There are a lot of terms I could use to describe myself last week, but I most definitely messed up. I made the amateur choice of checking my bank statement, something that is only marginally better than going to a dentist’s office or dealing with cyber money. What It revealed was just border lining what I would classify as poor financial planning: I had over 17 subscriptions that were all rapidly draining my funds with as much crafted chaos as a well structured vampire society.
How did I get myself into this? This is the story of how I turned into a person that pays monthly for workout tutorials I never watch, meditation sessions that go unused, and four different streaming services, who each grant me access to around two shows that I actually want to watch. With years of context, it all makes sense.
Many years ago I signed up for Netflix, which again, was just singular and all encompassing. The thought of sitting at home and watching movies without dealing with the teenage whizz kid at the rental store was pure bliss. So, one subscription truly does seem reasonable.
Next, came the great fragmentation. Instantaneously, the shows I used to watch were scattered across a multitude of platforms like victims of a digital separation, each requiring its own monthly payment. “Want to view that documentary series everyone’s discussing?
That will be another $8.99 a month, please. Oh, and that film you’ve been waiting for? Sorry, that’s exclusive with our competitor who will gladly charge you $12.99 for the opportunity.”
Before I knew it, I was subscribed to Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and something named “Streamorama”, which I have no recollection of signing up for, but which has been taking $9.99 from me every month for the past one and a half years.
And this isn’t relegated to just entertainment. My digital life is now a tangle of monthly expenses. I pay for a music service for a more refined version, which I mostly utilize to hear the same twenty songs I’ve cherished since 1997.
I pay for cloud storage to save photos that I never view. I pay for a “premium” news subscription that mostly sends me notifications about celebrity divorces and the weather. I have forgotten to cancel my monthly subscription for speciality coffee beans, which means I am paying for something that I do not need.
I don’t even have a coffee grinder. My pantry is filled with sealed bags as if I suffer from a caffeine fueled hoarding disorder. This subscription has caused me significant harm in an economy that is constantly on the incline.
There seems to be no impact when you make each individual charge. Oh, how it pains me to spend so much money. All I’m able to afford is a cup of coffee, but in reality, I am not getting a thing.
What do I get? I get the hope that I will be able to make use of the services in the future, but that is highly unrealistic. Last month, I found out that I was being charged for two different password management services.
TWO. As if I needed two digital vaults for the 17 different subscription services I need to use. Paying for a service that tracks the subscription services you have to pay for, sooo ironic right?
I used to think that I was good with money. I laughed at people who spent without thought, throwing cash around and buying things they didn’t need. But now, I seem to have become a consumer supporting an entire digital services sector, which seems to base its services on reminding me how much I can spend and how little I do.
The tactics these companies employ are extremely effective. The “free trial” scheme is clever and can also be considered a corporate crime. “Here’s a new service!
Sign up now and you will receive a free trial for 30 days!” they boast. They know full well how good we are at remembering free stuff, while forgetting to unsubscribe. At the moment I set myself a reminder on the calendar for every subscription I sign up to.
Managing the end date of services I impulsively signed up for after an Instagram advertisement at midnight is now like working a part time job. Then, there’s the cancellation maze: a piece of extremely intricate art for you to decode. This cancellation maze is painstakingly crafted to make you continue paying long after the initial interest has faded.
There are multiple cancellation mazes that exist but let’s check a classical example of the meditation app which has a grand total of two openings. Have set your app settings to not make any changes? Then you approach a hideout that scans your profile section which blatantly tells you navigate right instead.
Locate the “manage subscription” option that does not appear as a troll face. “It’s in gray text, size 8 font, at the bottom of the page” as some may say. Click through three other screens after thoroughly reading that you have been deemed pressed for time and are indeed to busy to even catch a glimpse at the important messages stashed on the screen.
Each message shows increasing disappointment and despair, which gets worse than the last one as you switch from page to page. Thankfully, the disappointment ends on a high note as it is capped with the last page congratulating you with a confirmation email that succeeds in making you contemplate whether you have indeed just senselessly assaulted a puppy. As if I had never sent them any money to begin with, they write “we’re sad to see you go”.
If that were the case, then why do I feel as if I’m breaking up with a partner that has put up with so much? The hardest thing is that I completely get it. There’s something fascinating about the subscription model that I simply don’t understand – it’s like obtaining a sense of exclusivity and always having something new in your possession.
For $4.99 a month, you can be the special person who can say they own a premium weather app. Just think! Weather predictions that are a tad more precise than a free version!
Now that is top tier! I have made it a point to divide my subscription purchases into levels of remorse. Tier One contains services that I do subscribe to and use on a consistent basis – which is a very small group of services.
Tier Two consists of subscriptions I use every now and then and constantly sit in deliberation over whether or not they are worth it. Tier Three – far the largest category – covers services I need to pay attention to more, the ones I only remember after looking through my bank statements and feeling bewilderment complemented with shame. My effort to solve this complex network of pending debts brought me to yet another unfortunate reality.
Some services, it turns out, do not wish for you to cancel online even slightly. No, they want you to ring a phone number during office hours to chat with a “customer retention specialist” – a name for someone whose job it is to ensure canceling is so horrible that paying for the service becomes the only viable option. Last Tuesday, I was on the phone for forty-five minutes with one of those specialists, because I had to explain yet again that, no, I do not wish to put my subscription on pause, and no, a 10% discount will not be enough to make me change my mind, and yes, I am absolutely sure that I want to stop my selection of a box of artisanal mid-day snacks each month, regardless of the fact that I may, eventually, face a dire snacking situation that only their selection of a super fancy batch of pretzel gold could solve.
At the end of my subscription audit, I had canceled seven services and found three I did not recall signing up for. One of them, a “premium” version of a dictionary app, was surreptitiously charging me $3.99 every month for two years. I don’t know why I was buying a virtual dictionary, let alone spending money on it, when I could have bought several physical dictionaries.
Nice ones too, with gold embossing and that little thumb index. The true genius of the subscription model is how it changes the act of purchasing. Back in the day, you bought something and it was yours forever.
Simple as that. You would make one decision, pay once and walk away with the product. Now, all you have to do is decide once, set up a recurring payment, and see what happens next.
Ensuring to pay over and over again. It’s a change of the default from “I want to buy this, so I need to pay for it” to “I’ve paid for this product, so I won’t cancel unless I choose to.” The mental math changes too. The $9.99 monthly payment seems easy to forget and the sting from the single, upfront charge of $120 does not.
Even though both options end up costing the same amount, the annual payment certainly feels worse. There are subscriptions that go as far as promising cheaper rates if you decide to pay for the entire year up front. They take a more ‘hostage’ approach to payment.
You are tricked into giving them money upfront due to their promises of offering ‘lower pricing’ even when you are unsure how often you will utilize the service. This is not to say I want to revert to an era where purchasing a physical item happened only once at set cash value. There are always two sides to a coin—both the consumer and seller gain value out of the subscription model that comes with its own set of difficulties.
From the business’ perspective, it is much easier to plan and expand with a steady cash flow. On the other hand, users do not have to worry about lapsing their subscriptions to the services and so can enjoy uninterrupted service. Surely there is a way to strike that brings together the concepts of ownership, these strange forms of corporate feudalism, and letting us own everything while continuously having access to services, without having to worry about cancellation enabling service discontinuation.
As of now, I have decided on my own rule: one subscription in, one subscription out. For every new subscription I add, another must go. Although I refer to this method as closet management, I prefer to think this as a way to prevent my finances from becoming overwhelmed due to the overwhelming growth of monthly charges.
I’ve also added a reminder to my calendar to pop up every three months telling me to review all of my subscriptions. Clearly, it is a check-in with myself regarding my spending decisions and my goldfish-like ability to forget about recurring purchases. More importantly, I have taken my subscriptions’ list out and printed it, putting it on my refrigerator.
I guess this serves as a reminder of all the decisions I made that lead to a lot of expenses. The 14.99 “Specialty Sock Subscription” on the list accuses me, I don’t even particularly fancy socks. Every time I reach for the milk, I’m confronted with evidence of my own susceptibility to the siren song of convenience.
I have plans of cancelling another three subscriptions over the coming weekend. This would recover around 35 dollars for me every month, enough to buy a reasonable bottle of whiskey to help deal with the anger of using so many services. Unfortunately, none of them give me even remotely good experiences, while I have practically zero assets.
Cheers to the subscription economy, the one industry that has survived all the recessions, slowly draining us with new subscription services that have a fee hidden in plain sight.
