[TeMPOraL]

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.

[lsc]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[lsc]

>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.)

[TeMPOraL]

You make very good points, but I'm not sure if you correctly identified our point of disagreement - because I believe there is problem with subscription model itself (at least for individuals, I get the capex vs. opex incentives for companies), on top of the problems with unsubscribing.

I was readying a long comment addressing your individual points, but I realized I can compress it all to this:

The overall reason why I prefer ownership of durable goods over subscriptions (and the planned obsolescence economy) is reduction of variance in opportunities and quality of life. At the time when I have the means, I can buy something. If I have less means or that something is very expensive (e.g. a new car, a house), I can convert it into a "subscription" myself using my bank, via various forms of loans and installment payments. And then when I go broke, I can still use the thing I own, perhaps to help myself get out of the predicament. Subscriptions bundle this all together, making the utility directly dependent on my cash flow, prevent me from optimizing the value I derive from them (through ToS that limit a lot of non-standard use cases), and deprive me from the ability to use a good in the time of crisis.

[johnpowell]

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.

[lsc]

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.