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To add to this excellent point, a better way to compare and understand costs in our subscription-addicted world is to annualize them. So with ChatGPT we know we'll be on the hook for $240/year for this new thing and can compare that number to all manner of things to decide whether it's worth it. (This also gets you thinking about annual discounts and what you can negotiate in the long term, so it can unlock free money.)

An EVEN better way, albeit more complex, is to amortize costs for comparison. This basically means figuring out what the entire cost of the thing is from beginning to end and then using that as a comparison to other stuff. This is where subscriptions get us - 15 years in, the amount of money I've paid to Netflix (even as the quality of the programming seems to have eroded) feels a little crazy.

Thinking about amortized costs when you have a little bit of cash in the bank or access to cheap credit is when finance starts to get interesting. Let's say you know you're going to need something for the next 10 years. Instead of paying the regular monthly price, what kind of discount can you get if you offer to pay cash up front for 1 year or 10 years? You'd be surprised how much people can be willing to lower the price of something for a large enough chunk of cash up front. For example if you live in a weak property market this can be a good way to rent for very cheap.

At the very least, the end of the year is a great time to look back at what you spent and ask, am I happy with spending $XXX or $XXXX on that again in 2024?

I just model subscriptions as a perpetuity at 3% interest (i.e. treat it as a permanent expense pretending I'm doing retirement planning). Then for a monthly expense $x, it costs 400 * $x in capital to "buy" it. "Multiply all monthly subscriptions by 400" is an easy enough rule of thumb to remember.

Is Netflix worth $20/mo becomes equivalent to is Netflix worth $8000, and you can just examine the alternative ways you could use that capital (e.g. buying a few thousand used movies and building your own collection which you can share with friends and family instead).

Naturally I have very few "subscriptions". I do back up data to glacier for now, but plan to switch that to off-site back ups at my mom's/MIL's.

Do you account for the fact that you can "sell" the depreciated asset by canceling the subscription?

+1 on the rent point. I've gotten significant discounts on rent in the past by paying a full year in advance. This makes sense from the landlord's perspective too, as they're not only gaining the time value of money, but also eliminating the possibility of missed payments.

> I'm even getting my cooking gas as 'prepaid' (i.e. I buy bottles) and I wish I could do the same with electricity and so on.

Gas and electricity do have small fixed components (“hookup fees”) but for the most part these aren’t strictly subscriptions since you pay for what you use.

> So I'm totally fine with getting a gift card or whatever you call those thingies in the supermarket where you can throw a lump (20€, 50€) at some provider (Google Play, whatever) and then get to eat up that amount (over the course of at least one year, hopefully).

So you are okay with subscriptions as long as they won’t charge you more than X? You might like privacy.com. They let you create credit cards with unique codes and defined spending limits. You don’t need to worry about cancelling anything since your billing just won’t go through after a certain amount is spent.

> So you are okay with subscriptions as long as they won’t charge you more than X?

No, most definitely not. I'm not talking about the sum (although we have to talk about it too), I'm talking about the recurrent obligation.

> for the most part these aren’t strictly subscriptions since you pay for what you use

which is where the obligation comes in. I prefer setups where I show up with a sum of cash in my hands and I can go home and use up whatever I bought. The utilities have an idea about what I might be using going forward so they set a price point for me to pay up for; each year there's a round of reckoning where I get back money or have to pay extra (Ukraine War -> both gas and electricity get more expensive), and they set a new price point for me. I cannot influence that in any meaningful way; should prices soar, I'm left with swallowing it or terminate the contract altogether. I could live by candle light (in theory) and use computers with a hand crank and battery setup (in theory), but I cannot save energy now and be the master of my expenses, now. When I was a kid we did have an electricity gauge with a coin slot in the vacation apartment but that's fifty years ago. Something like that would be great. I manage to use my phone like that, and my cooking gas; now that we all must have smart meters, I want the same for electricity too. Toss a coin, get some light, stay out of subscription, great.

You can 100% do this in many states. But solar, create your own energy and the state will force the electricity company to buy the excess capacity away from you.

I don't live in the states and it's not a regulatory but a technical problem, living in a rented flat that has hardly a good spot for a PV panel to hang to...

“Never subscribing” is of course one approach. Another would be “know your exits and keep a budget”.

Yeah, I feel "I never subscribe because I forget about the fact that I subscribed" is a statement indicative of a different problem.

Really though? When even toothbrushes want recurring revenue, it’s so easy to rack up services. I feel like I’m more conventional than OP but still avoid monthly subscriptions if at all possible (though pay for ChatGPT and other things that are worth it for me)

I'm not saying pay for everx nickle&diming sub, which I agree have gotten egregious. But for the ones that you do subscribe to, write them down so you don't forget about them.

I don't think the subscription fee in itself is the problem, but the lock-in and inevitable enshittification. I would not trust "OpenAI" to be any mandatory part of my workflow. It is really hard for me to change my workflow, since I need it in more or less muscle memory to have any stamina in doing stuff.

> I wish I could do the same with electricity and so on

If you are using e.g. wood pellets for heating you essentially can.

> wood pellets

or solar but I can't do that where I live

Well, it's known that it's a subscription. I am not sure what you what, exactly.

I want the explicit mention of it. I realize it's rather younger than older folks who give subscription prices as a sum instead of sum per time, and incidentally internet speed in terms of (Giga-) bit instead of bit per time. Maybe it's just me or the pedants who were responsible for my education, but "it's known it's a subscription" is fairly weak; what tells me this is a monthly, not a bi-monthly, weekly, yearly or one-off price? Listening in on the conversation of others in this and other threads I also gained the impression that there are some providers who do charge for some of their neighboring services an extra volume-oriented fee, so it's far from being that simple in the end.