Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. If you want to cancel your thin client you have to build a PC. Most modern consumers live on a knife edge where $20/month isn't perceptible but $1000 is a major expense.
The classic VC-backed model is to subsidize the subscription until people become complacent, and then increase the price once they're dependent. People who self-host are nutjobs because the cloud alternative is "cheaper and better" until it stops being cheaper.
Notably there's no way (known to me) that you can have direct debits sent as requests that aren't automatically paid. I think that would put consumers on an equal footing with businesses though, which is obviously bad for the economy.
Wait, your bank doesn't do that by default? I've always assumed it's default behavior of most banks.
The discussion started as a way to avoid forgetting to cancel subscriptions or to catch subscription price increases; if you are setting your limit to $100, you aren’t going to be seeing charges for almost all your subscriptions.
I have my minimum set to $0, so I see all the charges. Helpful reminder when I see a $8 charge for something I forgot to cancel.
Anyone who has had the misfortune to work on monitoring systems knows the very fine line you have to walk when choosing what alerts to send. Too few, or too many, and the system becomes useless.
If I get an alert and I didn’t buy anything, it makes me think about it. Often times it just reminds me of a subscription I have, and I take the moment the think if I still need it or not. If I start feeling like I am getting a lot of that kind of alert, I need to reevaluate the number of subscriptions I have.
If I get an alert and I don’t immediately recognize the source (the alert will say the amount and who it is charged to), it certainly makes me pause and try to figure out what it is, and that has not been “alert fatigued” away from me even after 10+ years of these alerts.
Basically, if I get an alert when I didn’t literally JUST make a purchase, it is worth looking into.
I dont think it causes alert fatigue; I am not getting a bunch of false alerts throughout my day, because I shouldn’t be having random charges appear if I am not actively buying something.
You don't need a whole DVD collection to cancel Netflix, even ignoring piracy. Go to a cheaper streaming service, pick a free/ad supported one, go grab media from the library, etc. Grab a Blu-Ray from the discount bin at the store once in a while, and your collection will grow.
For myself, the answer is "because the story is still enjoyable even if I know how it will end". And often enough, on a second reading/viewing I will discover nuances to the work I didn't the first time. Some works are so well made that even having enjoyed it 10+ times, I can discover something new about it! So yes, the pleasure of experiencing the story the first time can only be had once. But that is by no means the only pleasure to be had.
Most music doesn't have the same kind of narrative and strong plot that stories like novels and movies do, this is a massive difference. And even if it does, it doesn't usually take a half hour or more to do such a change. That's a pretty big difference about the types of art.
I will admit that re-reading books has become less of a habit the older I get because it is time consuming to get through a longer series again.
Same goes for a lot of other media. Some amount of it I'll want to keep but most is practically disposable to me. Even most videogames.
There's also a media preservation angle - you can imagine the monopoly media companies of the next decade not wanting to stream "My Own Private Idaho" or "Female Trouble".
This is so apt and well stated. It echos my sentiment, but I hadn't thought to use the boiling frog metaphor. My own organs are definitely feeling a bit toastier lately.
I did Apple Music and Amazon Music. The experience of losing “my” streaming library twice totally turned me off these kinds of services. Instead I do Pandora, and just buy music when I (rarely) find something I totally love and want to listen to on repeat. The inability to build a library in the streaming service that I incorrectly think of as “mine” is a big feature, keeps my mental model aligned with reality.
Going line by line I learned how much I neglected these transactions being the source of my problem. Could I afford it? Yes. But saving and investing is a better vehicle for retirement early than these minor dopamine hits
In the 2010's, when short on money, I noticed my cable+Internet package was above $200. I took a look at things and cut the TV service, keeping the Internet.
Movies and theaters thought they were untouchable until they weren't. Games can keep increasing their subscription fees until people just stop playing them. There was a world before video games, after all.
But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)
To such a degree that they able to pay for a bunch of subscriptions they completely forget about.
I'm not so sure, seeing the explosion of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms.
This idea that there’s a conspiracy to take personal computing away from the masses seems far fetched to me.
https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/ways-to-pay/buy-now...
https://www.klarna.com/us/store/5130c1b0-9c21-4870-b7ed-b610...
Cloud (storage, compute, whatever) has so far consistently been more expensive than local compute over even short timeframes (storage especially, I can buy a portable 2TB drive for the equivalent of one year of the entry level 2TB dropbox plan). These shortage spikes don't seem likely to change that? Especially since the ones feeling the most pressure to pay these inflated prices are the cloud providers that are causing the demand spike in the first place. Just like with previous demand spikes, as a consumer you have alternatives such as used or waiting it out. And in the meantime you can laugh at all your geforce now buddies who just got slapped with usage restrictions and overage fees.
If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However make sure you are comparing the real costs - not just the 2TB, but the backup system (that is tested to work), and all your time.
That said, subscriptions have all too often failed reasonable privacy standards. This is an important part of the cost that is rarely accounted for.
Well yes, of course. And for cloud compute you get that same uptime expectation. Which if you need it is wonderful (and for something like data arguably critical for almost everyone). But if we're just talking something like a video game console? Ehhh, not so much. So no, you don't include the backup system cost just because cloud has it. You only include that cost if you want it.
Yep, "seem". But the reality is more like 3 different subscriptions going up by $5/month, and the new computer is a once-in-4-years purchase:
$5/month * 3 subscriptions * 48 months = $720.00
And no bets on those subscriptions being up to $20 or so by the end of year 4.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g...
That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC.
RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build.
GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP:
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-prime-nvidia-geforce-rt...
SSDs are up marginally, maybe $50 more lets say for a 2TB.
So from summer you are looking at like a $250-350 increase on say a $1500 PC
Obviously this depends on where you live.
Realistically people normally buy whatever ram is the cheapest for the specs they want at the time of purchase, so that's the realistic cost increase IMO.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
The same site also has price trends for CPUs, video cards, etc.
Most people will pick a ram spec and buy whatever is the cheapest kit for that spec at the time.
I think the best data view would be what is the cheapest available kit for each spec over time rather than the average price of each kit.
Something that skewed the market in the past, which is unrelated the the reasons the market is skewed now doesn't make a compelling comparison.
The reasons would lead to differing levels of market skew.
I cancelled my plans to upgrade my workstation, as the price of 256 GB of RAM became ridiculous.
Or much longer. The computers I use most on a daily basis are over 10 years old, and still perfectly adequate for what I do. Put a non-bloated OS on them and many older computers are more than powerful enough.
And the inability to run rootkits is a bonus, not a drawback.
Every increasing prices
Password sharing forbidden
Etc etc
And still making more and more money.
People are willing to take a beating if they are entertained and pay a lot more
It had been my account for, what, a decade? A decade of not owning anything because it was affordable and convenient. Then shows started disappearing, prices went up, we could no longer use the account at her place (when we lived separately), etc. And, sadly, I’m done with them.
I think most people will eventually reach a breaking point. My sister also cancelled, which I always assumed would never happen.
Of course they will go up, that's the whole idea. The big providers stock on hardware, front-run the hardware market, starve it for products while causing the prices to rise sharply and at that point their services are cheaper because they are selling you the hardware they bought at low prices, the one they bought in bulk, under cheap long term contracts and, in many cases, kept dark for some time.
Result - at the time of high hardware prices in retail, the cloud prices are lower, the latter increase later to make more profits, and the game can continue with the cloud providers always one step ahead of retail in a game of hoarding and scalping.
Most recently, scalping was big during the GPU shortages caused by crypto-mining. Scalpers would buy GPUs in bulk then sell them back to the starved market for a hefty margin.
Cloud providers buying up hardware at scale is basically the same, the only difference is they sell you back the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.
I can afford to rent fractional use of one, but by that token I could also afford to buy a very small fraction of one too.
I've rented trailers and various tools before too, not because I couldn't afford to buy them, but because I knew I wouldn't need them after the fact and wouldn't know what to do with them after.
Apartments aren't really comparable to houses. They're relatively small units which are part of a larger building. The better comparison would be to condominiums, but good luck even finding a reasonably priced condo in most parts of the US. I'd guess supply is low because there's a housing shortage and it's more profitable to rent out a unit as an apartment than to sell it as a condo.
It seems to me that most people rent because 1) they only need the thing temporarily or 2) there are no reasonable alternatives for sale.
Everything as a service is the modern marketing ideal.