Subscriptions

Subscriptions - Why I like them and why other people don’t like them (I guess)

Why am I subscribed to some services? Why do I like them?

  1. I want to support the provider of the product or the service. If they don’t make enough money they go out of business and I have to find a new service. That’s one of the reasons I am subscribed to Happier.
  2. I absolutely hate ads. They steal my time and my attention and they interrupt the flow. To quote the minimalists here „advertisements suck!“. So, if I like your product, I am happy to pay 4,99 once or 10 bucks every year or so, just to get rid of the ads and the surveillance stuff in your product. To be honest to justify 10 bucks a year to myself it’s enough to use it once a month or so.

I pay 60,- € per year for Todoist. I like the app, I use it several times every day. It’s my most used app on my different devices.

I can see two reasons why people don’t like subscriptions.

  1. They don’t know how much value they get from a product. If I don’t know how much value something brings to me, every penny is too much. That’s why I like a resonable time to test the product before I buy/rent the product.
  2. They loose control over their subscriptions. I can relate to that. It’s hard to stay on top of all subscriptions and the more subscriptions you have the more likely is it that you forget one or two. This is especially annoying for a yearly subscription of 199 or something similar. It can help to set a reminder to cancel or at least to evaluate the service for it’s automatic renewal.

20 or 30 years ago, a lot of the products were non-subscription based. You bought a new software product and you could use it for 2,3 or even 5 years, until it stops working due to new hardware or new OS. Today products can be supported for much longer but the provider must constantly invest in the product to fix bugs, adapt to new hardware or new OS versions and therefore needs a constant flow of income. If the product uses some kind of backend, this also creates costs on a monthly basis for the hardware, the traffic and probably other license fee.

All in all, as the title suggests, I like subscriptions in general because they can provide more flexibility. If I need a product for some time, I can pay for a week or a month or a year and then cancel the subscription if I don’t need it anymore.

The reason why I wrote this blogpost is that a lot of times I see only a short comment like “I hate subscriptions” and this get’s me going.