Another side of the subscription model

rrichard63 said:

Opinion | The Sneaky Sticker Shock of Subscription Culture

Silicon Valley has immersed us in an expensive, pervasive and perennially annoying type of automated capitalism.

www.nytimes.com

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Article is behind a paywall. Mind giving us the highlights?

That's not ironic at all.

Here is the (LEGAL!) archived version of the entire article

https://archive.is/06mdq

Well the answer to that is ..be organised?

What I've skimmed was all about "people forget to unsubscribe and don't even know what they're paying for anymore". I can't fully relate because when I subscribe to something I usually set a calendar reminder to re-evaluate whether I want to cancel again after one month. So it's very rare for me to keep paying for something that I don't use.

yeah, it's that instant gratification once again... you get the "thing" for such small outlay. At first.

What's annoying is when ANY company thinks they can do the sub model without regard to their product line and potential customer base. Some subs make sense: Office for 99 bucks a year gives me five installs including family members and every one of them gets 1TB of OneDrive Storage plus you get a license for your tablet. The other is Adobe, I get the full suite for post EDU price of $29.99/month, as opposed to $2500 purchase and $1800 upgrade every two years. But the best part about those two subscriptions: if you have any form of a business, the deduction is SO easy, compared to the former depreciation model. But we are talking major companies who are here for a while with software that normally is expensive, who also have corprate customers that do need to turn licenses on and off when hiring temp staff for deadlines, etc. That does NOT work in our music ecosystem and doesn't even need explaining... nor does it work for the ones that have little in value and want us to subscribe is where it gets stupid. Example: Quicken used to be 49 bucks. Now they want you to subscribe for the same amount every year, probaly because most users only upgraded every 3 or 4 years. The other one... here it comes... WAVES.

For those of you who just spit your coffee on your desk, stop reading here and go get the paper towels.

Subs get SO out of hand, and when we sit down and evaluate our monthly outlay and realize it's time to trim it, the small subs for plugins and other less important things are going to get sacked first. Actually, the one music-based sub I think is worth its weight in gold is Composer cloud because look at all you GET and if you are getting into all of this, a startup expense of 20 bucks a month until you start knowing what you like is quite nice. IMO of course, YMMV.

Subscriptions have always been a greasy way to extract money out of people who don't know any better. Just look at gaming consoles for example, my roommate absolutely unquestioningly pays for his 19 dollar/month Playstation Subscription just to play the games that he already owns online! Over the typical 5 year lifetime of that console the guy's paid at least 1200 bucks! Coulda got a very high end gaming PC for the price of the console plus subscription...
I think the real issue is people allow themselves to be bent backwards and take it from these corporations instead of flat out rejecting and going for another alternative as evidenced in my example above. They only push them because they are profitable and it guarantees them constant stock ticker growth.

gohrev said:

Here is the (LEGAL!) archived version of the entire article

https://archive.is/06mdq

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Thanks. I did indeed forget that I was able to read the article only because my household subscribes to the New York Times. Which sort of reinforces the point of the article.

MartinH. said:

What I've skimmed was all about "people forget to unsubscribe and don't even know what they're paying for anymore". I can't fully relate because when I subscribe to something I usually set a calendar reminder to re-evaluate whether I want to cancel again after one month. So it's very rare for me to keep paying for something that I don't use.

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I try to do this but am somewhat erratic about it. I think that subscription as a business model relies on customers failing to do this kind of housekeeping.

By the way, a little hack for subscriptions that you don't want to pay full price for all the time but still want to be subscribed for somewhat regularly: a lot of things seem to be set up to entice you to stay subscribed by making counter-offers when you hit the unsubscribe button, like getting a month free or a lower price for a limited time. Sometimes when you go through with the cancellation they will send you special offers soon after to get you back, because they know you once were paying for the service, so you're a high value target for their marketing efforts.

Another tip for all your subscriptions is to regulary just cancel them. Especially with streaming services i sometimes just forget or don't notice that i havent watched anything on that particular service.

Just unsubscribe and if you want to use it and you're not subscribed anymore, re-subscribe

My problem with the software subscription model are the incentives. When a customer pays for upgrades, the developer is incentivized to continue making the product better. If they don't, they don't get paid further. You can say the same thing for subscriptions, "If you don't think the product is getting better, then cancel your subscription" and that's true except under the subscription model, the customer is dis-incentivized from doing so because they lose everything. Under the paid-upgrades model, the customer can continue using the product. I like it when a company offers both models so a customer can choose between them.

MartinH. said:

What I've skimmed was all about "people forget to unsubscribe and don't even know what they're paying for anymore". I can't fully relate because when I subscribe to something I usually set a calendar reminder to re-evaluate whether I want to cancel again after one month. So it's very rare for me to keep paying for something that I don't use.

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I think thats the whole point of it. You forget you are paying every month X amount of a product automatically and you dont notice.

FWIW.. I only have experience with Adobe subs for products of theirs I use. Quite franking, I dont and never need the latest and greatest features they keep releasing and its a little annoying to have the product change on you on its own and your regular workflow gets a little messed up. I prefered the old way where I used an install of the product for 5 to 10 yrs and then decide for myself if I want or need the new features. I would usually wind up upgrading when the product became legacy and stopped getting updates for new OS 's and graphics hardware.

nitrateaudio said:

FWIW.. I only have experience with Adobe subs for products of theirs I use. Quite franking, I dont and never need the latest and greatest features they keep releasing and its a little annoying to have the product change on you on its own and your regular workflow gets a little messed up. I prefered the old way where I used an install of the product for 5 to 10 yrs and then decide for myself if I want or need the new features. I would usually wind up upgrading when the product became legacy and stopped getting updates for new OS 's and graphics hardware.

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I get it! Still use CS6 for those same reasons. Luckily on Windows, OS updates aren't as big of a compatibility issue as they are on Macs.