I often look back and remember the days when you actually owned things. Yeah, I am getting older. I born in a fantastic era where Kurt Cobain was pioneering and cable internet was peak technology.
A lot has happened since then.
We transitioned from purchasing CDs at the mall to streaming music from the cloud, and we collectively agreed in silence to rent our entire lives. I didn’t even notice it happening until I checked my bank statement last month and had a minor existential crisis.
My Subscription Intervention
I went through my credit card statement and counted the number of recurring charges I had. I wanted to crawl under my desk out of disbelief.
The damage? Too embarrassed to even tell you the number.
Half of them were services I’d forgotten existed:
- A meditation app I used twice in 2022.
- Three different cloud storage plans (because apparently one wasn’t enough?).
- A streaming service for a show I finished watching a year ago. It was like discovering I’d been leaving money on the sidewalk for strangers to pick up.
I felt like an absolute clown, and if my wife would find out she probably plans to strangle me until I turn blue.
As a consolation, I realize I’m not alone in this struggle. We’re all drowning in subscriptions, and it seems like no one’s wearing a life jacket.
Everything’s a Subscription Now
Subscriptions crept slowly into our existence, approaching you like with absolute innocence. Netflix seemed like a pretty sweet deal compared to cable. Spotify or Apple Music made sense. Who wants to buy individual songs anymore?
But then the floodgates opened.
Now you can or HAVE to subscribe to:
- Your car’s heated seats
- Toothbrush heads
- Razors
- Coffee
- Your doorbell’s features
- Your smart fridge
- Ink cartridges
- Toilet paper
When did we go from “I’ll buy that” to “I’ll rent that forever”? The sense of owning anything is just evaporating like my motivation on a Monday morning.
Blame Salesforce (Kind of)
Back in the late ’90s, Marc Benioff from Salesforce had a wild idea: what if instead of selling expensive software that companies install once, we just… let them pay forever? Revolutionary. Diabolical. Brilliant.
The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model was born, and corporations everywhere lost their minds.
Why? Because the math worked beautifully. Instead of one big sale, you get smaller payments that never stop. Predictable revenue, which is the board of directors’ and their investors favorite bedtime story.
Every company with a spreadsheet and a dream looked at Salesforce’s success and thought, “We should do that.” And they did.
Adobe went from “buy Photoshop once for $600” to “pay us $55/month until the heat death of the universe.” Microsoft turned Office into Office 365. Some of those monthly auto-renewals are suspiciously difficult to cancel. (Adobe is famous for that)
The Pushback is Real
It’s a safe assumption to say we’re getting tired of it. Subscription fatigue is surging and there’s (I believe so) a genuine consumer rebellion happening in slow motion.
The signs are everywhere:
- Share your password became a “cultural movement”
- People are rotating streaming services like crop rotation
- Free trials are being gamed harder than a Las Vegas slot machine
- Everyone’s got that one friend who signs up, binges, and cancels before the charge hits
But can you blame the consumer? Everyone is tired of being nickel-and-dimed to death.
Tired of forgetting what we’re paying for. Tired of the mental overhead of managing seventeen different subscriptions across four different email addresses.
The Breaking Point
The thing about subscriptions is they’re designed to be invisible. Five bucks here, ten bucks there. It doesn’t feel like much. Until it does.
I think we’ve hit peak subscription. Not because the model doesn’t work (it works too well, that’s the problem), but because consumers are finally waking up and doing the math. And the math is depressing.
The icing on the cake is the obvious looming recession lurking, especially in the USA where Trump is wrecking their economy faster than one can change pants.
When I cancelled half my subscriptions, you know what happened?
Absolutely nothing. My life didn’t get worse. I didn’t miss any of them. I just had more money in my bank account and fewer things to keep track of. It made me realize I have to revise my how I work, what I am actually using and go for digital minimalism instead.
I think it’s time for me to make a serious change and document my progress + changes in a separate blog post.
Companies aren’t going to abandon subscriptions. They’re too profitable. But I think we’re going to see some evolution here. More flexible plans. Better value propositions. Maybe even the return of actually owning things?
Or maybe we’ll all just get better at the cancel game.