People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions

wsj.com

68 pointsmalshe52 comments

> Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

Because of all the subscriptions, I used to have a difficult time tracking them. A couple of times I had subscribed to services only for short term but then forgot to cancel them in time and they kept running for a few months. I think one was Amazon kids related digital product. Once I realized that I can’t trust myself to cancel the subscriptions on time, I started using Privacy.com cards. It allows you to limit the total spending limit on the cards. This has helped me a lot.

I also use them for free trials which require a credit card and then automatically convert into subscriptions after the trial ends. I create a one time card with $1 spending limit. Then when the trial ends and the vendor attempts to charge my card, it gets declined. So far this has worked beautifully.

I've been thinking about doing this more and more. How easily can you "reclaim" your money though? If you have 10 cards with $1 limits on them, how do you get that $10 back? To me it sounds like just another thing to track

I am not sure I understand your question. I am not actually spending any money here. I am just creating a one-time use debit card that has a spending limit of $1. Once I provide the card number to a vendor for a free trial, that card is now locked in for that vendor alone. It can't be used with any other vendor. When the trial ends, the vendor will charge my card for an amount equivalent to their subscription, which is usually way higher than $1. The card will decline this transaction. The $1 limit was never used so you don't spend any money. Delete the card whenever you want. I usually delete one-time use cards once every few months.

Edit: It's more like a debit card than a credit card.

The $1 example perhaps draws attention to the wrong use case, apologies. If I have a $100 limit across 10 of these cards, do I need to transfer $1000 out of my bank account upfront is basically what I am asking, or is it pulled on-demand (which is not quite the same as a debit card).

It will be pulled on demand. Imagine you have a debit card with only $1 in the bank account. As long as the vendor charges anything less than $1 it will go through.

Btw I use Privacy for my regular subscriptions too. There I limit the amount charged per transaction. I match this to the subscription price. So when the vendor raises prices and I miss that email the charge won’t go through. I also add time limit so there is no payment on auto renewal.

Lately, in light of things like Substack, I'm really wondering why we don't see more micropayments. Sure, it make more sense to pay $5/month if I'm going to read everything from that author, but (at least sometimes) I would pay $1 for one article. As for services, there are a few core reasonable things to pay for: cloud storage, hosting, maybe Github copilot or Adobe. What is certain is that no one wants to pay for 500 Twitch Streamers, every author of every Substack, youTube AND Hulu etc etc.

Much like games as a service, there’s finite time and money people can put into recurring payments.

And when one of those finite limits is hit, something will give. One service will be dropped for another.

If nothing else changes, this will just mean increased competition between services to not become the one being cancelled, i.e. every service trying to make cancelling as unpleasant as possible.

These stories where folk say they spent $5k on subs over four years without realizing it. Are these folk real? Why do you not know where your money is going?

That's about $100 a month, not too farfetched.

or about 10 $9.99 subscriptions, less if some of them are $15.99 ones.

https://archive.is/UOrkU

How much do you need to commit to a subscription though?

If it's a few weeks just to watch Ozark, then fine. Just be careful to abandon your account and never renew if you wanna watch just one show.

I don't have insider data, but I guess many people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it. It's this psychological mechanism that has people watching just because they pay for a sub.

Once you research the best shows to watch, you can watch them all in succession, then destroy your account and carry on with other duties.

You have that choice.

"Choice" is a very funny word to describe that. If you watch a new show every couple months, you'll have a string of subscriptions anyway, not to mention the massive PITA that managing this would be.

> people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it

Pretty much like TV has always been. Wouldn't be much of an issue if they hadn't decided to become a producer and spawn the 10 different streaming services we have now.

define:choice

>The act of choosing; selection.

>The power, right, or liberty to choose; option.

>An alternative.

There exist many alternatives to watching new TV shows. For example, books, work, exercise, cooking, staring at the wall, playing music, gardening, etc. Hell, one could even CHOOSE to spend 2 minutes and change their media subscription every month so that they are only paying for 1 every month.

I'm pointing out that it's not that simple. This is like saying you 'have the alternative' to not take a shitty job when you're unemployed, the 'choice' of not buying food at the supermarket, or 'the choice' of not participating in capitalism, good luck with that.

You're a graphic designer and want industry standard software? Subscription.

Want a new sofa? Subscription.

Want that new game? Subscription.

Need printer ink? Subscription.

Want to store text notes in the cloud? Subscription.

When this becomes the norm, it ceases to be an option unless you trade in a huge amount of effort and/or convenience.

Reminds me of a scene from a Discworld novel, where the resident, mostly benelovent dictator reminded the hero that a man always has a choice - even if, as in that case, the choice was between accepting the task or being shoved into a spike pit, it was still technically a choice.

I do not see why choosing what video entertainment you want to pay for at any one time would remind you of choosing between slavery or death...

That is an incredibly myopic viewpoint as subscriptions go much further than a few shows on Netflix or AppleTV.

I subscribe to Shapr3D, Fusion360, Jetbrains, Netflix, Adobe, 1Password, Dropbox, and a half-dozen necessary services. I'd much rather just pay for the software at that point in time and never upgrade. But rent seekers don't like that business model.

I hear you, but: good software/services require continuous investment. It's kinda hard to set an up front one time price that covers that without it being ridiculously high. You're not buying one copy of a static piece of software: you're buying all the future bugfixes, security mitigations, server maintenance, future integration work (it has to work with the next upcoming version of your phone's OS, or the next version of your browser, etc), adhering to important future tech standards in the space. With a subscription model, those costs can be amortized over the lifetime that you're actually using the software/service, and can increase or decrease as necessary due to economic conditions as well.

> you're buying all the future bugfixes, security mitigations, server maintenance, future integration work...

There's also middle ground that used to be very common: pay a fixed fee and get a perpetual licence + free updates for a certain period (say for a year, or until the next major release). As a user, that's my preferred model as it gives me complete control over my expenditure and over when/whether I upgrade.

(This is mainly about standalone software that fully runs on my own hardware.)

True, but the reason that I don't do that (instead, I just don't do subscriptions at all) is that is a lot of recordkeeping and attention capacity to spend. Much more than I'm going to do (whether I intend to or not).

I'm guessing that a substantial number of people keep subscriptions they don't really use because of the same effect -- they aren't putting in the work to actually track them, so they get forgotten about.

I watch Netflix because it allowed me to cancel my cable subscription. But now I also have disney, hbo, and a few others. In the end, unbundling allowed for better but more expensive content. It's primarily come from my movie theater budget since there's only 1-2 a year I can be bothered to care about for the last several years.

I'm toggling between Disney, Apple TV, HBO. This also allows me to build up a backlog of a handful of high-quality shows on each platform while paying only for one per month. The one i cannot cancel however is Netflix since multiple households now depends on my monthly payment.

This is exactly why I continue to torrent stuff

I have very few subscriptions. Internet, backup, some web hosting. A gym that's within walking distance. That's it. Everything else is pay-as-you-go.

I had a paid LinkedIn account for a while, but that generated spam, so I cancelled.

I hated cable paying so much and using so little, PlayOn.com helped a lot with subscription.100 percent legal using the old dvd laws Just record on phone or computer and have the shows forever. I have to admit HBO and Disney having movies same time as theater release makes it hard to cancel those channels but I still record if money becomes a issue.

For me it's a mixed bag. On the plus side streaming services that I can pause/unpause at will. On the negative side is the fragmentation of quality media where the subscription is just high enough to scare me off. NYT, WSJ, Economist...

Agree, however i feel that NYT plays it smart. I currently pay only 4$/month which is negligible enough for me to keep it on.

Since i'm a happy subscriber of Bloomberg, i am really not keen to pay another 30$+/month for WSJ but i find myself trying to read some of their articles. Would love to find a cheap solution that gives me limited access (max 10/20 articles/month)

I find it sort of funny that a lot of tech journalism still follows the assumption that consumers somehow want subscriptions - or at least wanted them at some point in the past, even if they grow weary of them now.

If that had ever been the case, companies wouldn't have had to use every carrot and stick at their disposal, from promotions to dark patterns to paywalls to eventually just discontinuing onetime purchases completely - just to drag users into subscriptions.

I'm pretty sure subscriptions have always been a trend that was driven exclusively from the business side - so I don't think consumers signalling "exhaustion" here is any significant development. They didn't have a lot of say in the matter in the past and they don't have a lot of say in the current time either.

WSJ: People Are Sick and Tired of All Their Subscriptions

Also WSJ: Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

Yeah, the irony in that one is great

On the contrary, I think it should be applauded that they publish stuff even if it goes against their own interest/image.

They should provide a one time purchase option of articles published by them for the day. Like newspapers. Of course, it should cost quite less. Pennies or a dollar or so.

Or, an option to purchase just the article itself for pennies.

If there was a privacy preserving micropayment system that charged pennies for per news article across a wide variety of news sources, I'd sign up immediately. But what I don't want is a micropayment system that just turns into a big tracking system to track my reading habits across a wide variety of news sources.

Coil proposes something on these lines: https://interledger.org/case-studies/coil/

A micropayment system might lead to even more clickbait teasers etc.

I would like an option to buy a complete issue in a simple way.

You’re basically describing Basic Attention Token, or BAT.

Yep BAT is a pretty cool idea. I have yet to see anyone actually use it though :/

If there was a privacy preserving micropayment system that charged pennies for per news article across a wide variety of news sources, I'd sign up immediately.

There was a service like this maybe 10 years ago.

You subscribed to the service and then you could pay something like 3¢ or 5¢ to read different articles.

The problem was that it didn't carry the entire newspaper, only "featured" articles. And it only had maybe a dozen periodicals in its collection.

Great idea. Poorly executed

You likely already have something like this through your local library, that you already chip in to pay for.

this assuming the local library has whatever they wanna read available.

Pennies per article is a absurd markup. The normal rates I see on the internet for ad-supported businesses is on the order of 200 cents per 1000 views, or 5 views per cent. If they charged you even a cent per article they are already marking it up to 500% of their ad-supported rates.

Ye olde Xanadu had this in their scope. I think it went further and allowed a paragraph based granularity.

Finer granularity than that. At least in Xanadu Classic/Green/88.1 the granularity was down to the byte

I've been waiting for that kind of option for years. Decades even! But the reigning paradigm among all businesses these days seems to be subscription-based recurring revenue, so I'm not holding my breathe.

Here is the article: https://archive.is/UOrkU

And you can pay here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/archive.today

that would actually make sense. Just be able to buy today's newspaper.

Same would be interesting for weekly magazines. Like... occasionally I'm interested in a magazine, but I just want like 1 edition because it has something that caught my attention

A paper copy is $5 at the gas station or the grocery store. I buy one once in a while and would rather do that then pay $1 online and be tracked.

I certainly won't be signing up for a subscription that makes it harder to cancel than to sign up.

Also it's good to be reminded once in a while how badly being online has destroyed my ability to concentrate, which is what happens when I sit down to read an actual newspaper.

There is a publication in India (The Ken) that allows you to buy a single article. But the cost of a single article is so high, it's not really worth it. It's 1/6th of the price of their annual subscription. The idea is to discourage single article buys and push a customer towards an annual subscription because it's a much better value. Classic pricing technique. Of course they are a business and they have to maximize the revenue.

If people could buy single articles for pennies, no-one would buy the expensive monthly/annual subscriptions except the diehard fans.

I was just thinking this. "Sick of subscriptions? Subscribe here to read more!"

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