The subscription models of todays day and age have harmed our society in the long run. How could this be? What do you mean Ben? And how do we correct this? All to be discussed soon my dear reader. Of course, please understand that I am simply observing and reporting my own thoughts and opinions here. If I seem to be echoing something that someone else has come up with, I simply was not aware of such. So let us begin, what do I mean by subscription models?

Yes, what do I mean? What are we considering a “subscription” and simply a bill. First and foremost, paid software where you have to pay a monthly fee to access it. Most notably, the bane of my existence, Adobe products. You used to be able to buy a license outright, and now you can’t. Most computer softwares are this way in the modern day and age. Other subscription models include paying for ink for your printer, paying for objects and things over the course of many months, and streaming services. Nowadays our houses are bought on credit, and you pay a monthly bill in order to continue your ownership of them. I would consider this a subscription model, you do not own something outright and you pay a monthly fee at a fixed rate. Now your water bill, electric bill, or other bills where the bill you based on usage I don’t think that’s necessarily a subscription model for the purposes of my argument. Those are simply necessary costs for operation.

Now how could this be? How could society possibly be harmed by the subscription model? Well, to begin a rather lengthy rant about it I must first start with the idea of broken down costs. You as a consumer are informed you could pay for something, you would normal buy this something outright, by paying $20 every month with interest. So lets say its a bed, and it’s $800 at 4% monthly interest. Wow! That sounds like a great deal right? You get to pay $20 every month instead of $800 this month. That’s an amazing deal! You’ve just subscribed to your mattress for 40 months! Oh wait, there’s interest. You would have to essentially pay the company a total of $855.85 over the course of 40 months. Now if you scaled that up to $80,000 you would essentially be paying an extra $5,585. The point is, subscription models purposely disenfranchise consumers into thinking they are getting a better deal, because its only $20 a month. If you miss a few payments, you don’t get to keep it! You have to give your bed back because you forgot to pay for it this month! The subscription model makes people think they are spending less money on things in the long run, when in reality its more expensive often times. My phones is a $1,200 phone, I was at Verizon and I was informed that they were more than happy to set up a payment plan for getting my brand new phone! Woo!!! It would reduce me and my moms bill for 2 years or something. I sat down and did the math and looked at the bill payments, and looked at the phone payments, and looked at everything. Yeah, no the bill was going to go down by $20 essentially for like the first 3 months, but then I would be paying a grand total of like $2,230 or something close to that number over the course of 2 years for my $1,200 phone. I looked at the man trying to sell me the phone and said “This isn’t cheaper, this is more expensive.” and he sat there and looked at me solemnly as I had figured it out. He couldn’t say “No, its not!”, he knew it was more expensive. I paid for my phone outright that day, my bill didn’t change, and Verizon didn’t get more money. These companies use this monthly payment subscription model to make you think it is cheaper in the long run because you are paying less, but in reality your paying more. They do the same thing with houses, most people actually pay way more than the worth of their house. They miss payments and the bank or whoever says “Hey its alright, you’ve paid for 10 years on time not sweat. You’re going to be paying an extra $4,000 for that mistake but we aren’t too worried about it and we won’t tell you that! See you in 20 years!” It annoys the shit out of me. Our society is being degraded by this idea that monthly payments are a great thing! If you’re paying $10 a month for 28 services that’s a great deal! Never mind the fact that your paying $280 extra every month for stuff. Some things make sense as subscription models, but everything nowadays? Really? Not everything needs to be a subscription model! But hey that’s crazy, what would we ever do?

So what would we ever do? How would we fix this kind of stuff? Well subscriptions like your house payment probably won’t ever go away, they majority population of America will never make enough money to actually be able to buy a house outright with their savings. Sadly there isn’t much we can do about that one. Software companies charging for their software at a monthly cost, well those guys are in for a rude awakening. If people think your stuff is too expensive they either develop their own programs and release it for free or make it a one time purchase. We are already seeing the effects of this as open source development becomes more and more prevalent. Phone companies make money on our monthly payments for the services and the payments for our phones, if you buy your phone outright from either the phone company or the manufacturer you will save money. They want to make you think you won’t but really you will. A lot of these other companies this is also the case, you can buy products directly from the manufacturer and get things at a hella cheap price compared to the monthly cost. Pretty much anything that you could normally buy outright traditionally, you should. And if you can’t don’t until you can. That’s kinda a crappy thing to say because not everyone can afford things right at that moment. But things like movie services, or printer ink, or something tangible that doesn’t have to be a subscription; how much do you use it compared to how much you payed for it, and how much would buying it outright cost? Let’s take movie for example, you can buy a lot of movies for super cheap nowadays, now it won’t be the “ultra high definition” type of movie but you can still buy a copy of it and enjoy it. You can keep that thing forever and rewatch it whenever or wherever. If you rip a copy of it to your computer, now you can always have it. But if you pay for Netflix and they have that movie that’s awesome, but they might now have that movie. Now you have to go “rent” an online copy for like $4 or something. These small inconveniences add up as you add more and more of them. There’s literally a paid service now to cut down on the amount of paid services you have, like are you kidding me? There’s a paid service to figure out what services you pay for! That’s because so many people will pay for services and forget they pay for them, then the bills come due and its all crazy! So for the love of God, stop using unnecessary paid services. I know it takes some getting used to, but look at the cost of things relative to how much it costs for a subscription to something. If the subscription is cheaper, then ok. But most of the time, they aren’t cheaper.

Sorry for ranting for a while about this. I just think our society has moved towards subscription models in order to screw over the consumer more so that the corporations can make more money. It’s messed up.

Thanks for reading!

-Ben