Why is everything a subscription?
Subscription services are everywhere effecting personal finance the average person is now spending $273 a month on subscriptions and at the same time less than one third of them could afford a $1,000 expense without going into debt…
This only includes software services like netflix, disney plus, hulu, spotify, adobe, apple music, xbox games pass and others. it does not include other recuring expenses like gym or club memberships.
Service companies are doing this to attract venture capital investment. These investors favour subscription businesses because they provide consistent cash flows and can be scaled rapidly before being sold through a traditional IPO, a SPAC or to a private equity fund.
But these businesses are not always perfect and there are some products that just make more sense to sell through a one time direct sale.
So it’s time to Learn How Money Works to find out how everything became a subscription.
Yea I’m not against any and all subscriptions in principle. When I was taxi driving, having unlimited music on Spotify was totally worth it and a great upgrade over radio. I even had Audible for a while, where you get one book a month to keep (DRM aside, which can be dealt with), so you know exactly what you’re getting.
The major problem is how much everyone is pushing subs now for every stupid thing, how markers are fracturing and worst of all, with most services once you subscribe, you take a massive hit and lose everything you’ve paid for until then - such as with the game passes. So one can only keep sucking up the ever increasing prices, further fragmentation and be at the provider’s mercy whether the thing even keeps going at all.
There was this neat, but totally unnecessary ‘water cooled’ mattress cover thing I stumbled on. It had a series of tubes they ran water through to keep your bed cool at night. Nifty little product. They also had an app and built in sensors for that sleep tracking stuff. Also neat and a nice value add.
Except that the app required a subscription and you could only adjust the temperature through the app. Oh and the subscription was $250/year. Talk about bullshit. You know they’re already selling all the sleep tracking data and then they want you to rent the product forever on top of that??