People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions

[ricardobeat]

> Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

[malshe]

Because of all the subscriptions, I used to have a difficult time tracking them. A couple of times I had subscribed to services only for short term but then forgot to cancel them in time and they kept running for a few months. I think one was Amazon kids related digital product. Once I realized that I can’t trust myself to cancel the subscriptions on time, I started using Privacy.com cards. It allows you to limit the total spending limit on the cards. This has helped me a lot.

I also use them for free trials which require a credit card and then automatically convert into subscriptions after the trial ends. I create a one time card with $1 spending limit. Then when the trial ends and the vendor attempts to charge my card, it gets declined. So far this has worked beautifully.

[bick_nyers]

I've been thinking about doing this more and more. How easily can you "reclaim" your money though? If you have 10 cards with $1 limits on them, how do you get that $10 back? To me it sounds like just another thing to track

[bluenomatterwho]

Lately, in light of things like Substack, I'm really wondering why we don't see more micropayments. Sure, it make more sense to pay $5/month if I'm going to read everything from that author, but (at least sometimes) I would pay $1 for one article. As for services, there are a few core reasonable things to pay for: cloud storage, hosting, maybe Github copilot or Adobe. What is certain is that no one wants to pay for 500 Twitch Streamers, every author of every Substack, youTube AND Hulu etc etc.

[falcolas]

Much like games as a service, there’s finite time and money people can put into recurring payments.

And when one of those finite limits is hit, something will give. One service will be dropped for another.

[xg15]

If nothing else changes, this will just mean increased competition between services to not become the one being cancelled, i.e. every service trying to make cancelling as unpleasant as possible.

[sys_64738]

These stories where folk say they spent $5k on subs over four years without realizing it. Are these folk real? Why do you not know where your money is going?

[bick_nyers]

That's about $100 a month, not too farfetched.

[malshe]

https://archive.is/UOrkU

[beauHD]

How much do you need to commit to a subscription though?

If it's a few weeks just to watch Ozark, then fine. Just be careful to abandon your account and never renew if you wanna watch just one show.

I don't have insider data, but I guess many people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it. It's this psychological mechanism that has people watching just because they pay for a sub.

Once you research the best shows to watch, you can watch them all in succession, then destroy your account and carry on with other duties.

You have that choice.

[justinlloyd]

That is an incredibly myopic viewpoint as subscriptions go much further than a few shows on Netflix or AppleTV.

I subscribe to Shapr3D, Fusion360, Jetbrains, Netflix, Adobe, 1Password, Dropbox, and a half-dozen necessary services. I'd much rather just pay for the software at that point in time and never upgrade. But rent seekers don't like that business model.

[JohnFen]

True, but the reason that I don't do that (instead, I just don't do subscriptions at all) is that is a lot of recordkeeping and attention capacity to spend. Much more than I'm going to do (whether I intend to or not).

I'm guessing that a substantial number of people keep subscriptions they don't really use because of the same effect -- they aren't putting in the work to actually track them, so they get forgotten about.

[ricardobeat]

"Choice" is a very funny word to describe that. If you watch a new show every couple months, you'll have a string of subscriptions anyway, not to mention the massive PITA that managing this would be.

> people only watch Netflix merely because they are paying for it

Pretty much like TV has always been. Wouldn't be much of an issue if they hadn't decided to become a producer and spawn the 10 different streaming services we have now.

[conductr]

I watch Netflix because it allowed me to cancel my cable subscription. But now I also have disney, hbo, and a few others. In the end, unbundling allowed for better but more expensive content. It's primarily come from my movie theater budget since there's only 1-2 a year I can be bothered to care about for the last several years.

[pastullo]

I'm toggling between Disney, Apple TV, HBO. This also allows me to build up a backlog of a handful of high-quality shows on each platform while paying only for one per month. The one i cannot cancel however is Netflix since multiple households now depends on my monthly payment.

[happynacho]

This is exactly why I continue to torrent stuff

[Animats]

I have very few subscriptions. Internet, backup, some web hosting. A gym that's within walking distance. That's it. Everything else is pay-as-you-go.

I had a paid LinkedIn account for a while, but that generated spam, so I cancelled.

[badboychronic]

I hated cable paying so much and using so little, PlayOn.com helped a lot with subscription.100 percent legal using the old dvd laws Just record on phone or computer and have the shows forever. I have to admit HBO and Disney having movies same time as theater release makes it hard to cancel those channels but I still record if money becomes a issue.

[zwieback]

For me it's a mixed bag. On the plus side streaming services that I can pause/unpause at will. On the negative side is the fragmentation of quality media where the subscription is just high enough to scare me off. NYT, WSJ, Economist...

[pastullo]

Agree, however i feel that NYT plays it smart. I currently pay only 4$/month which is negligible enough for me to keep it on.

Since i'm a happy subscriber of Bloomberg, i am really not keen to pay another 30$+/month for WSJ but i find myself trying to read some of their articles. Would love to find a cheap solution that gives me limited access (max 10/20 articles/month)

[xg15]

I find it sort of funny that a lot of tech journalism still follows the assumption that consumers somehow want subscriptions - or at least wanted them at some point in the past, even if they grow weary of them now.

If that had ever been the case, companies wouldn't have had to use every carrot and stick at their disposal, from promotions to dark patterns to paywalls to eventually just discontinuing onetime purchases completely - just to drag users into subscriptions.

I'm pretty sure subscriptions have always been a trend that was driven exclusively from the business side - so I don't think consumers signalling "exhaustion" here is any significant development. They didn't have a lot of say in the matter in the past and they don't have a lot of say in the current time either.

[FalconSensei]

WSJ: People Are Sick and Tired of All Their Subscriptions

Also WSJ: Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

[ksd482]

They should provide a one time purchase option of articles published by them for the day. Like newspapers. Of course, it should cost quite less. Pennies or a dollar or so.

Or, an option to purchase just the article itself for pennies.

[butterisgood]

I was just thinking this. "Sick of subscriptions? Subscribe here to read more!"

[potemkinhr]

Yeah, the irony in that one is great