For one, I hope subscriptions die. It's a pernicious trend that is borderline fraud for consumers (like gyms, profiting from users who simply forget to unsubscribe or making it painfully hard to unsubscribe). It's also exclusionary for most of the world for whom the subscription price might be a year's income. With downloadable software it was kind of possible to find a crack online, but web apps and content make it almost impossible.It also makes individual property ownership impossible. we need honest,anonymized payments on the web.
Part of the problem is that they handle much differently than purchases. To buy something you need to have enough money at some point in time. Subscriptions require you to have a stable cashflow. The former is usually easier than the latter.
On top of that, subscriptions are also relationships you have to keep track of. With a lot of subscriptions, it can become overwhelming.
I agree but at the same time I feel like companies are bolting “as a service” onto literally everything. Take Rosetta Stone for instance. There’s zero need or benefit from that to being subscription but there it is. Games as a subscription also make we want to die unless it’s an MMO where you’re constantly getting new content.
In the UK that is (and has been for a while) the case:
If you set up a direct debit (allow a company to withdraw money from your account) you will be able to view all the details about it on your web banking (which company, how much and when the last debit occurred).
But most importantly, you can unilaterally cancel the direct debit from within the web banking interface. It will notify the company that you cancelled it on your side and you are guarnateed to not have any money withdrawn from them.
This makes life easier but does not solve the problem completely. Cancelling a direct debit does not cancel any debt you have (obviously) but it also doesn't cancel your account/contract with the company. So there is nothing stopping the company from continuing to bill you. It will just make it harder for the company to recuperate their money.
People try to do this by using one time use credit card numbers, but being able to easily cancel the payment method does not release you from the agreement you made with the vendor for their service. It’s simple contract law and I can see how banks would not want to wade into those murky waters.
SEPA direct debit (and the earlier non-SEPA versions) allow the bank to do just that: show a list of charges, set monthly limits and cancel the authorization.
Unfortunately, most foreign companies don't offer SEPA, but my bank also offers virtual CCs that are tied to a single biller, so not only I can revoke them at any time, they are also useless if leaked.
I'd like to see free trials regulated. 80% of the ongoing price should be the maximum discount allowed for any first billing period. It's like a tollway on-ramp advertising "free* toll for X miles, for the next Y minutes" ... "(*) after which, as much as we care to charge". It stifles assessment of the value for the service as a whole, which is the stated point of a trial. A cheap sentiment is understood but an expensive rate is locked-in. It's a Fake Gesture.
Dark patterns at the off-ramp deserve more attention too. Try to unsubscribe from netflix and they would just as soon give you an extra one or two months free, asking you to cancel later. They know something finally prompted you to the task after a few months of sparse usage which may not happen the next time. Before you know it, you helped make a trusted account on a friends device and it becomes easier to justify the expense.
Funny to read this, VISA near silently installed a program whereby replacing your Debit/Card (lost, stolen, etc) automatically updates that card everywhere it is being used a payment method. You can't even cancel a card and see what dies. You have to opt out of this program.
The Starcraft community requested subscription content for years during the hots years. The popular reasoning was that the game needed refreshing and updating but that a company can’t afford to do it without incentives - and the ongoing revenue would incentivize them to keep the game in great shape.
Then again, you can’t use subscription software at all after the company completely moves on either - no windows 95 compatibility mode to keep using your expensive desktop applications. So you still end up with unusable software eventually - longer peak but a shorter life for more cost
The fundamental problem is how difficult and expensive it is to make software and maintain it year after year
> You can make subscriptions work if your intentions are good
I am afraid investors only care about growth. First they are going to grow untill no more subscribers. Preferably the company will have monopolistic position by that time. Then they will start increasing rates up to "what market will bear". Then they will start tweaking "personalizing" experience with microtransactions etc trying to squeeze more. Add regulatory capture to this. This rent-seeking won't stop.
A year ago I downloaded an interval running app for 10 dollars. Recently I recommended it to a family member only to find out they changed the pricing to 10 dollars per month for the same features.
I bet it's all the "social" features running apps cram in now. Last time I looked (admittedly a couple years now) it was slim picking if you wanted an app that didn't sync your data to the cloud or offer some sort of social feature.
I stopped using apps. I run to clear my head and try to stay healthy, not brag that I run.
Subscriptions for SaaS are essentially a lease, and leases are almost always preferable to sales for the one doing the leasing. See e.g. IBM[1]
[edit]
Software (and other media with a high development cost, but low marginal cost such as films) are particularly valuable to lease, because you remove the secondary market, which can cannibalize sales.
So because of the timing on this article, the notes on Apple’s PE ratio are interesting to consider. Apple is now trading at a P/E ratio of 23 (Microsoft at 28), and Apple has made a point of trying to reorient / reclassify revenue as subscription revenue over the last several years. Even still I think this argument is rather weak, I think looking at a coarse metric like P/E to induce a single fact is a little too much.
I just cancelled Netflix because I'm also paying for Amazon Prime. Netflix hasn't had anything worth watching for a good few months but it took me longer than that to go in and cancel it. But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
Patreon's another one. Really cool idea, but everyone with a Youtube or a blog or a Twitch stream is pushing it. So it's a case of subscribing to one person for $10 a month or 5 people for $2 each.
After that, you can get a monthly subscription of underwear, shaving stuff, make up, etc. at which point it seems like a purely wasteful cash grab.
The problem is, even with the increased competition, prices are only increasing.
> But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
I expect someone will make a site or app or service for managing this, which lets you maintain a "want to watch" list with optional priorities.
For each streaming service, the app would tell you which if the items you want are on that service, and how many total hours of content that is. You can use this to help decide which, if any, streaming services you should subscribe to for each month.
I have no idea where one would get the data for such an app, but this site [1] seems to have it, so I infer that it is possible to get it. They have a paid API, so maybe they could even be used as the data source.
I'm already there. I just hate random money coming out of my account. I just gave fastmail $130 for three years. I wish I could have given them a thousand for lifetime so I would just never have to think about it again. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass for $150 so I would never have to think about it again. And no hard feelings if these services were to shut down.
I can deal with a large one time payment. A bunch of random 5 dollar a payments a month isn't going to float. I crawl through my credit card statements looking for oddities. And it just bugs me.
Selling lifetime services for something like that is very risky. It would be like paying someone a few million dollars and then they have to try to budget it out for the rest of their life. Also what happens if the company runs out of money and cant continue services. You have already paid for a lifetime subscription but they have no money to give you a refund.
I think there already was, at least in Germany -- based on contracts that made it quite hard to unsubscribe. I think a key to avoiding a general subscription aversion is to make it very easy to unsubscribe.
Yup. Two years contracts, automatically renewed, with three months notice period for cancellation, cancellation by post (yes, by a papper letter), no early cancellations. Reverting the monthly direct debit transaction to "give a hint" to the predatory "service provider" triggers furious response from their accounting and customer service, and transaction cancellation fees. It's hard to imagine how the setup could be even more predatory for a customer. Fuck, even the memory of dealing with this raises my adrenaline level.
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For one, I hope subscriptions die. It's a pernicious trend that is borderline fraud for consumers (like gyms, profiting from users who simply forget to unsubscribe or making it painfully hard to unsubscribe). It's also exclusionary for most of the world for whom the subscription price might be a year's income. With downloadable software it was kind of possible to find a crack online, but web apps and content make it almost impossible.It also makes individual property ownership impossible. we need honest,anonymized payments on the web.
If you could easily see recurring billing charges and cancel on your bank's end easily, companies would have to step up and offer a useful service.
On top of that, subscriptions are also relationships you have to keep track of. With a lot of subscriptions, it can become overwhelming.
If you set up a direct debit (allow a company to withdraw money from your account) you will be able to view all the details about it on your web banking (which company, how much and when the last debit occurred).
But most importantly, you can unilaterally cancel the direct debit from within the web banking interface. It will notify the company that you cancelled it on your side and you are guarnateed to not have any money withdrawn from them.
This makes life easier but does not solve the problem completely. Cancelling a direct debit does not cancel any debt you have (obviously) but it also doesn't cancel your account/contract with the company. So there is nothing stopping the company from continuing to bill you. It will just make it harder for the company to recuperate their money.
You can cancel a recurring payment with a few clicks.
Unfortunately, most foreign companies don't offer SEPA, but my bank also offers virtual CCs that are tied to a single biller, so not only I can revoke them at any time, they are also useless if leaked.
Regular CCs are a pain in comparison.
Is that correlated with having ample money to pay for them?
Dark patterns at the off-ramp deserve more attention too. Try to unsubscribe from netflix and they would just as soon give you an extra one or two months free, asking you to cancel later. They know something finally prompted you to the task after a few months of sparse usage which may not happen the next time. Before you know it, you helped make a trusted account on a friends device and it becomes easier to justify the expense.
Deleted Comment
Then again, you can’t use subscription software at all after the company completely moves on either - no windows 95 compatibility mode to keep using your expensive desktop applications. So you still end up with unusable software eventually - longer peak but a shorter life for more cost
The fundamental problem is how difficult and expensive it is to make software and maintain it year after year
They could also release a final patch that unlocks all content and removes the license check.
Before the next 5 lb jar was supposed to get sent, they sent me an email saying they were about to charge me and I had until X date to cancel.
You can make subscriptions work if your intentions are good and you’re not looking at them as a revenue stream based on people forgetting to cancel.
I ended up cancelling that next shipment but ordered again a few weeks later.
The model isn’t bad. Just depends on the execution.
I am afraid investors only care about growth. First they are going to grow untill no more subscribers. Preferably the company will have monopolistic position by that time. Then they will start increasing rates up to "what market will bear". Then they will start tweaking "personalizing" experience with microtransactions etc trying to squeeze more. Add regulatory capture to this. This rent-seeking won't stop.
I stopped using apps. I run to clear my head and try to stay healthy, not brag that I run.
[edit]
Software (and other media with a high development cost, but low marginal cost such as films) are particularly valuable to lease, because you remove the secondary market, which can cannibalize sales.
1: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40751117?seq=1
Food and printer ink are different because they are consumables.
I just cancelled Netflix because I'm also paying for Amazon Prime. Netflix hasn't had anything worth watching for a good few months but it took me longer than that to go in and cancel it. But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
Patreon's another one. Really cool idea, but everyone with a Youtube or a blog or a Twitch stream is pushing it. So it's a case of subscribing to one person for $10 a month or 5 people for $2 each.
After that, you can get a monthly subscription of underwear, shaving stuff, make up, etc. at which point it seems like a purely wasteful cash grab.
The problem is, even with the increased competition, prices are only increasing.
I expect someone will make a site or app or service for managing this, which lets you maintain a "want to watch" list with optional priorities.
For each streaming service, the app would tell you which if the items you want are on that service, and how many total hours of content that is. You can use this to help decide which, if any, streaming services you should subscribe to for each month.
I have no idea where one would get the data for such an app, but this site [1] seems to have it, so I infer that it is possible to get it. They have a paid API, so maybe they could even be used as the data source.
[1] https://reelgood.com/
I can deal with a large one time payment. A bunch of random 5 dollar a payments a month isn't going to float. I crawl through my credit card statements looking for oddities. And it just bugs me.
Yup. Two years contracts, automatically renewed, with three months notice period for cancellation, cancellation by post (yes, by a papper letter), no early cancellations. Reverting the monthly direct debit transaction to "give a hint" to the predatory "service provider" triggers furious response from their accounting and customer service, and transaction cancellation fees. It's hard to imagine how the setup could be even more predatory for a customer. Fuck, even the memory of dealing with this raises my adrenaline level.