The Subscription Trap
sufyaan.me
sufyaan.me
10 EUR/month? 3000 EUR purchase.
Given how subscription prices have increased well beyond inflation, I should perhaps change that multiplier to 400 or 500…
Buying or subscribing to an optional thing is different. You could live without adding numbers as a service. You could live without a calculator. You could still do arithmetic and even calculate the value of those things based on the time they could save you.
But for the purposes of this conversation, there's a wide middle ground between a $1 bowl of rice and beans and a $50 restaurant steak. For someone in the US, if you're prudent with your grocery shopping and willing to cook at home, a person can eat luxuriously for $10/day.
I’ll go out to eat for the sake of socializing, but we rarely go out to eat as a family, because cooking at home is easier, along with being cheaper and frankly better than most restaurant meals that cost well over double what I paid for higher-quality ingredients. I’d rather have a friend come over and make lasagna with her than go out to a restaurant where it’s too loud to talk and the waiter comes over to see “if there’s anything we need” every 15 minutes.
Preferences can be cultivated. A preference for cooking and reading library books is less expensive than one for going to restaurants and the movies and maintaining the range of streaming subscriptions required to have access to all the currently-popular shows. I’ll leave more subjective judgments out of it.
But you're not wrong there's a wide gulf between a $50 restaurant meal and a $10 home cooked meal. That gulf shrinks when you account for your time cooking and cleaning.
Which gets back to the original point, the value of a subscription isn't a function of the raw cost of it but the delta between the alternative and the subscription.
A $50 dinner costs more than a home cooked $10 dinner. But if the inconvenience of cooking and cleaning "costs" you $15 worth of effort because your time is worth something then it's only twice as much as the home cooked meal. So the actual additional "cost" of the restaurant meal is $25 because you need to spend $25 of time and materials for dinner anyways.
That calculus changes depending on how you charge yourself for time spent cooking and cleaning. In terms of subscriptions if a subscription costs you $10 a month but you'd spend $5 a month doing that thing by hand a subscription might be worthwhile if it offers $5 or more of convenience of time saving. You need to judge the subscription on the delta between it and doing the thing yourself.
The obvious answer is "no". You seem to have something else in mind.
You probably don’t waste as much as I do on skiing or amateur radio stuff.
You also won't be tied to the this one thing, if it's Netflix today it would be some other form of entertainment later.
It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature since it's filled with dark patterns.
But it seems that a bit of ethic would kill the greedy.
Agree. I loathe subscriptions and avoid them like Covid. But the code I write for the publishing industry is out there day and night, across continents, pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.
It's not like a pacifist writing missile guidance software, but it's sad that this is where the money is.
pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.
Still.
At the end of the day, if you've tried to get paid for a service or product you provide, to some degree you work in advertising.
I think I’d be likely to subscribe to more TV services if they only charged me on months I used them. I’d feel I could just let them sit dormant in months they had no shows I wanted to watch, but I think I’d use them without much hesitation when some new show I was interested in became available.
From a provider standpoint, I’m guessing they would lose more revenue from existing subscribers not using it vs. what they’d gain from new (often dormant) subscribers.
They are not like a gym where it's work to use. Instead, they are exactly the opposite.
I agree it would be great if more services were like this.
For instance Netflix charges you for the next month you'll be using it. So at the time of charge, it has no idea if you'll use the service within the month or not, thus only the "cancel" part could happen. Moving to a post-usage payment can be done, but it becomes weird when the payment doesn't go through and quickly transforms into an open door for fraudulent activity.
Auto-canceling could be the best option, yet it would be an issue if the user actually expected to use the service the next month. They can still resubscribe again before using it again, but that's an extra step and also means the billing date gets reset, which might not desired by the user depending on how they manage their budget.
Basically, it's looks like a simple enough idea but the devil's in the details and it requires a decent amount of work to come out with something both the service and the user can easily understand and manage efficiently.
It would be weird to get billed for December on a service because you used it a few times in November; that can be explained, but with enough time between the use and the billing it would easily look like a fraudulent charge to the user, and if they decide to cancel it at that time, they'll still be stuck for a full month.
That could make more sense if you're burning through "coins" and need to purchase new ones once you don't have any.
Come to think of it, mobile data billing system would also be close to that, except mobile ISPs can afford to require KYC documents up to a legal ID which drastically reduces the potential for fraud.
It goes from a simple "the user pays every month" to "the user sometimes pays, sometimes doesn't, they have to guess by themselves when and why they 'll pay, it all depends on what happened in the past month". How you deal with the extra complexity from the user and from the contracting side is completely unclear. It might be surprising, but many users care a lot about understanding what and how they pay for.
Perhaps it's not important to your point and it's just an idea that doesn't need to ever see the light of day. But I feel we've been using subscriptions for long enough that improvement ideas could come with a clearer picture on how we deal with the change.
Yes, and if you didn't use it for the next month you could "freeze" the subscription for the user. Basically as if the user cancelled it on the last day. It should be easy for the user to continue it since the payment method is already setup and authorized. Send an email like "Hey, we noticed you haven't been using our service lately. We went ahead and cancelled your subscription. Welcome back anytime."
For what it's worth my perspective is for a service that is free to use, but subscribers get extra "free" stuff. Basically the purpose of subscription is to get loyal customers who do not use competitors.
That keeps the user in control of the situation, as a service you've been transparent, and you can still issue full refunds to users who come to you after a while explaining they actually wanted to cancel but forgot.
My basic POV in all of this is, the user enters the agreement on their terms, and it's weird to have the service acting cute and unilaterally suspend itself.
As a real world example, it would feel like leasing a car and have the dealer take it back during the night and stop the lease because you didn't drive last month. Sure you could just phone and they bring back the car, but why in the first place ?
Even if you’d keep the transactions fees, it would still be quite user friendly.
With it comes a right to a certain amount of consumption. Every individual item of consumption will then have a set price.
If you use all, you've paid precisely. If you use more, you'll pay a little extra next month. If you use less, you'll get refunded next month.
This way payment follows consumption, it is transparent, and it can be implemented technically.
It becomes messy when you have more credits than you could ever consume, as the service will be reluctant to emit refunds (making them harder to get also pushes the user to consume them instead...yes, dark patterns...), but I think it's a good system.
I personnaly think it works better when it's not auto renewed (so not a subscription), as it engages the user in the ownership of the credit and naturally reduces the refund part. Getting new credits can still be as simple as pressing a button, so friction can be reduced.
Subscriptions are just the gym membership model, where they hope people forget about it. Or when it comes to SaaS, the ransomware model. (“Those are some fine files you got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to them.”)
I always evaluate subscriptions based on their cost over five years, since that's a reasonable amount of time to use services and products. In other words, the opportunity cost of a $5/month subscription is a $300 pressure washer or $300 worth of shirts. I don't get the subscription unless I'd be willing to pay the full $300 right now.
This is the way I use most subscription products. There are a lot of pieces of software that I think do actually make sense to charge a subscription for rather than a one-time payment; almost all the software I use daily in 2023 has some kind of server-side component or ongoing maintenance/development costs and I don't mind paying for that. It's the auto-renewal aspect and all the dark patterns associated with cancellation that I really despise.
One thing that I do now is try to use iOS to initiate subscriptions as much as possible, since the Apple-mandated subscription mechanism there lets me easily and immediately cancel auto-renewals for a new subscription as soon as I sign up for it.
I don't love that the walled garden approach seems to be the only way to restore sanity here and would love to see something standards-track and cross platform emerge for signing up for, listing, and cancelling software subscriptions in one place as part of the functionality provided by your OS. Basically, "passkeys for subscriptions". Maybe someday!
Is it accusing the common person of being unable to evaluate whether something has value to them? I think all of us know the dynamics of subscriptions and are relatively clear-eyed about their value.
Just ask the average person how they feel about price increases at Netflix and Disney+ and you’ll hear very reasonable arguments being made.
The author seems to believe that the vendor wanting your money and getting it from you is a big trick and a scam. Or, we can call it an exchange of goods and services.
Then the article turns toward time-productivity guilt tripping. “If you like watching TV you’re wasting your life.” Maybe we should be upskilling and side hustling instead! Or, perhaps now is the time to point out the vast selection of activities and hobbies that cost way more money than most subscription services.
And, yes, a lot of consumer subscriptions feel cheap because they are cheap. You can’t even get out of a grocery store one time for less than $50 these days, so spending $50-100 for an entire year of something does look petty darn good in comparison.
The self-dellusion about the above is how subscriptions, advertising, and all kinds of BS snakeoil get people.
This is exactly what I didn’t like about the article: it seems to universally categorize all subscriptions to be toxic time-wasters, but really they come in all shapes and sizes.
It’s pretty snobby to say that anyone with a subscription is in a state of self-delusion.
No, just like it's not hard to imagine a business proposition via email from a Nigerian mogul that's valid. But most will not be, and the whole model has expanded like cancer to leverage customer lock-in and lack of no-subscription alternatives (because of cartel-like behavior from the big players).
Yes, lots of people don’t track their money that well. There’s an industry devoted to helping people do better at tracking their money.
One of the problems is that subscriptions aren’t consolidated. You might subscribe to streaming services individually or through a third party, such as Roku or Apple. And then of course, there are other types of subscriptions, such as music, news, patreon, recurring political contributions, and substack.
Another issue is that you might subscribe to a service which you are excited about, but you don’t actually end up using it, and you forget about it entirely.
And probably the main problem is that a lot of people don’t review their credit card statements rigorously.
You don't understand it because it doesn't impact you?
I keep an eye on my subscriptions too, mainly because my banking app automatically categorises outgoings so they are easy to keep track of.
It is easy for subscriptions to pile up though, at one point last year I had three subscriptions to different on-demand training and book repositories. I realised I hadn't used them for three months and cancelled them all.
Many gyms relie on subscribers not using the facilities, they are commonly oversubscribed. Cancelling something like a gym subscription, or a meditation app has some amount of guilt associated with it too, like you failed to achieve what you imagined when you first signed up.
If they use the services regularly then you’re fighting a losing battle.
They do use the services regularly, but it’s not clear why they couldn’t shift behavior to use just two at a time, for example.
Why not find other activities you can enjoy with your family instead of trying to limit something that is inexpensive and not harmful in the long run?
What makes you say this will alienate the family? Should I give up whenever my values for raising my children are not 100% endorsed by others?
I say this has someone who has actually cut off family members over things people would consider trival. Like soda. I literally cancelled an entire summer vacation with my family over it. No soda, high processed foods for my child. For me, it's a imminent matter of health for my kid who has GI issues to my family, it's be being over strict. I was willing to blow up everything over it.
Are you willing to cause strife over stream services? Because this seems silly enough yo outsiders that I think you'll find it hard to convince your family. You'll probably only get to hard draw your boundary and deal with the fall out.
For some background, I volunteer to help people find genetic family who may have been separated from them. I also help parents/offspring reunite if both are willing.
These reunions are not always meant to be as the offspring is often the one that cut contact in the first place (and refused to reunite) because they felt they were mistreated at some point during their childhood. This ranges from their parent not letting them join the extracurricular activity they wanted (usually because it aligned with the child’s goals but not the parent’s), to literal abuse of all kinds. I would say about 80% it’s one or both parents withholding something that child just wants to enjoy with no rhyme or reason and thus feels as if it were done to spite them.
I guarantee that three streaming services do not put them at the top of their peers of being spoiled, which what they will be comparing their situation with. If they already feel they are getting by with less and more is taken away, the long term resentment will start.
I recently encountered an adult offspring of my client who went no contact with their parents because they banned video games in their house and as a result, lost their group of friends who kept in contact by playing games together.
There are two facets here that are important to note: values and autonomy.
Your values are not your children’s. They may be related and overlap but they are never a carbon copy. Values also change over time, not only what ideas they hold true but also what things they literally value. Sometimes these values are different but compatible, e.g. I’m sure there are hundreds of things you would rather be doing than having a play tea party, but when that play tea party is hosted by your child, we recognize this is a good opportunity to bond and share an experience with the child and that in itself has tremendous value. Sometimes values conflict, in my example of an adult child not wanting anything to do with their parents for the small crime of not letting video games in the home, to the child, this caused them immense social harm in that they could not keep in close contact with their friends any longer. To the parents, they did not see this as harm because “video games bad” and thus anything associated with it was bad (including their friends).
The second facet is autonomy. Reductions in autonomy is why grounding works very well for teens - it directly impacts what little agency and control they have of their own life (side note: which is why grounding should not be done unless the rule they broke was an inappropriate use of autonomy or if they pose a danger to themselves or others). Children have their own sense of autonomy, although limited, but they can tell when it’s being taken away for reasons that are unjust.
To bring to it all together, if you are the kind of person that demands compliance “because I said so”, the crime of reducing the steaming services from three to two represents a bigger problem that begins with small transgressions over disagreements, entering into the range of learned helpless, and finally escalating into outright rebellion once all respect is lost. All rules that they feel is pointless and does not reflect their values is disregarded and a typical response is ”no contact” leaving the parents wondering why their kids don’t talk to them.
I didn’t intend to soapbox here, I just recently dealt with 3 holiday cases where the adult children want nothing to do with their parents and its sad to see that happen for preventable reasons.
I appreciate your sharing these stories, but I wonder if your perspective on likely outcomes is skewed by virtue of your chosen (and very noble) volunteer work. But regardless, thanks for sharing. I will be sure to not let things go off the rails in the way that you describe.
For most middle or upper-middle-class children in the US, I don’t think it’ll be having 3 streaming services that provide the experience of everything at their fingertips. They have Spotify/Apple Music, YouTube, and any streaming, and their parents provide them with all the food and electricity they need often without knowing anything about the cost.
We had on-demand and every channel when I was a kid, but I was taught about things like our household budget. I also had to learn to save and budget my own money to buy the things that I wanted that were not part of the family budget.
“How can I help my 80 year old parents save $30 a month by getting rid of cable and getting streaming services and dealing with something that is more complicated”
They are grown most likely intelligent adults. Leave them alone and let them live their lives.
If $60/mo for the household prevents even just two unplanned outings per month, (which the cost per each would likely start at $60) is that not a cost saving measure in itself?
The biggest things besides housing that people often pay are car payments, insurance for your vehicles, and utilities. Where can you save there instead? If saving is important to you then maybe ditch the car payment and get something you can pay for in cash, replace the old furnace for a high efficiency heat pump, etc.
Set your entertainment budget for the household at whatever you are paying now for streaming services and when they inevitably want to add Paramount or Discovery onto the what is available in household, you say “that is fine, but we can only have 3 streaming services (or if the kids are older: we only have a budget of $x month for streaming), which means we have to cancel one in order to add this new one”
Because it’s hard to claw back what they already are used to, you’re putting them in a position where they must consider opportunity cost. If they are clever, they will say, “let’s switch for 3 months so we can watch what we want and switch back to our original setup.” This way introduces scarcity without being the “bad guy” - after all, the budget is the budget. It also gives them choice but not the freedom to choose everything so they can take some agency and better prepares them for the challenges of the Real World(tm).
I think it's a good idea personally, it allows them to be in control and think about money a bit more. We don't have half the subscriptions we once had, but it's not like I can't buy Netflix for a month if there is something I really want to watch.
This is not actually true. While scrolling to find something to watch is frustrating, people have a low tolerance for it and so switch to another service, continue with something that they have been watching anyway, or decide to entertain themselves in some other way.
I do prefer buying full digital discography when available, because it’s such a good deal. For $30 or so, I get years and years of albums, while still supporting an artist with a much larger sum than I could via a streaming platform.
Admittedly, I’m still also using YT Music precisely for the reason I described above, and also because it makes it much easier to discover new music, compared to Bandcamp (something I’m hoping to potentially address in my own alternative).
I never subscribed to Spotify etc - I always bought mp3s (well, at least after they became DRM-free). It's relatively cheap. Spotify is currently charging $15/month. I can buy 11 mp3s for that amount. That's almost the amount of mp3s I buy in a year (because I've already bought most of the ones I like).
Also, when I buy it, I never have to worry about the streaming service dropping the music I like.
Discovery: Radio while driving. When I cared more about music, I would actively seek music out (checking out the charts in various countries, etc). I'm just not that into music any more.
Upload to device? I use FolderSync on Android to sync any new songs between my PC and phone. It checks daily/weekly. Given that I was already using FolderSync to sync other directories between my PC and phone, adding this directory was "free".
I'll grant simply paying Spotify a monthly fee is more convenient. For me, though, losing it all because they change their policies, lose license deals, or go under is worth the "inconvenience" several times over. I've accumulated mp3s of pretty much any song I liked ever since I understood the concept of what a "song" is. I would never want to lose that,
Subscriptions are a "convenient" (whenever you hear that word run for the hills) way to receive payment. So what happens? It becomes the only way to take payment, because companies are fooled into seeing other methods as "too expensive to process" and not worth accepting. They prioritise subscriptions over individual sales.
For example, I will most always give to charity on the spur of the moment. I am ready to put my hand in my pocket for a childrens' charity, veterans' fund, cancer research or whatever.
That rarely happens now, because nobody will take money. Main charities are not at all interested in that, they want to get people hooked into a subscription contract. I will beg the collector to take a handful of cash coins or a note, but they say "sorry we can't handle cash". That's insanity on a stick, right there.
They don't want £5. They want £5 per month. And I will not do that on principle, for all the good reasons given in TFA, plus some others. One strong objection I have is that subscriptions involve a bank, and the banking industry is a hive of unethical scumbags. If I want to give to charity that's a transaction solely between me and the charity, not some data collecting parasites.
So they end up getting nothing, because they want too much.
That's a genuine tragedy, so sad, because whatever apologetics fanboys of the "convenient, cashless society" spout, at the end of the day it's a clear triumph of stupidity, greed and laziness over common sense.
I am sure subscriptions harm many other businesses in the same way as charities.
I genuinely don't consider dropping $15/mo on Netflix and another $10 on HBO a problem because I get an incredible amount of value from them. I am also not going around subscribing to ten more useless services every day. And if I do pay for something but feel like I don't need it any longer I hit the cancel button. It's really not that difficult of a process to manage.
Blaming subscription services for your high credit card bills is like buying too many designer shoes and blaming the shoe store. Maybe it's instead time to acknowledge that you have a spending problem.