I just cancelled Netflix because I'm also paying for Amazon Prime. Netflix hasn't had anything worth watching for a good few months but it took me longer than that to go in and cancel it. But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
Patreon's another one. Really cool idea, but everyone with a Youtube or a blog or a Twitch stream is pushing it. So it's a case of subscribing to one person for $10 a month or 5 people for $2 each.
After that, you can get a monthly subscription of underwear, shaving stuff, make up, etc. at which point it seems like a purely wasteful cash grab.
The problem is, even with the increased competition, prices are only increasing.
> But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
I expect someone will make a site or app or service for managing this, which lets you maintain a "want to watch" list with optional priorities.
For each streaming service, the app would tell you which if the items you want are on that service, and how many total hours of content that is. You can use this to help decide which, if any, streaming services you should subscribe to for each month.
I have no idea where one would get the data for such an app, but this site [1] seems to have it, so I infer that it is possible to get it. They have a paid API, so maybe they could even be used as the data source.
I'll need to subscribe to an app in order to manage my subscriptions. Of course, that app will only deal with media-related subscriptions. I'll need another app to manage food/health related subs. Rinse. Repeat.
I'm already there. I just hate random money coming out of my account. I just gave fastmail $130 for three years. I wish I could have given them a thousand for lifetime so I would just never have to think about it again. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass for $150 so I would never have to think about it again. And no hard feelings if these services were to shut down.
I can deal with a large one time payment. A bunch of random 5 dollar a payments a month isn't going to float. I crawl through my credit card statements looking for oddities. And it just bugs me.
Selling lifetime services for something like that is very risky. It would be like paying someone a few million dollars and then they have to try to budget it out for the rest of their life. Also what happens if the company runs out of money and cant continue services. You have already paid for a lifetime subscription but they have no money to give you a refund.
The problem isn't with unexpected or fraudlent charges. It's with the expected ones. Each subscription is another recurring charge, of a different amount and at a different time. Eventually it can become a death of a thousand papercuts.
I too share the subscription fatigue, and avoid subscriptions as much as possible. I prefer to pay once, up front.
eh, but the comment you are responding to had a solution that worked for me for some time. I haven't used privacy.com, but bank of america used to have a way for me to create virtual credit card numbers; I'd simply create one for every subscription I had, and it was really easy to just disable the virtual credit card.
Bank of America has discontinued this service, and I haven't setup a new workflow, which is disappointing. but I mean, it is one solution.
I didn't mean that. Let me rephrase it more clearly: recurring payments are a problem by themselves, the more of them you have, the more problem they are. This makes things offered as subscriptions inferior to actual products you can buy one-off, at least in this aspect. If you're wealthy enough to put money for couple years worth of service into a virtual CC for every service you can use, you're probably wealthy enough to manage all this stuff for you anyway.
>recurring payments are a problem by themselves, the more of them you have, the more problem they are.
In some ways, I agree. In others, I don't. I mean, the problem is largely in the difficulty of unsubscribing. If that were easier to manage (and virtual cards are one way to deal with that) I think it's not such a problem, and even has some advantages. But you could easily argue that this difficulty of unsubscribing is built into the business model; people who sell subscription based services know that the harder it is to unsubscribe, the more money they will make, so... incentives are not, as it were, aligned, and that tends to lead to suboptimal outcomes.
I think there are valid arguments for the subscription model; I know before buying a car, I rent all of the models I'm considering, for a week or more. This is often harder with things like software, which don't have as strong of ownership protections as physical goods, meaning I usually can't rent software to try it out, if it's not sold on a subscription plan. I'd consider renting a car permanently, (except that it's either massively expensive or massively inflexible; getting out of a lease, as far as I can tell, is way harder than selling a car, and renting cars outside of a lease is uneconomical. I feel the same way about commercial real-estate; usually the penalties for breaking a lease seem a lot worse than just selling the goddamn building a year into ownership. And this is possibly your objection; if you have perfect knowledge of your future needs, buying software up front is probably a lot cheaper. But, without the ability to sell the software when you are done, it's not really comparable.)
>If you're wealthy enough to put money for couple years worth of service into a virtual CC for every service you can use, you're probably wealthy enough to manage all this stuff for you anyway.
I think wealthy people would be willing to pay for an easier solution to this. I would. the virtual credit card solution is clumsy because the software is bad (I haven't actually gotten the capital one solution suggested earlier setup, it might be great, but the citi solutions and the now defunct bank of America solutions require flash and are... clumsy) - the problem isn't the money; for all the virtual credit card solutions I've tried, the payment goes to your regular credit card, so you don't need to sink any capital, it's just work
(but, of course, this is mostly about how difficult it is to cancel subscription services. If it were easy, this wouldn't be a problem. - I think this is our major point of disagreement.)
I have a card with Capital One and can do virtual cards too. There is even a Firefox extension to make it a few clicks to make a new one and input the info.
I guess I should mention that I am poor-ish. Right now I am getting lumber from a reclaimed lumber place and making furniture in a Amish style. Then my sister paints and distresses it. So if a bunch of random five dollar charges hit my account at once and I am not expecting them it could be a problem.
I heard that but never got it setup. I did a bunch more poking today, and it looks like they want me to use a chrome extension (I'm mostly a safari person) I should spend more time looking up how to get that working, 'cause it was way more convenient than just canceling my credit cards every six months.
I think there already was, at least in Germany -- based on contracts that made it quite hard to unsubscribe. I think a key to avoiding a general subscription aversion is to make it very easy to unsubscribe.
Yup. Two years contracts, automatically renewed, with three months notice period for cancellation, cancellation by post (yes, by a papper letter), no early cancellations. Reverting the monthly direct debit transaction to "give a hint" to the predatory "service provider" triggers furious response from their accounting and customer service, and transaction cancellation fees. It's hard to imagine how the setup could be even more predatory for a customer. Fuck, even the memory of dealing with this raises my adrenaline level.
I just cancelled Netflix because I'm also paying for Amazon Prime. Netflix hasn't had anything worth watching for a good few months but it took me longer than that to go in and cancel it. But the trajectory suggests that you'll need to sub with Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. if you want the full range of streaming TV. You're going to have to start micromanaging that if you don't want to throw your money down the drain.
Patreon's another one. Really cool idea, but everyone with a Youtube or a blog or a Twitch stream is pushing it. So it's a case of subscribing to one person for $10 a month or 5 people for $2 each.
After that, you can get a monthly subscription of underwear, shaving stuff, make up, etc. at which point it seems like a purely wasteful cash grab.
The problem is, even with the increased competition, prices are only increasing.