| I have opened myself up for more subscription services over the last couple of years. I freelance. My income is generally 'high', but irregular. Monthly subscriptions aren't irregular. Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple. I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these. I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar. Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now. Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature. I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no). "to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier". My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume. |