local library card, or just buying theater tickets and DVDs. You could go back to using Notes or some other app instead of using Bear. There's no real alternative to paying for a VPN, so that becomes harder to decide you no longer need once you've decided you need it.

With content in particular, there's far more of it out there both streaming and otherwise than anyone has time to watch. Indeed, it probably makes sense, if one were to budget, to have something entertainment as a category of which streaming is just a subcategory. It's certainly an area where you can end up subscribing for some show and then you really don't get your money's worth. I don't watch a huge amount of video and I'm always leaning in that direction.

> apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced

Not sure about the last 2 but a weather app is a simple problem that needs to be solved once and then never messed with again - I would personally prefer my weather app not to be constantly updated. The last thing I want is the UI on my weather app to change all the time.

I don't go buy a new screwdriver or hammer despite newer and slightly better models being available unless the existing one breaks or stops being compatible (let's say a new kind of screw/nail became mainstream). I want the same from my utility apps.

The collection of weather data itself is a different task but that's something that's already often done by governments and given away for free (as we pay for it indirectly via taxes).

But they're not changing the UI regularly for the most part, they're offering new and more convenient optional UI elements that are useful. Or providing good Day-1 support for new OS notification features or new options on Apple Watch.

It also helps pay for their use of those weather data and forecasting APIs, some of the more effective of which are private and paid APIs.

And that's totally ignoring that almost nothing, especially in mobile apps can just be "written once and never updated". APIs change, new sizes of device come out...

What you pay for isn’t generally updates to the app, but the service of sourcing, processing and consolidating the weather data for the way it is presented by the app. I use three different weather apps (only one of them with a subscription, $1 per year) because each has unique aspects of its data and presentation that are useful depending on the use case. One of them has diagrams combining forecasts from 20 different data sources for the next week (which gives a nice overview of the spread of forecasts for each day), sources which I don’t think are all free.

INCREASED quality?

I think we live on different planets...

It's obviously not every app, but I pay for Carrot, Overcast, and Parcel, and would consider Flighty if I flew more than I do currently. I can earnestly say that all three have been best-in-class apps for what they do, and for 20, 10, and 5 dollars per year, I don't mind funding their development.

I go a bit the other way. I can't stand the constant turmoil in an app's UI in the name of whatever new UX thing is being experimented with. I'd much rather have big updates in one go that I can evaluate on their own merit. That doesn't totally preclude a subscription model, but it is how most subscription services work. Lately, I've been forced to update mobile apps just to connect to whatever backing service. It's obnoxious because even with auto-updates enabled, it may not have updated yet. And now I need to wait for the update or just not use it if in an area with limited cellular coverage.

I appreciate recurring revenue helps businesses, but that's true of all businesses. Software just has the lock-in, generally, to enforce it. If this is the only way to pay for stuff, though, I think JetBrains has the best model I've seen. I pay a subscription and can update software on my own schedule. If I decide to stop, I have a fallback perpetual use license.

I think that really depends on the app in question. Often these apps have a free version where you can evaluate if you think they'll cause UX Turmoil, and then support the ones that are reasonable.

If anything, I find my subscription money helps to support smaller developers and developer teams that tend to be better about not being all about meteoric growth and trend-chasing and focus more on just delivering a quality product.

On the “subscriptions or not” part, the useful distinction is what’s left when you cancel.

Amazon products, even if you paid monthly to get them would still be in your hand, and potentially of value if you canceled your subscription. Same goes for “build this ship one piece a month” kind of irl subscriptions: arguably nobody would buy your half built ship, but it’s still in your hand when you stop paying, and it makes a decent paperweight.

Disney+ or MLB leave nothing if you unsubscribe, in that respect looking at it the same way as Adobe CS if fair imo.

I'm not sure if that's true though - If I subscribe to Disney+ for a month and watch hours of movies and TV shows that I enjoy, someone from Disney doesn't come by my house and mind-wipe me when unsubscribe.

What's left when I cancel a media subscription is all the enjoyment I had in the past while engaging with the media it provided, and maybe the conversations I had with friends or family about the Baseball game we all watched. They don't "leave nothing" any more than going to spend time with a friend leaves you with nothing when you come home after.

That seems meaningfully different than something like Adobe CS or a VPN - When I cancel my VPN subscription, I no longer have a VPN. I don't subscribe to Adobe CS because I inherently enjoy my time using Adobe CS, I do it because it's helpful for a hobby or job I have.

I am frankly astonished by this article and all of these comments. Right now I have only 3 digital subscriptions totalling $20.58/month. (Admittedly that's low right now; I usually have an additional 2 streaming services, rotated every few months, for maybe another $25/month).

The key thing to remember is that any recurring subscription costs us theoretically infinite money (given infinite time). Obviously we won't have that subscription forever, so it's up to us to calculate how much it will cost us over the next month, year, decade.

Any time someone says "Just $N per month!" all I hear is "costs infinite money unless I do something about that." This thought really helps me resist leaking money like that.

It's just a matter of cashflow. Presumably, you will continue making money. Either from salary or hopefully from investments / pension later on. Is money in > money out? Then you're good. You can keep paying infinitely if you have income infinitely.

That seems like an unhelpful way of thinking about it. I always think about it as "I make X per Month. This thing costs Y per month. Is Y/X a reasonable amount of money to spend on a thing?"

By your logic, I earn "just $N per month" so I'll earn infinite money unless I'm fired. That's obviously not a useful way to budget, but neither is thinking about $5/month as "costs infinite money".

If, after taxes and mandatory expenses I have $500/month left over, then the proposition "Should I spend 1% of my discretionary money on this?" is a much more reasonable way to think about things until your financial situation changes. If I lose my job, or take a pay cut, then it's obviously time to consider cutting back unnecessary expenses, but otherwise, it's as "infinite" as my income.

>> Is Y/X a reasonable amount of money to spend on a thing?

The proper question to ask is sum(Yi)/X a reasonable amount of money to spend. If not, which Yi is not providing the desired marginal utility.

It is interesting to me that you have income and outflow so tightly coupled that you think in terms of "N% of income".

I did that for several decades. These days I take pains to decouple income and outflow. That is: I judge the expenditure on its own merits, whether I need or want it by itself, without regard to what % of income it might be.

Think of it like a leaky bucket: my paycheck goes in the top, and I control how much leaks out the bottom. Of course, I am lucky enough to have that luxury. Many people (most Americans) don't have enough income to decouple outflow from it, and are forced to think in percentages of income.

Sure - there's benefits to both ways of thinking about it. It's less that I tightly couple them and more that I find, for a sufficiently low percentage of my income, it's not worth stressing that much about the expense.

My mental model is quite close to yours for larger purchases ($100 or more, generally), but for something whose monthly cost is less than my hourly wage, thinking too long about if it's really worthwhile is probably not a great use of my time.

We also make infinite income, given infinite time, and spend an infinite amount on every purchase category, including one-time purchases. :)

Payment / discount rate (PV of perpetuity) is a good way to evaluate alternative purchases against an ongoing subscription, though.

An infinitely recurring payment shouldn't be thought of as costing infinite money, even though that's what you'll pay over time. The later payments aren't worth as much as the payments today because the money today can be invested. It turns out that the value of money decays exponentially over time, and the total value of the money paid is an infinite series that converges to P/r, where P is the payment and r is the applicable interest rate.

So a never-ending subscription of $100/yr is worth about 100/0.03 = $3333 total today (assuming you would have invested the money in something like a 5-year treasury bond instead). Still a lot, but not infinite.

This all assumes a price that doesn't creep up. I only know of one of my subscriptions that hasn't increased pricing in the last several years.

Another one like the OP. Addicted to subscriptions. Terrible.

Only subscription here is my cell phone plan.

Unless you plan on living to infinity too, I don't think the cost of a subscription is infinite.

I call it the nickel-and-diming of consumers.

(We don't have to play.)

Corporations have essentially enacted private taxation on the public. Sure, you are paying for a service, but does the service you receive really add up to what everyone is paying for?

I'm not even that old, and I still miss the time where you could simply buy software or a digital product and it didn't change out from underneath you all the time. A lot of the time, it feels like you're paying these corporations to test their software for them. For example, we went months while the voice search on our YouTube TV app went away, presumably part of some A/B testing, or when Amazon temporarily (on the order of months) removed the ability to see pending orders and pre-orders.

A tax is compulsory. You cancel an app whose cost > value. The friction for canceling a government whose cost > value is much greater.

"taxation" is being a bit melodramatic. These services require an ongoing cost on the part of the service provider to keep a backend running in order to be useful. It's not really economically feasible to have a one-time payment and provide infinite ongoing support for it.

Take 1Password for example. If you paid one time you could have a local app that exists on your computer. Want to access your passwords on your phone? Well, too bad, you can't. If you want to do that, there needs to be a server which means 1Password needs to keep paying to keep a server running, hence you have an ongoing subscription cost.

You could host the server yourself if you're technically capable and so inclined, but lots of people aren't so they pay someone else to do it.

Software devs should work for free. Servers should also be free. Electricity, free. Computer hardware, free. Anything that I pay for is a tax.

...I won't work for free though.

I saw someone showing off their "vintage Mac" running Mac OS 9 or an early Mac OS X ... and one of the last paid versions of Adobe Photoshop that I remember seeing before they went to a subscription model. It occurred to me what a nice setup that would be to still have around.

I don't think invoking a comparison to taxation makes this a compelling argument.

Almost all of it is spent on entertainment, i.e. something you could theoretically replace with some other subscriptionless hobby.

I haven't even heard of 90% of these things. It seems hard to believe that people could have so many things in their life that need paid software solutions. I get the feeling that most of these are solutions trying to invent problems instead.

You are in the majority. I bet 99.9% of HN readers don't have these either.

The more charitable read is that there's a lot of free 80% solutions that a lot of people are totally ok with, and some number of 90-100% solutions that a dedicated set of developers provide to people who actually care. I don't NEED almost any of the software I pay for, but I can justify spending $20/365 on an application I use a few times per day to make it better for me to use than the free version.

I am a retired, mid-30s, former IBEW electrician.

That there are even so many subscription models, and that a single person/family could spend THOUSANDS of dollars, annually, on "apps" ... just blows my mind.

Definitely, I'm "an old fogie" : I still use a pager for incoming contact; I still mainly use Mac OS 10.6/10.8; I have an iPod, which is outdated but task-specific (and I enjoy its simplicity); my kid-sister installed Pandora on the iPod, which I ENJOY (and pay for)... BUT Apple no longer offers updates for the iPod, and Pandora does not allow updating without installing an unsupported iOS.

The "licensing model" most major platforms are pursuing is alarming; when my Mac Pro 5,1 goes out, I'm not sure what I'll do without my long-ago pirated edition of CreativeSuite4.

----

Reading about all the menstruation cycle tracking apps, and the criminal/civil vulnerabilities some women may/will face in some jurisdictions... is just alarming. Already, the data mined from these apps can be pretty "choice" for advertisers (e.g. hormonal cravings &c).

I think banks should implement a feature where you can navigate to a tab on their website that shows you all repeating charges you have been paying for, maybe even giving estimates of total future cost. This would be very easy for them to implement. I have written to my credit union suggesting this.

This is one advantage of having an app-store manage my subscriptions - I am the person who forgets what all I am subscribed to.

ABN Amro does this. Their app automatically groups expenses into categories and is able to identify recurring costs.

Video is in Dutch but you can get a rough idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1MJrhED4Lc

A number of credit cards have apps/websites with recurring charge trackers. As much as I love credit unions, they don't do 2-5% cashback, so it can be wise to stack recurring payments onto credit cards for benefits.

HSBC in the UK does something like this. It detects the regular monthly outgoings from your account, like bills paid by Direct Debit or other regular payments, groups them by whether they’ve been paid yet this month or not (based on the date that you entered as your payday) and estimates what your remaining bank balance will be after the bills are all paid.

Amex does this and will alert you when it finds a new recurring charge.

Related: Substack and other paid newsletters are bringing the same energy. I have just one subscription (Stratechery, which my old job paid for and which I will let lapse) but I'm gobsmacked at how many there are. Many are actually _good_ and I would like to read them, but they're not $100 / year worth of good, and yet that's like the price people default to.

I'm all for peeps getting what the market will support, and I love that random obsessive genius oddballs can now theoretically make a living by going direct to their 1000 true fans, but to me the value isn't there, and I suspect most others are in the same boat. I hate myself for saying this, but I think it's time to re-bundle.

Of the podcasts I listen to many don’t have a monetization model at all, some are ads only, and others have patreons, or their own online storefronts. Considering all the time it would take to pay them all individually, and add their feeds to my app, and this starts to sound like a major chore. Between the time, and the cost you noted, directly supporting podcasts at this time is pretty broken for anyone that listens to more than a few podcasts.

Thanks for reminding me. I planned on doing "cycles" between my favorite substackers (buy, cancel, read the backlog, switch to a new author), but i ended up with 5 concurrent subscriptions. Canceled now.

I find subscriptions interesting. Basically any business that wants to survive since forever used subscriptions.

The term subscription for monthly or yearly payments labeled as that just receives a lot of hate.

But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise. Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.

If i sell you lunch, is it a subscription just because you will eventually eat again? That doesn't make sense. The important criterion is that a subscription will make you pay automatically without you making another choice.

Musical instruments are a good example. Nobody _needs_ to replace their guitar/piano/violin/pipe organ/harmonica after x years, but they might build a collection based on the quality.

I get it, but when it comes to Photoshop, you buy it and then can use that one version of the software for 10 years if you don't care about all of the upgrades, which aren't necessary, or you can pay ten years worth of monthly subscription fees.

The subscription is massively more expensive.

Buying a product and then buying a replacement at some point in the future is massively preferred to me over paying every month for that product. It allows me to budget and update when I want to depending on what features are released that I need or want or to replace the item when it wears out a subscription generally costs more and robs me of any flexibility.

Production quality and innovation is also better without subscriptions. Businesses have to win me over with there new product or version and convince me it's worth paying to upgrade, if i'm already on a subscription, they don't really care as long as there are competitive to alternatives.

Interesting you chose Photoshop: I've stayed on my older version of Lightroom because Adobe moved to a subscription based model and I just don't use it enough to justify that. They're clearly addicted to that revenue stream over their former model.

This isn't how Photoshop works anymore sadly. Now it's all under "Creative Cloud" subscription so you pay monthly/yearly, and if you stop paying you lose access. For a while it was common for users to keep the last "purchased" version (called CS6) but it's been so long I see this less and less.

I fully agree tho when you stop subscribing you should be able to keep the previous version. It's a tool, not entertainment like Netflix/Spotify.

> Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.

Every funeral home.

Anyway, I find the term "subscription" misleading. A lot of software nowadays is more accurately termed "rental". If you have a traditional newspapers/magazine/comic book subscription, you get to keep the issues forever if you want. I still have some old comic books.

Whereas a lot of so-called "subscription" software stops working entirely when you stop subscribing. This is more like rental. You lose everything when you stop renting. In fairness, there is some software that has a subscription model for software updates, where you get updates for a year if you pay a subscription, but the last downloaded version works indefinitely. But that's a minority of "subscription" software.

The key difference between rental and ownership is that with ownership, the buyer gets to decide if and when to buy the product again, whereas with rental, the seller decides.

> But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise.

The big difference here for me is that you own those, so you have equity in them. You bought a washing machine? You can sell it 3 years later, or purchase one used to begin with.

The washing machine in particular is not a subscription in disguise. You'll only pay (a well defined price) when the machine actually breaks (in a way that is not economical to repair), and you are free to choose any provider, with no pressure or default to just buy the same brand again. Especially if the machine asked for a "renewal" too early for your taste, you're probably not going with them again. They have to sell to you again.

With a subscription, by doing nothing you just keep paying to the same company in perpetuity. You even keep paying if you stop using the product unless you actively cancel. The company sells to you by default, not by convincing you to make an active decision for them.

A washing machine is also a big purchase that you'll probably spend some time to think through to some extent, much more than you will with your Netflix subscription - despite being quite small compared to typical subscriptions! A $600 washing machine that lasts 8 years is $6.25 per month. The subscription models are generally abused to charge way more for a product by making the payment seem small to people who are bad with money. A subscription washing machine would likely be "only" $3.99 per week...

For example, at rent-a-center a washing machine that costs $520 at Best Buy costs $1223.28 if you pay it off as planned (and I believe their business model also revolves around preying on people who miss payments).

Phones are also commonly sold as part of mobile plans, where you pay approximately the purchase price of the phone each year.

That's why most people who do the math hate subscriptions: They realize that they're now asked to pay 2-3x (and often even more) of what they were paying previously (or would typically be paying without a subscription model).

You don't have to buy a washing machine every few years, and you shouldn't have to buy an iPhone every few years either. That's just consoomer nonsense. Washing machines of all kinds are repairable. Subscription software is different. It's closed source, and often times there's no way to fix it.

My Omnifocus 2 outright purchase for what is effectively a todo app bugged out in one of the MacOS upgrades in a way where it was still completely functional, except now there's a permanent grey box in front of the interface. I could buy a new version, but they haven't added or changed anything of value, and it costs more, so guess what, not buying it. I'd buy an upgrade for $5, maybe $10 if I really used it. That's digital capitalism. Subscription services, where you don't get access to anything if you stop paying, are even more disgusting.

Old iPhones don’t support latest OS and can then no longer support latest apps. Batteries get crap and the whole thing slows down.

I have an iPad 3 that was more or less useless when I bought it, beyond the use of a few apps that I still have installed. The battery is crap, but the only reason it hasn't been replaced is because it can't.

The washer/dryer my parents bought in 1989 was still working 20 years later.

Remember when Maytag's advertising shtick was how reliable their appliances were?

> Basically all subscriptions in disguise

Good luck selling your lightly used subscription on Craigslist.

Due to the screwy way credit works in the US I just use one card but have several (free) ones. Cancelling the others would make my credit worse; if I don’t use them for a while two companies have reduced the credit lines and I have heard others can be cancelled due to non use.

So I distributed my subscriptions among them (in my case news, video, apps, clown subscriptions); every month I get a reminder to consider the spend. When I had everything on one card I had only one bill to pay but these subscriptions were buried in everything else.

I similarly have several credit cards, but they’re all on autopay. There’s some older ones where I don’t use the card anymore haven’t even logged into the account in a long time (but I may still use them for new transactions on websites where I saved the credit card info). The autopay comes out of my checking account, but it just says things like “citi $271.15” (made-up example). So effectively I do not know where my money is going and it’s possible I have subscriptions I forgot about.

Just pointing out a potential pitfall of this situation. Someone’s who better at keeping up with all the details would not have this problem.

My cards are all on full autopay. This spreading around of subscriptions is it’s a way of making it easy to check and not be overwhelmed.

I am trying to decide if I want to learn more about your “clown subscriptions”.

I’m betting it’s probably an autocorrect failure for “cloud” but I keep on trying to figure out what it would entail if you really meant to type “clown”.

The autocorrect is in my fingers — I’ve been saying/writing “clown” instead of “cloud” for so long it’s automatic. And rarely does anyone notice.

Hahaha perfect :)

It reminded me of a youtube video were a chief was explaining how to cut vegetable quickly. One of the comment said: "I can cook diner with what this guy throws away".

Well years ago, I used to live an entire month on what this guy spend yearly on subscriptions.

I could now afford all this, but it still seems odd to me to spend so much on this.

I guess old habits die hard.

A cheap way I’ve been keeping subscriptions from getting away from me is to log each one in a spreadsheet with name, type (monthly, annual), amount, and renewal date.

Using this, I can find things to cancel when I want to sign up for something new. It also helps point out opportunities for annualizing monthly subscriptions I want to keep for additional savings.

> and renewal date.

Might just do that. The auto-renews always slip past somehow...

Most things let you keep access until expiration so just default to cancel and see what sticks for you. I always log in to cancel most things I start right away.

I log all my subscriptions and other periodic income/expenses and keep track of my daily net income... when you look at the impact a subscription makes per day it makes you very wary of them.

For people using GnuCash, you can define these in GnuCash rather than separate spreadsheets/files (menu "Actions > Scheduled Transations").

Then, whenever the scheduled time occurs, GnuCash will add the right double-entry accounting entries, and notify you the next time you start an interactive session.

Like any transactions added manually in GnuCash, these will be matched up with imported data (and any transactions in imported data that are not already entered manually or by schedule will be highlighted as new). The scheduled transactions also show up like any other when you reconcile a GnuCash account with a statement from the bank/CC.

> didn't think my list was particularly egregious. There's Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a few more

At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a weather app not egregious?

Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people's irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 / year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can't know whether the author really needs 2TB.

Yeah I have two subscriptions: Netflix, and YouTube Premium. I have purchased a handful of other apps on my phone but all were one-time payments.

Apple One is a bundle. If you use the majority of the services at a given tier, it can make sense to just buy the bundle rather than a la carte.

Some of those definitely seem high for what they are. Certainly he has more than I do although I do subscribe to The Economist and The New York Times which are relatively high ticket and also have an Adobe subscription--in addition to various streaming content.

I didn’t realize Apple One Premier was that expensive.

I…guess it could make financial sense? If you do use Apple Music for streaming, and you do watch shows on Apple TV, and if you have a family that could plausibly use 2TB of backup storage. But yikes that seems costly—I have the 200GB iCloud Storage plan, and I still have over 100GB available.

I have it. I use it with 6 people and we all use Apple Music, watch stuff on Apple TV and use about 1.2TB of storage for backing up 5 macs and 12 iOS devices. Two of us use Apple Fitness. Oh plus hosting 3 email domains. Works out fairly cheap if you use it all.

Same for us, with a “family” account. The teens didn’t care about switching from Spotify to apple and this way I know all their stuff is backed up. iCloud…can’t say it’s as good as Dropbox but in the bundle it’s cheaper than paying for Dropbox. Etc.

An unexpected feature is their News app. I pay for some subs to read news in my RSS app, but sometimes i come across a paywalled article that is free with the bundled apple news sub, so I read it there. I wouldn’t pay for that benefit but when the marginal cost is $0 I’m glad it’s there.

It’s a good deal for this use case. I’d actually think there are a lot of people in that category.

News app is fairly good actually. I use it for BBC Good Food magazine mostly.

While commercial VPNs are scams from a security perspective with misleading marketing, they're pretty useful for location spoofing and accessing blocked content (if the content service hasn't blocked a VPN already). Especially if you travel a fair amount and want to access things from the perspective of your home country, they do the job

I'd also say my password manager (1Password) is by far my most used and most bang for the buck subscription I currently have. I literally use it almost every hour of every day and paying a few dollars a year is not a big deal

How does it compare to Google's password management? I constantly use it from chrome or mt Android phone.

I think Chrome's pw manager is pretty fine if you don't feel like you're missing anything.

I'm on the free tier of Bitwarden and it's been perfect for me. I'm a cheapskate with subscriptions though.

Browser password managers are probably fine for most users, but 1password is really good for specific use cases 1password works across multiple OSes, works in other browsers, allows saving much more than just passwords (ssh key management, API credentials). The ability to securely share passwords with time limited links is a big draw for me to use the subscription model. 1p cli is also seriously useful.

Also for those who are not aware, if your company uses 1p business, you get one FREE personal family account for every business user.

Thank you!!! This is why I come to HN.

Or shielding content from intrusive ISPs. Comcast and AT&T will both shake down people over torrenting media, especially if that media is copyrighted by one particular mouse-related company.

It's also a good way to obstruct mass data gathering by governments, provided your chosen VPN lives outside the 5/9/14 eyes.

> Comcast and AT&T will both shake down people over torrenting media

Same with every single ISP in Germany. Law firms representing rights holders basically scrape peer swarms on content they "protect", and use the ISP to arrange to send letters demanding a fee be paid or else they take you to court.

If you torrent in Germany, a seedbox or VPN is essential.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-...

I thought 1Password was too expensive, and the interface doesn't always work perfectly. So I canceled the subscription and went to a home-rolled solution of spreadsheets and Apple's built-in manager.

My home-rolled solution worked OK on desktops but using it on tablets and phones was no fun at all. After several months I went back to 1Password and am now happy to pay for it.

If you want to replace 1password by a free (or cheaper) alternative, look at Bitwarden rather. The UX isn't as polished but otherwise it provides the same main features.

> I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager.

I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app. You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices. Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.

Except Apple already provides one for free

It is quite limited and not very usable on cross-platform use.

I also don't understand paying for this when both Apple and Chrome have one, and you can even use the chrome one instead of apple for most things on the iPhone

I’ve had this thought a few times, but am pretty entrenched in 1Password with hundreds of logins. I’m curious if you know about a good migration tool to get these into the Apple password manager?

> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.

I agree but I think the point being made is that there are free password managers that do the job just as well. I use keepassxc on the desktop, it has autofill, it's backed up in my Google Drive, I have an Android app that works pretty well too.

I've never really felt a need to pay for a password manager, my current solution works well enough.

I agree. You need to pay for the hosting and continued security support, and they're usually not priced unreasonably.

I would strongly recommend BitWarden

I've used Bitwarden at Lastpass and Keypass in the past and found all of them much worse at their sync and ability to integrate with websites or OS to paste my passwords, not to mention how many of them required either a subscription to them or to Dropbox or the like to keep your passwords synced across devices.

I agree that everyone should use a password manager. But that doesn't mean you need to subscribe to one, rather than buy one outright or use the (rather capable ones) that platforms already ship with. 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.

It's easy to see why some things need to be subscription-based; e.g. the value is actually in some kind of constantly updated content; or providing ongoing service actually has a significant cost to the supplier, e.g. in bandwidth, compute resources, operations. Neither of those is the case for password managers. (Or at least, should not be the case.)

> 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.

That is their greedy business decision, and it should not reflect to every one of the password managers. If it costs too much, change service.

However, there is a reason why you would pay for the password manager. They have the highest security requirement from the every app. Their auto-fill properties should not fill to scam websites. They should support every possible machine, like BitWarden for example does, even CLI is there. They should be accessible at any time. Their data can’t be leaked with bad memory managment. Their UX should be designed in a way that everyone graps the idea of good password, and can keep using them. Too often people stop using them, because they are too difficult or clumsy to use.

If they have the highest security requirement of any program, why are you using a closed-source implementation?

My example (BitWarden) is fully open source.

Anyway, open source does not mean that much unless you are able to verify identical releases with reproducible builds.

There is no need for reproducible builds if you just compile it on the user's end.

> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.

My bed is the best investment in the sense that I spend 1/3 of my life there. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to pay 1/3 of my income towards a bed and mattress subscription.

Healthy competition from many suppliers means that I can buy a bed for a one-time, materials cost + profit margin price instead of purely value-based pricing, and spend the surplus elsewhere.

The bed is a great example. Saying that investment should go linear with a time spent is a bit of a harsh generalization.

Instead, you certainly want to get a good enough bed. However, at some point, you get diminishing gains when investing more into it, and it does not matter anymore. Usually, good enough is the point to which healthy competition leads—an affordable price and with a not too high-profit margin.

Similarly, with password managers, are free alternatives good enough? The initial comment implied that it is not worth paying at all, but I think the good enough is not met with current free alternatives, at least for non-tech people.

I'm using the free version of Bitwarden and have no problems with it.

To be honest, free version of BitWarden might be the best you can get at the moment and it is enough for the majority. But you have to pay for better two-factor security.

Like the author, I pay for Carrot Weather. I do so because I find the features it provides to be helpful and of high-quality, and I find it a joy to use. I could probably just use the free version, or any other app that didn't charge, but I also find it feels good to give a clearly talented and passionate developer a job making an app they seem proud of. I don't find it any different than buying a nice piece of art, or eating out at a nice restaurant.

I need a whether app fairly often and luckily the federal whether agency of our country offers a pretty great one for a one time flat fee of 3€ that has become an invaluable part of my (hobby Pilot) flight preparation routine.

To get a different / global perspective I also pay for windy premium.

I use the free Carrot Weather myself. I love the app and would actually love to pay for it, but they only offer subscription options-- and oh my, what options!

These payment options vary from $1/month to $30/month. For a weather app.

They seem to be intentionally obtuse. It's extremely difficult to parse out which one you might want. I believe you need "Premium Ultra" to get weather notifications, to let you know it's about to rain, and that's $8/month. The listings in the Apple store are different from the documentation on their support website, so that's no help.

Seriously, check out the in-app purchases at the bottom of the Apple app store. How could anything be more anti-consumer? And I like this app. If they sold a new version every year for, say, $10 I'd buy it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrot-weather-alerts-radar/id...

http://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/

At the same time, I mostly understand their levels. The higher levels are mostly intuitively as a developer, things that cost more money to provide in terms of infrastructure and access to paid APIs.

Also, I'm not sure what you're looking at, but looking in the app, Premium Ultra, which seems to only give you notifications for lightning and storm cells, as well as tidal data and the ability to hook up to your own weather data source, is $29.99/year.

I'm literally not seeing anything that costs $30/month on either of your links, or in the app.

They even do a decent job on your link of explaining why they charge money:

"The subscription is necessary because weather data is very expensive. Without charging extra for the subscription, in just one year it would cost CARROT more to supply weather data than a $4.99 upfront payment for the app. So CARROT's Maker either had to offer a subscription or not add these awesome features at all."

What's anti-consumer is how the app store obfuscates things in their UI. If you open the app itself and look at their options for purchasing a subscription, it gives you plenty of information that's clear and explains the levels. If you think this is your height of anti-consumer behavior, you're blessed in who you're shopping with.

Pretty much this

1/3 of this list is just BS. Another 1/3 are things that you can go for the cheaper option.

Not to mention stuff like "CleanMyMac"

(oh yeah I'm not paying for 1password)

Sure, and I could eat rice and beans with water every day and save thousands of dollars per year. It's confusing to me how many people on here seem to think paying money for non-essential things that provide enjoyment or convenience is some sort of moral failing.

I'm all for spending money on convenience (that doesn't mean a "fundamental laziness") and enjoyment

NordVPN and CleanMyMac or the oversubscribed options like Apple+ are not enjoyable nor convenient to me

"fundamental lazyness" - things like relying only on your phone to unlock your car then running out of signal/battery/etc and getting stranded somewhere and looking like a dunce because you were more lazy than you should have been. Or getting takeaway coffee as first thing in the morning when a coffee machine would pay for itself in a month of usage.

Sure, I'm not defending every choice they're making specifically. I don't subscribe to almost anything they do, although I probably subscribe to plenty of other things you think are "not enjoyable not convenient". But I can think of reasons why most of these things could be a reasonable purchase for someone.

I'm not seeing any of these that are "fundamental lazyness" unless you're trying to claim that entertainment is a bad value proposition.

Eating the same food every day is unhealthy.

Commercial VPNs prey on ignorance as well. They frequently talk about “keeping you safe from hackers”. When is the last time sensitive data was intercepted due to lack of TLS? Twenty years ago? VPNs do nothing to protect from the most common and serious threats - data breaches, spear phishing, any/all of the other myriads of ways users are tracked online, etc. I’m also of the belief that security services take a closer look at VPN traffic (like some Tor exit nodes) that also happens to make their jobs easier by concentrating the data for them.

Commercial VPN services certainly have some valid use cases but for the vast majority of the population they effectively do nothing or worse.

If there’s any benefit to their proliferation it’s in the security service case. Now that all of your non-technical friends have signed up for ExpressVPN because they heard about it on a podcast there’s just that much more data to sift through. Not that security services can’t handle vast amounts of data… I’m just certain that from a classification standpoint intercepted data coming out of a VPN (and certainly Tor exit) is likely classified higher for analysis, potential manual review, etc. Much bigger haystack in the VPN/Tor case.

Two decent use cases are out-of-region TV and hiding your unencrypted traffic (URLs) from your ISP (as you say you don’t hide it from your VPN provider, but they don’t know your address). Also sites you visit don’t get your location.

Personally, given the kinds of friends I have, a VPN hides my traffic from them when I’m on their WiFi. But I don’t need a commercial VPN for this.

The out of region TV is a use case but I wonder how long before this turns into a cat/mouse game between VPN providers and streaming services/content providers. I am pleased to see (when I have to sit through these ads on podcasts) that providers have seemed to start emphasizing this use case instead of their dubious security related benefits.

This is kind of my point - now if a law enforcement or security service wants to get access to a treasure trove of traffic and analytics that is likely significantly more interesting to them than general ISP traffic they send an NSL or equivalent to a VPN provider and have it all nice a collected for them. That said, DoH appears to finally be gaining some traction (default on Firefox, IIRC).

Hah, I’m a little curious about what kinds of friends you have for this to be of concern :).

> The out of region TV is a use case but I wonder how long before this turns into a cat/mouse game between VPN providers and streaming services/content providers.

This cat and mouse game has been going on for a while. I actually subscribed to Expressvpn for my kid, who likes to watch tv in the languages he grew up with: he says their customer support is really good for this use case. (This reminds me he’s now old enough to pay for this himself).

After Tom Scott made a video about VPNs[1], apparently a lot of VPN company executives got together to rethink how they market their product. He mentions that the reason there are so many VPN ads is probably because they are VC-funded, so perhaps the gravy train will run out for these companies some day.

It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

No one is going to admit it upfront but I imagine that there is a huge number of people who use a VPN as their defacto means to torrent.

Additionally unfortunately at least in the United States a lot of ISPs snoop on your traffic, so you can avoid throttling and achieve some semblance of net neutrality by running everything through VPN (assuming of course that VPN doesn't do any throttling).

Obviously your IP records may be available, depending on whether or not the VPN keeps logs, but in general most cease-and-desist requests for torrenting go after the low hanging fruit e.g. people who don't obfuscate their IP address at all.

I have a 2TB Storage VPS that costs $48/year............. With a host that has been operating since at least 2016.

Huh, that seems like a pretty rare offer!

Some of the more affordable providers that I know of:

  Hetzner 1 TB storage VPS: €3.45/month
  Time4VPS 1 TB storage VPS: €6.65/month (with yearly billing)
  Contabo 1.4 TB storage VPS: €12.99/month

So Hetzner can be €41/year (though taxes vary) for a single TB, but all other providers that I know of cost at least twice the amount of money or so.

ServaRICA "Polar Bear Storage Offer".

Hetzner storage is not VPS, for what it's worth; it's a restricted ssh environment that won't do much beyond storage. About the same category of offering as rsync.net, I'd say?

What do you use for backups? That's another cost on top.

As someone who is unlucky enough to live in Russia, VPN is now more or less a necessity to access information around Putin's internet censorship.

However, while using it I've found some unlikely virtues of using VPN:

- I'm never offered ads based on my location

- Services like Google are not suspicious of your logins and don't bother you with additional 2fa measures. Previously it could be a real pain if you are abroad without your regular phone service and Google really wants you to enter that code it sent you over SMS.

> people's irrational privacy fears.

My ISP sees me connect to one server and one port only. I think it's great. It's irrational not to want my ISP to record my activity on the internet all day every day, and associate it with my real life identity?

Is it better if it’s your shady VPN provider that knows all this? It’s a ridiculous argument.

They don't know _who_ I am

I'm surprised there isn't a straightforward financial app that could tell you all this information with an intuitive graph.

I'd pay $9.99 a month for that.

I wouldn't.

The major Canadian banks offer this as a standard feature.

It's free.

I use one dedicated free debit card to pay for all my subscriptions. You can see the bank statements in details every month. Also graphs.

In the US, you can even earn at least 2% cash back with a free credit card and get the same breakdown and analysis from almost any bank website.

I use bobby [0] for that

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bobby-track-subscriptions/id10...

I use virtual cards via privacy.com to pay for subscriptions. I generate a virtual card with a monthly or annual limit on it for each individual subscription service. Each card is backed by my real credit card. When a virtual card is charged, my credit card is charged. If it's charged over card limit, the transaction doesn't go through. The nice thing about this is i can login to my privacy.com account and look at all of my subscription spend. If I ever needed to cancel any subscription I can also burn the virtual card so I don't get over charged.

Is this supposed to be a meta joke?

Two things from this article stick out to me:

1) The author was paying for both Bear and Craft. To me, they serve the same purpose - Markdown notes editors with a sync component. I tried both out (and liked both) but have since settled on Obsidian because I like being able to see my notes as .md files on a device I own.

2) The author mentioned Microsoft Office was a lifetime purchase in 2021 which confused me - are they are referring to Office 2019 instead of Office 365? I don't believe O365 offers a lifetime option.

Looks like they bought the standalone Office suite, a lifetime license, for about double the price of a year of Office 365. Makes sense if you only need Office on a single PC or Mac (365 can be installed on 5 computers) and store less than 5gb on OneDrive.

Yeah O365 is not same as Standalone Office 2019. First off his version would not include outlook at that price point. Second, the 2TB storage and mail service (and maybe personal domain?) is part of the value.

A lot of times what people dont realize when they get sticker shock from these recurring revenue models is what the price of the software would have been if the company wasn't willing to accept a future cashflow instead of the full discounted present value.

I think people don't really realize how expensive life has gotten because most of us dont pay full price for anything anymore. Even the idea of $12 a month for a heated seat ruffles some feathers, but many balk at the idea of paying $1200[1] upfront for a heated seat. Perhaps because they don't have $1200, but they do have a (presumed) income stream of $12 a month.

Ultimately I presume the internal rates of returns really benefit the companies (eg, maybe discounted using credit card rates)

[1]: (made up number to illustrate the point)

The heated seat comparison is pointless.

The reason why this system exists is because company costs to run these products are largely ongoing. With a physical product, they release, do some updates, and then eventually release a new version to keep it going (this still largely exists with games, P2W games are the only ones who created a business model from free...and people also hate that passionately). With a digital product, you need servers which is an ongoing cost (that is sometimes a large component of overall cost) and you just keep releasing.

It is actually a better system. There is no logical reason to pay monthly for heated seats (that product is a just a loan, it isn't a subscription). There are logical reasons to pay monthly for software (when things were physical, you had buy new software every couple of years...that is how the nice things appeared, stuff today is crazy, crazy cheap...monthly models definitely de-risk the financial model but prices haven't and aren't going up).

Yup. YNAB says my "software subscriptions" averages out to $92 a month, and that doesn't include Apple music, Spotify, Audible, Kayo, Prime, and Stan, which would be around $90 a month also, off the top of my head.

Not sure if I should include Prime, since I signed up for the shipping, but I do watch it more often than I watch Stan.

I should probably go back to torrents. I just wish I could buy/rent individual shows and movies like you do on iTunes, but each platform has such a limited range of content, I no longer feel like we've made any real progress from the old days where you'd have one big subscription to Foxtel or similar.

I'm a big fan of privacy.com: they provide me with a spend-limited debit card number that varies by vendor. I use them especially for newspaper subscriptions that make it difficult to cancel and have balloon renewal payments.

If you’re deciding to buy a subscription you should calculate the price for 2 or 3 years. So it is comparable to other things you buy. New phone (I will use it for 3 years): 1000$. Some weather app, 2.99 per month, so 107$ for 3 years, is it really worth it?

Wow, this person is wild, so much wasted money. I don’t have any digital subscription. Any, I’m not kidding. My only automatically recurring expenses are utilities: phone, internet (both subsidized by my employer) and electric. I can’t say my life has been impacted at all and I am certainly not a hermit or anything like that. My girlfriend and I live completely normal lives in a major US city. Most of the stuff is just junk.

I also live in a major US city and everyone I know pays for at least a handful of subscriptions. Some people in my friend group share subs with each other, and/or with family. My mother and I split a few newspapers and media subscriptions. I'd say on average, most people I know pay for 5-10 subs and have access to 10-15.

Yet no one can share TruTV with me!

It's especially hard to imagine not having a music subscription these days.

A CEO I worked with a while back just cancelled her CC every few months. Then she'd resubscribe to things she was still using. She said she didn't have time to cancel all those subscriptions individually. I thought it was poor form since a lot of services bill at the end of the month and would never get that last months due.

That's definitely CEO behaviour, legally she is still on the hook for that expense and it can go on her credit rating. Don't try this at home!

Is this a common risk? Most subscriptions I can think of are prepaid —- they charge you when service starts. If your card expires or is cancelled, they shut down your account once the paid subscription runs out.

A notable exception is US cell phone plans. I think most people still have postpaid plans and of course the carrier will send you to collections if you don’t pay.

That’s why you have to agree to a credit check, though. I’ve never been subject to a credit check to sign up for a software or streaming service.

If by "cancel" we mean have the CC issue a new card with a new number but the same account, this doesn't always work anymore. The issuer may supply the new number to merchants who perform recurring charges.

Love reading this discussion, even though it feels to be primarily limited to unix/linux users in a US-centered echo-chamber. (I'm in Europe)

Regardless of what the author is spending his money on, I think he is along the median of subscription spend in most of Europe. (counting software and services(streaming, podcast, amazon prime))

I'm not a huge fan of subscription-by-default myself but it has grown on me for certain apps/services. I used to pay $xxxx for a software package and now pay a price per month and getting way more updates, and I can easily cancel at any given time, and resume when I need to with the latest version.

As a professional user, I'm amazed at the amount of people not willing to pay for their daily tools, but I guess that's another discussion.

> My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year

Maybe I'm the crazy one, but how is this a lot? First, almost all of the apps are used by multiple people (Apple One Premier, the VPN, MLB, NHL, etc.). Second, let's assume a family of four with a US average salary of $55k for both parents. We end up with a household income of $110k, so the subscriptions are 1.3% of gross income. This is barely a blip on your financial radar.

If your household income is $200k or above (which, let's face it, most HNers probably do earn), worrying about these subscriptions (which in this case would be <0.6% of your gross income) would literally not even be worth thinking about.

I know HN has a thing for penny pinching, but if you're trying to build wealth, this ain't it.

> If your household income is $200k or above (which, let's face it, most HNers probably do earn)

What? Not everyone here lives in the US

And? The author seems to, since they're paying for a number of US-specific services. Obviously if you make 20k USD, then paying 2k USD on entertainment and optional applications for you and your family is a bad idea. If you make 200k then it's probably not.

We're here to talk about TFA. Coming here to comment that "people in country X can't afford this" isn't going to be a helpful conversation. People are aware that there's income differentials between countries.

Sorry, but no, read again what I quoted. I never said people in X country can't afford this or passed any judgement on any of the numbers. I didn't even make a comment about the article.

The poster claimed "If your household income is $200k or above (which, let's face it, most HNers probably do earn)" and I disagreed

Agreed.

To be totally fair, I don't think $1500/yr is a small number, but the author subscribes to so many stuff. I can't get close to that even actively trying. I think most of people would end up with something close to $500/yr which is even more reasonable.

I feel like it depends on what we want to call an app subscription. I feel like most people I know from my parent's generation pay close to $1,500 a year on TV cable service alone. Considering how much of the author's spend is sports and streaming services, that feels fair to consider TV cable in this context.

You should run a poll on that income assumption.

The median household income in the US is $67k, not 110k.

Come on, please don't play these kinds of games. This includes single people (in which case you wouldn't need the shared Apple plan, among other things.)

The median family income in US appears to be 84,000 in 2020 [0] if that helps.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

$1,500 invested yearly, at 7% interest, generates ~60k in 20 years. So even at your inflated income estimates, this is definitely worth thinking about.

> trying to build wealth

The reasoning behind many people claiming that ~$1500/year for software subscription services being "too much" is, in my opinion, not based on the intention to save money.

Rather, it seems to be the realization that these subscriptions cost way more than the perceived value of the benefits they bring.

In other words, spending $1500 a year for e.g. a health insurance might be reasonable. But spending the same $1500 for a year-long subscription of toilet paper might not be.

Sure, but a third or more of their subscriptions are both:

A. Subscriptions they said they were canceling in TFA.

B. Clearly optional entertainment expenses that amount to buying TV.

Trying to judge if other people are spending too much on entertainment seems like it's innately subjective, since different people want and enjoy different things.

Keep in mind that salary is top line gross, before federal/state taxes, retirement savings, healthcare deductions, etc. Then, you take out housing, food, transportation, and other more necessary expenses. Frequently, by the time you do all this, you'll find that small recurring discretionary expenses can make a surprising difference in the amount you have left. $1500 is a large percentage of many people's free cash flow.

If you're in a high tax bracket, it's a bit sobering to realize that a $5k/mo apartment in a high tax state represents ~$120k of pretax income.

Is it unusual that I have zero subscriptions to anything?

I pay for my server, but I don't consider that a subscription. So I also have zero subscriptions.

Unusual in terms of total world population, probably not.

Unusual in terms of HN readers, I'd think most people here have at least 1x video streaming service at home.

Most people I know at least use a music streaming service, so I'd say you're in the minority of people that I know. Respect to you!

Maybe one video (Hulu or Netflix) is understandable. Maybe one Spotify if the person likes to listen to music without interruptions or non-youtube form on the go.

Anything else in this article is hard to believe/understand for most of us.

I would be embarrassed to post a list like that. This "consooming" just for the sake of it. Like part of their identity is paying for subscription services. I wish I had the writing skills to fully elaborate on why this irks me so much.

That seems like a profoundly ungenerous take to have on someone making a fairly honest post about them realizing they'd let their finances get away from them. It's not as if they're bragging about how much they spend. Presumably these are all things they started paying for because they found enjoyment or value in them at the time - no different than why anyone else pays for anything.

The best things in life are free.

While we're throwing out cliches, I pay far more than this for health care and health insurance. I can promise you that me being alive still is the best thing in my life, and it is definitely not free.

I think you are projecting quite a lot here

My subscriptions amount to b2 for backup (<1$ a month), a Linode for projects/experiments from time to time (5$/month). Everything else I'd rather pay a flat fee to own it or find a free alternative.

The author's list is ridiculous.

I pay for my VPN, one health app and one productivity app. I've left a ton of software behind. I moved to self hosting, piracy, and free software alternatives that are good enough.

Which apps are those?

Things like buying coffee (a hot cup of coffee while out and about) is not something I started doing before I had a full-time job. It would have been mad of me to do that as a student.

I’m finishing up making my family a GAAP family (kinda joking, but mostly serious). I’m doing this to understand where my money comes from and where it goes. Think YNAB, but including paychecks, etc. against a family of four. Built with some hand crafted software on top of hledger, too.

Anyway, we’re at about $80/mo, largely dominated by Apple One and Google Cloud subscriptions (though I’d love to move off the latter, but lock-in). What really gets me is the cell phone bill, though.

> What really gets me is the cell phone bill, though.

What I don’t understand is that we have been on the same fixed, unlimited plan with five identical lines yet somehow the bill varies each month.

I don't have any subscription aside from utility (including network).

I don't watch Netflix/Disney+ (anymore) as I realized there are too many good free contents out there on YouTube and such, and modern shows are pretty much garbage comparing to X-Files and "Yes (Prime) Minister". Those two and a few similar old-timers can keep me entertained till death (I'll just loop through them every year).

I don't have music subscription. Actually music subscription is a very alien idea. I buy cheap CD given the chance and they stay with me for a very long time, while subscription service could screw people if they want.

The only subscription I really have a motivation to purchase are high quality magazines. I don't have any yet because I'm a bit picky at the moment. I once purchased a year of "Archaeology" but then realized I don't really get much from it. It goes a lot more in-depth with books and academic papers. Actually, with the boom of Internet, very few magazines have reason to exist. I really enjoy the PoC GTFO magazine but it's free. Anyway I'll probably keep spending $0 on magazines and more on books.

I see a lot of potential for the EU* to mandate an API that each company offering software or service subscriptions would have to implement. The goal being that every end user can have a central point where they could see all their subscriptions and cancel them at any point in time.

* or any other powerful government body

I don't know the details behind it, but I can already cancel all of my subscriptions through an app (Grip) my Dutch bank (ABN AMRO) provides

Ah, it's great that this exists! Can you give us a quick explanation how that works?

Most subscriptions here are paid via direct debit, which the app detects and groups under a "fixed expenses and subscriptions" category. If the charge is considered a subscription, they let you fill a generic form with some details about yourself (i.e. Address, Email, Phone, CustomerID ...) to request it be cancelled.

I reckon the bank(s) requires payment providers to handle this as part of the integration for recurrent debit authorizations.

I use disposable revolut cards for all my subscriptions..

Makes me only pay when I use the service in coming months

Same here... Later i read that this is the only way to get rid of a New York Times subscription...

Yep, they certainly do add up! That's why I refuse to subscribe to any app. I will never, ever, subscribe. I've abandoned apps I love when they transitioned to subscriptions.

Note that I do subscribe to services. Disney+ and Amazon Prime provide a service. I also subscribe to Deliveries (which is $5/yr not $7 as the article states) to track packages. Again it's a service not just an app; they actually do something on the backend-- I autoforward package notifications to a special email address and they're immediately added to the app. Very convenient.

Most of my subscriptions are for video services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max.. But some of the software subscriptions present there and my current monthly bill comes to little bit over $150/month. Well, at least it is what Bobby (iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bobby-track-subscriptions/id10...) says. The only problem I need not to forget to add/update subscriptions. There are apps which will track these things for me, but will require to share access to credit card/bank accounts, which I don't feel like providing.

I went into the Subscriptions page and found a few subscriptions to cancel.

Thank you Apple for making this easy to do, but they're the ones who pushed everyone into a subscription model to begin with - by staying stubbornly at 30% for purchases, but 15% for subscriptions.

I just can't figure out one thing: why would one ever want to buy a Twitter subscription?

I saved a little money last year by going through my subs and purchasing annual subscriptions where available. I think on sites like Substack and Patreon it's determined by the creator, so you might be able to message them and ask for an annual option.

I found it odd that my own digital subs, which number precisely 19, have almost no overlap with the author! Only Disney+ (which I don't actually pay for) and NordVPN. I guess that's a testament to how many digital subscriptions are out there today. And a good sign that people are actually paying for things more now instead of being data-minded into oblivion or force fed grotesque ads.

>At $3/coffee (black, nothing fancy) purchased on average four times per week across 4.5 years of school, the total came to roughly $1,700

$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K

A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.

And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.

I had the same idea about saving on coffee around 2003. I started making coffee at home. But I found that a drip coffee maker needs to make a minimum of about 4 cups of coffee to make proper coffee. I was only drinking 2 cups, and I was throwing away 2 cups. This seemed like a giant waste too. I used this to justify a fully automatic espresso machine that makes a variety of coffee drinks one cup at a time without extra waste. The payoff (in savings) of the fancy machine was quite long but totally worth it in the long run. The first machine was done after about 12 years and I'm on a second one now.

> I was only drinking 2 cups, and I was throwing away 2 cups.

I make enough for 2 days and microwave the leftovers for 2nd days' coffee.

I recently build a importer for Beancount to allow me to import AppStore orders into beancount to analyze my subscription situation there. From my experience I want to accuse Apple has make this particularly difficult against user to do this kind of analysis easily.

https://github.com/chazeon/beancount-extra/tree/master/impor...

Highly recommend an app like truebill or something that analyzes your bank account! I found subscriptions to things I had totally forgot about etc. and saved a significant amount of money right away.

How much value does this provide vs. just checking over your account history every month? It feels like a pretty high price to pay in terms of access to your data just to have them check for things that you could probably do by exporting a CSV and searching for things.

I've found it's not worth it. What I've had be most impactful is just to look at all the transactions on my accounts every paycheck. I notice subscriptions to cancel, spending I want to change.

I don't think looking at sums is actually much more powerful than looking at items. The count carries a weight. There's also no chance of analysis paralysis, slicing and showing things a hundred ways to avoid the heart of the matter. It's just you and the transactions. It leads to less understanding but better decisions.

Can I say, just having the transaction merchant name converted to a more human readable version makes it worth it in and of itself (there are probably some free services that do this).

I took a look at Truebill, and expected to find a list of supported banks somewhere, probably prominent on the landing page, as how are they supposed to be able to analyze my bank account otherwise?

But, there is no such information. Applications that reads data from banks keeps doing this, missing to display the single most important piece of data before I signed up.

Truebill supports most banks in the US.

Source: I work for Truebill.

We use Plaid for this support - there’s more detail here: https://help.truebill.com/en/articles/931156-i-can-t-find-my...

How does one forget about a subscription? Doesn't everyone periodically review charges to their credit cards and bank withdrawals to make sure they make sense, and to pay bills that are due? If not, how do you know day-to-day how much money is available in your account or discover fraud? I'd be bouncing checks left and right if I didn't keep a close eye on my balances.

I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, so I'm not in the habit of looking at every transaction. The monthly/quarterly budget and subscription reviews that truebill prompts are massively helpful.

It is a bit aggressive in classifying recurring charges as subscriptions, but that's better than the alternative.

Ever start a trial and forget to cancel? I've found that's where a lot of mine came from. I think its a pretty universal experience.

For some services, my friends and I are sharing accounts, even if it's not intended by the services. It works very well for streaming services (I'm fine paying €4 a month for Netflix even though I rarely use it), but with two very close friends (who I trust a lot), I'm also sharing a YNAB account because YNAB's subscription prices have become ridiculous.

All in all, I pay "only" about €35 a month total for all my subscription services even though I use quite a few.

Hardware is also turning into a subscription-like model. You can't upgrade a component on your iPhone or Android without needing to purchase a new phone. With Macbooks, you can no longer update the hard drive, battery, and RAM. You must purchase a new Macbook. Remember the recent story about BMW charging for heated seats in South Korea, another hardware as a subscription idea.

I read that Apple is considering a subscription model for iPhone devices. That will formalize what is already implicit.

That sucks for apple users I suppose, but I don't think that's the direction the rest of the industry is taking outside of luxury brands.

I don't know about other countries but in Poland we have subscription based phones for ages from mobile operators. You get the phone for 1PLN but you pay for it with the bill for 1-2 years, when you get another phone with new agreement. I don't know about you but I call that subscription for device.

Right but you get to keep the phone after these 1-2 years. Once it's paid, it's paid and it's yours.

It's more like a consumer loan than a subscription in my eyes.

Ha, yes, you get to keep the phone, they even have to unlock it (remove the SIM lock), but you also still pay the monthly installments because it is a subscription. They just change the name of the line item to some other service.

It's supposed to incentivize people to move to a new fixed term contract. But people often simply just keep paying.

I only learned about that recently since I always buy my phone separately.

It already exists.

https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program

This is not quite the subscription based model I envisioned, but it is a big step in that direction. For example, you still need to make payments on the existing phone for 12 months before becoming eligible for a new device.

This is nothing like a subscription. I have a MacBook Pro that is over 8 years old and I'm still using it. It still works just as well at doing what it does as it did when I bought it.

I even have an old iPod touch that still does its thing just fine.

With this many subscriptions, no wonder piracy is up, not to mention free and open source alternatives to many of these apps, such as with weather, productivity or note-taking apps.

I've become more open to paying for subscriptions over the years—especially for apps that continue to release updates or provide new content.

Just to add another data point, I'm currently at $858.21/year:

Music, TV Apple One (Family): $19.95/month Amazon Prime: $139/year Formula 1 TV: $79.99/year

Fitness OpenSnow: $29.99/year AllTrails: $29.99/year Strava: $59.99/year Strong: $29.99/year

Learning Lingvist: $9.99/month Waking Up: $99.99/year

Misc VSCO: $29.99/year

What I don't see anyone discussing is the value that the subscriptions are providing. Isn't that the real justification we should be looking for? Rather than just saying "life-time fee vs subscription"?

For a time I was subscribed to Nuraphones (headphones). I had no problem with the subscription because I was getting value from the headphones. Sure, I looked at the cost of paying outright vs monthly, and the monthly made sense to me.

That’s why I have a personal finance spreadsheet.

Also I despise subscriptions

Say you are building an app or service, does anyone have rules of thumb to setting subscription amounts or tier levels?

As a consumer I like subscriptions because I can easily calculate, “how much time and effort do I spend doing X, is it worth $_____ a month for that?”

My career has been enterprise software for internal apps so I’ve never sold software before. Setting costs feels like a WAG (at least initially).

One very basic one that I see is "how much employee time am I saving you?"

If a company pays its engineers $75/hour, saving 10 hours of engineer time is worth $750/month!

That's a high number -- plus, it's on you to prove you really can save that much time with your service -- but I think it's a reasonable starting point.

Subscription model should be abandoned and replaced by paying for actual time using/consuming. Many useless apps would die immediately, scammers would be reduced and innovation would grow up.

More subscription = more consumerism = less time for creativity. And more work to pay all subscriptions. It's a trap.

What I usually do these days is subscribe to a streaming service when I want to watch something then immediately cancel my sub. If I need to extend that it’s a couple button presses away. I generally find I do not. The only service that sucks with this is Netflix, as they often delete inactive accounts.

This is a simple hack, but I just put everything that is recurring on a single credit card (auto insurance, cell phone, app subscriptions, etc)… it really strikes home to see how much your monthly nut is. It also helps to not have these charges buried in amongst Ubers, lattes, lunches, etc.

>The findings shook me. My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year

I want to know how much you earn yearly.

So let's assume this person makes $50k/y after taxes. How is 3% of your yearly income paid for stuff you use shocking? It's really not that much...

Put it the other way. If you could have an extra $1500/year after-tax, would that motivate you to do some lifestyle changes? In EU you can travel to 3-5 countries (like a weekend trip) as a 20-something with that amount.

Edit: $50k after-tax is probably even low for HN, but it's probably in the top 1% globally.

> If you could have an extra $1500/year after-tax, would that motivate you to do some lifestyle changes?

When I was younger and poorer, maybe.

Now, not really. $1500/year for things I actually use on a 50k post tax income is nothing for peace of mind and convenience and saved time. Compare it to things like health insurance that you pay $3000-4000 a year for and maybe end up not using at all if you're healthy.

The problem for me, personally, is that I would be very hard pressed to find enough SAAS services I find useful to get to the $1500 number, if we exclude must-haves like utilities + internet subscription.

I pay ~$60/yr for a VPS and ~$35/yr for an email provider, and that's about it.

I tend to try to cancel some of mine a few times a year and renew the next I need them. That might be a two weeks (save 5%), a month (save 10%) or more.

This is also another reason (besides the credit card savings) why SAAS companies offering yearly deals really makes sense.

Currently I’m working on a app that helps you keep track of your spending including subscriptions. I myself ran into this problem of what/where my money is going.

Keeping track of spending habits is hard to see just from looking at your bank transactions.

This list is particularly egregious.

I have a Netflix and Amazon prime subscription and that’s about it.

Why do you need Amazon? You can easily live without that.

I actually stream more, rather than shop, via Prime these days.

Funny, it's my only subscription. Wife is gonna buy loads from them anyway, and this way I also get some digital content (which happens to be more than I can watch)

Because they like it?

Presumably this is why the writer of the article is paying for everything they're paying for as well, but per the OP, they're "egregious" for doing so.

Not really, shops around me don’t have the niche things I want. I have a Amazon credit card that gives me 5% back on each purchase and a lot of things are one day deliveries.

We came to a similar calculus, nearly the same cost of unattended subscriptions. Dropped the obvious ones, and for entertainment, we usually have 1 a month, and actively decide what we're going to bing watch.

I tend to avoid subscription services. But it means I watch more Asian drama than US TV. "Log in with your television provider?" What television provider?

Somewhere along the line I automatically started internally multiplying monthly payments into yearly payments. It really helps when I'm in the decision stage.

I currently have two online service subscriptions: Posteo (e-mail) for €1.20/month, and a VPS for €5/month.

> Twitter: $36/year

Why is he paying for Twitter?

BMW sells heated seat subscriptions to car owners, starting with $18 a month.

A good reminder - thank you for sharing.

I'm surprised that this crowd in particular is so incensed by someone paying $125 bucks a month for their software. If anyone knows how much it costs to make good software and run a company that operates and maintains, I'd think it would be HN.

It's been this way for years. HNers have a particularly egregious sense of entitlement around software, which is ironic because writing software pays their own bills. Perhaps a larger proportion of them nowadays are writing services that advertisers, rather than customers, are paying for, and so they don't see the cognitive dissonance.

Because most people don't realize how these fees compound. The realization is why people are incensed.

Which really makes you wonder, what businesses just survive by just this SAAS model that couldn't before in perpetual license/pre smart phone world.

You would also think that HNers, being programmers, know how to do basic arithmetic.

It's easy to lose perspective, but that amount is 5% of the average net income in the US.

Any reason to believe that's true for the subset of US residents that are on HN?

Sure, but not the average net income for people on HN probably, or the author's. The entire article is about them realizing they're probably spending too much!

It also probably not that different from what a person making that average income pays for their cell phone and possibly cable TV every month.

No, according to https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... the median household income is the US is $67,521 in 2020, which $125 a month is about 2.2% of. If you look at "real median earnings", you get a number of $41,535 which comes to 3.6%. Except that number includes "all workers aged 15 and over" which includes high schoolers part time work, so it's a highly skewed statistic when talking about people who might pay for software or a monthly sub like this.

Neither of those numbers comes close to 5%, which would be a net income of $30,000/y.

The USA usually reports household income as you do, which contains about 2.5 people.

So per-capita income is far less than the $67k figure you picked, and 5% is about right.

In addition, using the mean (average) is deceptive, because it is skewed by the few people that earn a lot (Jeff Bezos walks into a bar). Using the median would make more sense (although the person you replied to hasn’t, probably because it is harder to find).

The mean on HN is possibly higher, making the point moot? There are a lot of international commenters that could swing the number down.

Side note: if you want to compare how well you are personally doing you need to compare by other factors. Age cohort especially matters for income and wealth comparisons - even for software dev?

> In addition, using the mean (average) is deceptive, because it is skewed by the few people that earn a lot (Jeff Bezos walks into a bar). Using the median would make more sense

Confused by this comment -- the source I linked IS using median, not mean. I guess that does mean (heh) that the number isn't skewed as much by higher numbers, but can still be skewed by the larger number of part-time high school kids too.

Maybe both of these two things can be true at the same time. This might be a sign that society is spending too many resources operating software companies for silly things when they would be better spent else where.

Looking at the costs and voting with your dollar, like OP did, is your responsibility as a consumer to drive efficient market and resource allocation.

I once had people screaming bloody murder at me here on HN for suggesting that, for a professional North American software engineer making a typical US SWE income, a one-time $150 purchase of a tool you would use daily in your professional capacity was totally reasonable.

There’s a baffling disconnect here between how people perceive their own value of time while feeling entitled to the product of others’ time for essentially nothing.

It’s not baffling if you think you are better, and therefore your time is more valuable, than everyone else.

And there is nothing more accurate about the average HN user than that.

Especially me. I’m the best and smartest.

Do surgeons purchase any od they equipment they use on the operating table, or does hospital provide it all?

I would imagine that depends on whether they’re employed by a hospital or incorporating themselves and running their own private clinic.

If you’re a salaried SWE, obviously expense the $150. But for a contracting SWE? $150 is really nothing compared to what a woodworker, wedding photographer, welder, or most any other self-employed professional has to spend on their tools.

Chefs provide their own knives. A lot of blue collar jobs require purchasing the uniform. Managers and execs in some industries still buy “work clothes” and though work pays for their travel they still buy luggage etc.

I keep my work on work owned hardware and my personal stuff on my own computer/phone etc. That means paying for my own 1password etc (I only use free dev tools, as it happens)

Auto mechanics, chefs, the entire construction industry, usually provide their own tools. Skilled labor tends to value and keep their tools.

Because everyone wants to get paid but reduce their payments. E.g keep their money

This same thing comes up anytime the topic of paid IDEs comes up, and people will act surprised that people pay for Jetbrains IDEs

I think it's understandable when we consider most people struggle to meet ends meet, especially in their college and formative years.

However really if something provides value to your life, it should be rewarded , especially if that value is higher than the cost.

E.g Jetbrains IDEs pay for themselves every week in time saved. Many apps I subscribe to easily provide higher value to me than they cost.

When I use usem, I mainly do that on the job and Jetbrains IDEs provide value to my employer, not to me.

I agree - my employer pays for IDEs and developer tools without question, and the main benefit goes to them. Some of it comes back to me in promotions and bonuses, but not all or most of it.

Me paying for tools to increase my productivity at work might still make sense if it helps my pay increase, but it's even more worth it for the employer to do it.

Surely depends on how things work out. Even though ultimately my employer is who saves money (and they pay for my work license), I end up benefiting because I have to work less , I’m therefore less stressed to hit deadlines and I’m seen as higher performing.

I pay for the Jetbrains all products pack, $250 a year. I spend on average 3-4 hours a day in their products. That $250 is pennies compared to the amount of value I create with the various JB IDEs.

Good software - like IntelliJ, GoLand, etc. - don’t just act as a tool to get the job done, they act as a force multiplier enabling vastly better UX, tooling, etc. compared to competing software. I can’t imagine relying on Eclipse or VSCode for my work nowadays - I could do it fine, but it would feel like cutting an arm off.

One thing that a lot of people don't know about the jet brain subscription is that the all product price goes down each subsequent year that you continue to subscribe, which is a great incentive. At this point, for me it's only $150 a year.

I was curious and checked, looks like my discount is 40% now! What a great incentive.

JetBrains is increasing pricing in October (for example $150 to $173 for All Products pack with that discount) but they announced this over three months in advance, on their blog and on Twitter, and are allowing everyone to prepay for around three years to lock in current rates.

good way to treat customers IMO.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/06/29/increased-subscri...

Assuming the median person is willing to spend ~$1440 on a laptop every 3 years which amortizes to $40/mo, to justify another $120/mo would require those services to 4x their productivity/satisfaction compared to getting a computer in the first place. For trade to truly be useful, it needs to provide surplus value for all parties involved; and I don’t think most subscription services make a compelling case to consumers at large.

Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.

——

This is markedly different from the sentiment expressed in an Alan Kay quote (paraphrases): Most people spend about as much in their computer as they do on television, and use it about the same way. [He] would consider a good computer more valuable than a car, for the possibilities it entails [but no hardware/software creator seems to be operating with that level of ambition in providing users that much leverage].

I would be stunned if the median laptop purchased from Dell cost more than $750 before tax or was used less than three years. I think you're significantly overestimating that - maybe it's the median cost of a MacBook, but with the $1K MBA as good as it is, I even doubt that.

> Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.

The cost of a product is more closely related to the cost (e.g. labor) of producing it than how useful it is. My mattress was purchased online for less than $200 and shipped. It's lasted almost a decade before showing any signs of age. That's maybe $25 a year for something I spend almost a third of my time using! By that standard, I shouldn't even be willing to buy a computer, which has a higher cost / value ratio.

Doesn't really work like that, of course. Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets. Most stuff is much cheaper than would correspond to the use we get out of it, thankfully. Expensive writing tools are targeted towards people who can definitely afford them, and they manage to get away with enormous profit ratios in part because they're in niche markets with little competition between products. They're a rare exception where the price has trended closer to the value to users rather than the cost of production.

> I would be stunned if the median laptop purchased from Dell cost more than $750 before tax or was used less than three years.

Fair… I was just trying to be generous in the cost estimate, but this just makes my point stronger.

> Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets.

That’s an interesting perspective. Reminds me of something I read — that home computer prices have straddled the $1K price over decades even though their usefulness has multiplied. It seems like there’s some other perspective that anchoring prices, AB’s whatever that is also tends to value hardware more than software.

I can’t speak for others, but I have limited, volatile income and subscriptions aren’t a realistic option for me. One-time purchases are much more realistic.

I don’t care for subscriptions because they lock out those of us with limited means.

Edit: even so, I still have $16/mo in subscriptions on my phone. :-/

Enterprise software can easily be 5 figures a month for even moderate usage.

Because the marginal cost of selling a license is often close to zero, and companies often add pointless cloud features to lock people into subscriptions they don't want.

It's possible to write software on your own or with a small team, and sell it for low prices, and make a decent income from it. I know it's possible because I've been doing it for a decade.

But somehow over the years software developers have moved everything to subscriptions, prices are going up, and everyone competes for the attention of the people with lots of disposable income.

The marginal cost of a copy has never mattered in the history of copyright. We're not talking about an item from a factory here; we're talking about works of mental labor that frequently take many thousands of person-hours and often tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to produce the first copy.

Judging by people in this comment section, no one has any disposable income to compete for, because $5/day is an insane poverty-making amount of money to spend on things.

I'm confused what price you think most of these softwares should be charging. If you exclude things like MLB or Disney+ where their cost is tethered to the amorphous costs of entertainment, most of these don't cost all that much per day given how much a full time developer earns/costs per day.

I wouldn't put Disney+, Netflix and the other streaming service in the "software" bucket. I'd rather pirate than paying for these, but if people are paying these to get rid of Cable, I'd say it's more than justifiable.

But what really drives me crazy is that if you asked people "Can you look at the actual software you are paying and take 20% to donate to developers of open source alternatives?", they would find all types of excuses.

Tech-oriented internet commenters have very different behaviors and spending patterns than typical consumers. We occupy a unique position in that so many of our tools and technologies are freely available on the internet. Many people also grew up during periods where piracy was rampant and even the paid tools and media could be acquired (illegally) for free if you knew where to look. People stuck in this bubble tend to resent any requests for paid software, especially when it goes beyond one-time payments of nominal amounts.

It’s a bubble. Outside of the bubble there are quite a few people who don’t mind paying subscription fees for software that delivers value. HN is not a good place to gather market sentiment or perform product research for this reason.

Depends. Was the software commoditized in the 90s or a trivial feature that should be included in the OS?

Or is it serving a lucrative niche that pays for itself every day in productivity? Need to be clear before making a judgement.

Stupid title. Re-do.

That is an unreal amount of money to be spending on subscriptions. I can't imagine paying more for software every month than my mortgage.

ha I think you may be getting the yearly and monthly costs mixed up. Under $126/month for a mortgage sounds like an amazing deal

Oops you're right, I take it back. $1500/year is still pretty steep though.

Not as much as many pay for their cell phone, tbh.

Where do you live that you can pay $1,500 per month mortgage? I am assuming out of the states?

Before 2020 that was pretty easy to accomplish. My home in the Raleigh-Durham area is under $1500/month including taxes, homeowner's insurance, and HOA fees.

That's almost twice cheaper than California studio rent. No wonder why people are leaving the big cities. Thank you, I was considering moving out of California and I might if the mortgages are still like that in other states.

I don't understand, 1,700 per year is nothing.

You'd need to spend twice that amount just to acquire decent coffee equipment. Then waste a huge amount of time teaching yourself how to source good beans, make good coffee, not mentioning the time needed to execute and clean up even when you have achieved mastery.

No, buying from a coffee shop with trained baristas making coffee all day is a much better deal, unless you're in need of a new hobby.

Where do I need to spend that much for coffee equipment?

The hint was in the "decent".

The decent espresso machine is more than $3,000. You'll also need to acquire a grinder, usually around $1,000.

I did not think that espresso is standard for high quality coffee. It is just a type of the coffee. You can make ”decent” coffee with regular pressure boiler and $200 grinder.

You don't even need a grinder unless you make espresso IMO. Filter coffee from pre-ground coffee is pretty good (as long as you drink enough coffee so it doesn't go stale).

I agree that if you are able to consume filter coffee quick enough, grinder is optional. Of course, unless you want to be picky with the roast of the coffee.

If you want high end grinder and a dual boiler espresso machine with good temperature stability.

Unless you want to take part in barista competitions you really don't need to spend that much money.

>No, buying from a coffee shop with trained baristas making coffee all day is a much better deal

Not the OP, but my bar for "good coffee" is pretty low. I think I'm not alone, and for a lot of us the investment is way smaller. In 2017, I spent about $500 for a grinder, kettle, scale, dripper and glass containers. I haven't spent a cent since then on infra, just ongoing expenses for beans (again, not terribly expensive given the bar).

I like an amazing coffee now and then, but the number of places where the $8 coffee is really amazing is vanishingly small, IMO.

You can get very good equipment for a lot less, Gaggia Classic + Baratza Encore will set you back around USD 700 new and will last for many years. If you want all in one Barista Express is about 500.

He was buying coffee every day on campus, not driving to the best coffee shop in town. The priority was convenience and the priority would still be convenience - one button coffee, rather than becoming an expert coffee taster.

I cannot tell if this is a joke.

This comment gives me "how much could a banana cost" vibes.

You can out-brew Starbucks with about $50 of "equipment": $20 Mr. Coffee machine, a pack of 100 paper filters for $5, and a $20 electric grinder. Skip teaching yourself how to source good beans and just buy some fresh, local whole beans at your grocery store. Probably a medium roast.

Pike Place really is not a high bar. (I doubt I'm even two degrees away from anyone who has a $3,400 coffee setup.)

Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

A good grinder alone is 675 dollars.

A Baratza Encore burr grinder retails new for $170, but you can get one in great shape on eBay for $50-70: https://www.ebay.com/itm/325267513385

I can't even fathom what you'd get for $675. What does it do?

If you want to make espresso the type of grinder is important for the quality of the coffee. More important than the espresso machine. You want a disc grinder, and they are more expensive than cone grinders.

For filter / french press / aeropress it doesn't matter as much and you can use any cheap grinder.

Your prices are starting to make more sense. Wild stab here, but I don't think most people read "decent coffee equipment" and thought, "espresso machine at a minimum"

I agree with you, and I'd like to add that parents prices are high even for espresso machines. You can get a decent espresso machine + grinder for under 1000€.

You can look up the Niche Zero.

https://www.ebay.com/bfl/viewbids/325267513385?item=32526751...

Heh, looks like this link started a bidding war

You gotta be trolling. This is definitely a caricature of some of the worst commenters on hn.

How good do you need to grind to justify $675 to crush your beans?

I'm skeptical you need all of that to get a cup of coffee you'll like the same amount.

Is there quantitative data out there on the kinds of coffee people like the best? I recall a TED talk [1] which claims (not as its main claim) most people like weak milky coffee despite claiming to like a dark roast - claimed preferences are different from revealed preferences. I don't know if that's true or not, but it'd be interesting to see the data.

Personally, I think my bar for "good coffee" is so low that I'll be satisfied with the shittiest mug of instant coffee with a small amount of any milk.

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...

> Personally, I think my bar for "good coffee" is so low that I'll be satisfied with the shittiest mug of instant coffee with a small amount of any milk.

When I wake up and the household hasn’t finished yesterday’s pot I just pour it in a mug, zap it, and I’m fine. Let someone else go to the effort :-)

Coffee has a lot of rituals that have replaced smoking. People rave about Philz coffee in the Bay Area, but if you walk in you can’t just walk straight out with a cup of coffee. No, you must make a bunch of choices (there’s no default nor minimal option) and then wait for them to make it. The entertainment is the point. I like that in a restaurant but can’t be bothered for just a cup of coffee. I’d rather spend my time on talking with the person I’m with, not paying to be entertained.

> Coffee has a lot of rituals

You might appreciate this article: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-case-for-bad-coffee

> Standing at my kitchen counter, I measure out two teaspoons of Maxwell House instant coffee into my favorite mug, pour in 12 ounces of hot water from a tea kettle, and stir for a moment. I look toward the automatic drip maker to my left and feel a pang of sympathy for its cold carafe that once gurgled and steamed each morning with the best coffee money could buy. On top of the refrigerator, my old friend the French press has gathered dust. When I notice a dead housefly decomposing inside it, I wonder what the hell has happened to me.

I really liked that, thanks!

Probably because I hate lines, it always shocks me to see the cars lined up around the block at takeout for my local Starbucks. In person lines are almost as bad. I've skipped coffee in the morning when traveling because I didn't want to stand in a 15 minute line.

Used to do the same and still would if I had a coffee maker. Now I just use a plastic drip cup, filter, and cafe bustelo (nothing against coffee makers, it's just less space/easier imo). Tastes good, affordable, lifts spirits, gives some pep, gets the job done, and helps trigger the morning number 2/three Ss.

Though, one does wonder if the connoisseurs have better experiences with their morning laxatives

There are diminishing returns there, and I'm assuming this was standard drop coffee, not a pour over. Is a Mr Coffee and some generic ground coffee going to be as good? Likely not (but if it's a generic coffee shop, it really is a toss up in my opinion). If you get a $1,500 grinder and then use something like a V60, that's more expensive in equipment than most people care to buy or can taste enough of a difference to make it worth while.

Also, most people don't care about their coffee enough to consider $1,700 "nothing".

How to get it 99% cheaper:

- https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/coconut-cold-br...

- https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/050759

Can even upgrade to the French roast.

In the summer, I sometimes like ice coffee. I actually bought a cold brew coffee maker. I still use it for iced tea sometimes but otherwise I just pick up the cold brewed coffee in the supermarket.

In addition, although I'm definitely not a Keurig fan I rather like Nespresso and have been having that rather than dealing with the filling and cleaning of my espresso maker.

An Aeropress costs 30€ and makes better coffee than most coffeeshops. You can learn using an aeropress in 10 min.

Good coffee is typically 30€ per kilo and easily available everywhere in speciality stores. Heck, most supermarkets here even sell acceptable coffee.

You really don't need to spend thousands a year for good coffee.

> I don't understand, 1,700 per year is nothing.

Welp, good for you for getting the money to roll on in and not be able to understand that most people aren't in that position. Median income, at least in the US, is ~$30k.

$1700 is significant for the majority of folks, not just in the US, but the World. $1700 spent purely on coffee each year is also laughable and/or outrageous to most, when that could cover rent for 1-4 months.

...the hubris on HN lately, regarding high personal income, is too much...

Kudos to OP for spring cleaning, but the idea of many of these being subscription services to begin with is outrageous to me.

Software as a service rarely makes sense on a scale of 1.

- 1Password (Family): $59/year. Replace with a shared spreadsheet.

- Bear: $20/year. A markdown editor for Apple devices.

- CARROT Weather: $40/year. For the weather.

- Day One: $32/year. A personal journal app that runs on "unlimited devices." Why, unless writing the journal with a team of ghostwriters?

- Lost It!: $28/year. Supposed to be Lose It!—a weight-loss app? Replace with books: The Blue Zones, Spark, Self-Directed Behavior.

- Habitica: $63/year. Habit tracking, gamification. Replace with books. These are tactics, not technologies. Learn the tactics once and use them for life.

- Ulysses: $67/year. A writing app for Macs. What could justify a recurring fee?

- Squash 3: $41/year. A batch photo editor for Mac for resizing photos. Like the free IrfanView or many others.

- 1Password (Family): $59/year. Replace with a shared spreadsheet.

Saying (Family) doesn't mean they only use it for sharing. In our family we're using it for our individual password management, sharing is just an add-on. Having it as a family plan is just cheaper. Please don't replace your password managers with spreadsheets (unless you really really know what you're doing and few people do).

> Replace with a shared spreadsheet.

I really do not suggest storing passwords and sharing them with family members in a spreadsheet. Of all of the services on this list, a system that provides end-to-end encryption, autofill, generation, and sync for passwords across a family, is a fairly good rationale for a subscription. They at least offer a server side component that has to be paid for somehow.

A shared spreadsheet doesn’t even come close to matching 1Password’s features.

> I really do not suggest storing passwords and sharing them with family members in a spreadsheet.

Why not? Password-encrypt the spreadsheet if you want. The browser can do the "last mile" of autofill.

Realistically, a family's going to be just as safe with an encrypted spreadsheet on OneDrive or a home file share as they would entrusting their passwords to a centralized service that's highly visible to attackers.

Alternatively, just write them in a notebook. A family isn't webscale.

People work hard to develop and maintain all of those applications, and other people find more utility in them compared to the free alternatives. What's the problem?

People can develop what they want and people can pay for what they want. I'm with you there. But the developers' hard work doesn't necessarily create value. I may work hard on composing a song, but that doesn't mean it's any good.

To me, there are better alternatives than paying monthly for these kinds of services.

Hasn't value been created by the fact someone got a service in exchange for money? Like I don't see how 1Password doesn't create value just because free spreadsheet tools exist. Similarly, with your example, if you compose a lousy song, but people enjoy it enough to spend money on it over the other songs on the market, you've created value.

Sure, enjoyment is valuable. And if someone enjoys my terrible song, that's their prerogative. The same for these services. I'm not trying to tell anyone they can't use them if they like them -- I'm just expressing disgust with their subscription pricing models, which I think are outrageous for what limited value they add compared to perpetually licensed software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com