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Comment by jowea | Hacker News Reader

I feel people don't want the feeling of expending money when using a service. It just makes using the service feel bad.

Although that's how electricity and water "subscriptions" work.

I agree, I think that paying based on usage encourages people to use less, use only if they are sure that it's valuable to them. With a subscription you feel the need to use more, just to not waste the money spent on the subscription. Using more is making a habit, and allows to see more sides of a product, which can encourage you to use it even more and pay for the next period of the subscription.

I'm sure that if I was paying per song, I wouldn't be letting Spotify play random things with no end, or use it when I don't really have to, and then I wouldn't start to see the convenience it brings and that I don't mind paying that subscription. And now, after years of using it, I really wouldn't like to end that subscription, because I got so used to it.

> I think that paying based on usage encourages people to use less, use only if they are sure that it's valuable to them. With a subscription you feel the need to use more, just to not waste the money spent on the subscription.

On the contrary, businesses make more money from people paying the fee and not utilising the service enough.

If we moved to pay-as-you-go, the price would rise proportionally because the small fraction of 100% utilisation users would no longer get subsidised by forgetful folks forgetting their subscription or just hoping to use it occasionally.

Think about a small data center. A small portion of users will constantly blast away the VM at 90% CPU and saturate(use) the bandwidth while the majority will sit idle at 2-5% utilisation. If all VMs are being pushed to 90%+, the cost of operation goes up immediately and the price will go up to keep the margin healthy.

Not a decent example but hopefully gets my point across.

This is only the case if the high users are not canceled by the service upon being detected. Many businesses use this model where it is "unlimited" but they cancel customers that are using it in an unlimited way.

And my electric company/water company offer ability to pay single amount per month which is average of your 12 month bill.

So it’s clear people dislike that model as well.

Living in a climate (Wisconsin) that has extreme highs and lows my understanding is this is typically intended to smooth-out a gas bill (as one example) moving from $10/mo in the summer to $400/mo in the winter.

It’s a budgeting thing.

Electricity and water are things that we don’t mind (or even want) people using less of. The same can’t really be said for Spotify etc.

You meant use less water listen to more music, right?

Perhaps there is just much more utility per dollar in electricity and water subscriptions. People don’t feel bad about them because it’s a reasonable deal.

Let’s say you had to cut a $15 subscription. Is it going to be water or the oomphteenth Netflix clone? There is almost no value in the latter compared to the former.

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