| Appropriately-usernamed GP isn't wrong though. SAAS models are loved by entrepreneurs because you get more money at a lower cost: Making a sale is easier because the numbers are lower, but what you rake in is higher because LTV is (usually) higher than what you'd normally charge as a one-off. The amount of people who forget to unsubscribe, who don't care and leave it running, etc, is shocking. Hell, I'm frugal, and I've been guilty of leaving things like my Prime subscription running for months despite living somewhere I don't even have Amazon. My WoW subscription is still running today even though I haven't logged on the game since 2017. (My monthly costs are sub-300usd... making a $15/mo subscription 5% of my costs) So yeah, it can absolutely be toxic. I've seen people not be confident enough in their product and rely on tricks rather than worry about making what they charge for attractive enough for users to want to pay for it. But all in all, unless you're straight up scamming people, I think the incentives behind subscriptions are pro-consumer. Certainly a hell of a lot more than the incentives behind ads. There are two problems I see as unsolved in the subscription model today: - Payment gateway fees prevent microsubscriptions. Decentralized digital currencies promised to solve this -- they didn't. When the cost of providing a subscription is $0.001, and you have to charge at least $0.32 to break even, you're forced to tack it on to something bigger. This also massively incentivizes long-term subscription plans (12 month plans), over impulse-buy short term subscriptions. - Subscription management is done individually by services. This is a feature that your preferred payment provider should be offering. Paypal has a pretty decent implementation of this for users (A shame that Paypal sucks so much for developers). If you could cancel/manage all your subscriptions through your bank, subscription fatigue would be less of a problem I believe. |