It's unpopular because it's a bad idea. Sometimes products or services aren't unit economical at small scale and need to be subsidized until they are adopted en masse.
A tempting idea is to judge whether or not the final good/service is indispensable for the users (and how likely monopoly can be established), such that prices can be raised to recoup the losses. But that alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient as shown by the MoviePass collapse. Lots of ingredients to get right!