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The subscription business model has absolutely skyrocketed in popularity. It seems like everything is a subscription these days. Remember when you could just buy something, and here’s a wild idea, own it?

Picture this: It’s a beautiful day and you feel like watching a movie. You turn on your TV and search through your preferred OTT service and you’re greeted by a pop-up saying it’s time to renew your subscription. You think, “Meh, it’ll autopay”. And then you find nothing good to watch, so you decide to get on youtube and start doomscrolling (here’s why you shouldn’t), and there it is, 15 notifications telling you how YouTube premium is the next best thing since sliced bread.

Fine, you decide to ignore it and do something productive for a change, and you go to print a document for college, but uh oh, what happened? Turns out, your monthly subscription to HP ink ran out so you lost printer privileges. Annoyed to your core, you decide to go to the store to get the printouts because you need them for tomorrow, but your car seat feels like a frozen slab. As it turns out, you missed your BMW heated seat subscription so you’re stuck on what feels like a metal chair on an ice skating rink.

At this point, you start wondering. “Do I even own anything  or am I renting my life one subscription at a time?”

Remember back when you could buy a DVD or a Music CD and actually own it? Like, you can listen to it or watch it whenever you feel like it. And no one would take it from you because you stopped paying them for it. Yeah, that doesn’t exist anymore.

(Obviously you can still buy DVDs, but Netflix has thrown DVD players into the same dusty old shelf as your grandma’s old rotary phone.)

Let’s unearth this capitalist haven one subscription at a time.

Subscription services weren’t always the new-fangled money-laundering scheme it is now. It used to be that you actually got what you paid for. Or rather, you paid for what you used. As is the case with your utilities, electricity, water, and newspapers. And this was a very understandable model since you needed money to print new newspapers everyday. And if you didn’t want newspapers everyday, you could just buy them at your nearest corner-shop. Similarly for electricity and water, you paid for what you used. They didn’t just hide your tap until you subscribed to “extended family access.”

But things got a bit more spicy when modern technology came into the mix. When cable TV became all the rage, subscription services for entertainment became widespread. And understandably so. It was nearly impossible to maintain infrastructure and deliver content from multiple sources without continuous financing. And if you didn’t want to use it, again, just unsubscribe and buy a VCP or a DVD player.This is also the scene where the entertainment giant Netflix came into being.

Contrary to popular belief, Netflix didn’t start off as an online streaming service. Their first business model was a rental system, where you subscribed to their service, and they delivered DVDs you picked from their catalogue. And you return them after you’re done watching. This was, again, a fairly noble initiative. Renting is a win-win situation, you get your content and they get their money for giving you content. But this seemingly innocent idea set off an avalanche of companies realizing, “hey, I don’t have to give people what they pay for, I can just make them keep paying in exchange for not taking away what they already paid for.”

This started the corporate cog that kept on spinning. Spotify popped up with their music streaming service– Unlimited streams as long as you never stop paying. And then adobe pulled the boldest move in subscription service history by throwing all adobe software under a single “creative cloud” subscription. This meant that for artists, softwares like Adobe Photoshop, which you could previously have owned for $700, was now locked behind a subscription of 50$ monthly. So now, instead of paying $700 once, you have to pay $600 every year you want to use it. This might sound like a sweet deal in the short term, but for artists and organizations dependent on the software, it was a trap that they could never leave. And with Adobe’s monopoly on the creative scene, it was nearly impossible not to pay them.

So this begs the question, Why do companies love subscriptions so much? And why do we go along with it? 

Let’s start with the companies. For one, it’s sweet, reliable cash flow. Instead of gambling on a new product launch and spending resources on making useful and innovative products, companies can focus on delivering just what is expected of them while making the same amount of money(or more) forever. Like stated previously, instead of getting $700 from a single user, they can get thousands of dollars from a user depending on how long they use it. And the longer they use it, the less likely they are to switch to a different tool. It locks in customers that actually want the one product since cancelling the subscription usually meant losing data or having to spend extra time learning a new tool that may or may not have all the functionality you’re used to.

But this has the downside of decelerating innovation. When a company makes enough forever with a single product, why bother innovating on new products? And having one renewing subscription means the company can add or remove things from the product and users just have to deal with it. The company is more or less locking the user to their whims and fancies while simultaneously earning money out of it. They remove our choice and make us pay for it. 

If a company realizes that people will pay to keep what they already have, they’ll know that they’ll pay more for the content they already had. As is seen recently with Amazon Prime adding advertisements to their paid subscriptions and asking more money to remove them. We’re a few steps away from YouTube asking us to pay to pause a video.

Now let’s look at why customers keep falling for it. Since when did we start liking not owning the things we paid for?

The biggest reason is the low upfront cost. Like we talked about before, the periodic subscription charge for a product is usually lower than how much the product would’ve actually cost. This is a very positive aspect of the subscription business model. You have more freedom to try out what you want. But it turns negative really fast because if you do end up actually using the product, you have to constantly pay more than the product is worth just so you don’t lose access to it. And more often than not, the subscription cost will only be marginally lower than the true cost of the product so by the second year, you’re already paying a lot more than you would’ve if it was a one time purchase.

Another reason is the fear of missing out. While subscription services take away a company’s motivation to innovate on new products, they keep developing the existing product. This may not always be to the customer’s benefit, but it will always be marketed as the latest and greatest. This creates fear in the minds of customers that if they stick to the one version they get, they will be missing out on new stuff. And companies add fuel to this by releasing half-baked versions while promising bug-fixes and updates on the next version, forcing customers to get the next version. They can just throw in a really good update every once in a while to sort of maybe try to justify the exorbitant price they’re charging for the product.

The subscription model removed a company’s incentive to release a good final product. Since they can always just add on more to the product. They end up having the freedom to advertise more than they are practically able to deliver. 

Another big reason the subscription service model is so successful is the human brain’s natural aversion to loss. Subscriptions are very threatening in that you lose all access once you stop paying. If you don’t pay, it’s gone. This is a very powerful message that keeps customers from leaving such services. And although it might seem like such a simple concept to just stop using it if you don’t want it, it isn’t so. The brain is highly averted to losing something. Be it a person, object or just access to something. So it is never a good feeling to lose access to something you’ve always had even if you barely ever use it. And more often than not, the “losing” part includes not just your access to the software, but also access to the data you have in that software. A bit dystopian isn’t it? That they’re making us pay to keep our own data?

Now that we’ve talked a lot about the subscription model and all of its downsides, it might seem like a grim future with no escape. Are we stuck paying our technological overlords forever to keep access to our things? The answer is no, there’s plenty of alternatives that are better, and that you have direct control over, that you can use to have more control over your life and finances. It is obviously up to you to decide what is and isn’t worth losing. But once you’ve made the choice, and there always is a choice, you’ll be a truly responsible customer. Here are some paths you can take to slowly untangle the net of subscriptions holding you down.

Open source projects. This is truly the “wisdom of the crowd” of the technological world. We are engineers, and we have the skillset to bring out good products to the world. And open source projects allow us to use our skills to add on to thousands of other people’s work. There are thousands of open source alternatives to highly commercialised software that perform just as good if not better. And for the projects that aren’t that great yet, you could be the person to add the feature that brings it up to the level of their commercial counterparts. And open source softwares are generally safer since there’s thousands of contributors that continuously watch for backdoors and bugs in the code and fix it themselves. Some examples for open source software in the creative field include Blender, Gimp, and Inkscape. Open source softwares are one of the best ways to detach yourself from the proprietary chains holding your freedom back.

Yet another way you can see yourself being subject to the subscription lock is through cloud storage and “photo backups”. And this is quite a twisted trap to get out of. You have all your photos and videos and all your memories stored with one company, and they can take it all away just like that if you stopped paying. But you don’t have to sell your soul to Google to keep your data. The answer out of this pit is a NAS or Network-attached storage. These can be easily set up at home using your existing network with a little bit of setup cost. This is your own little cloud server that can be configured to hold all kinds of files, be it photos, music or movies, that you legally own of course. This keeps your storage and data out of corporations and safe at home. And such setups have highly versatile and open source front-ends that are very comparable to their proprietary counterparts. So instead of being handcuffed to cloud storage, just set up a NAS, slap it in your closet, and there you go! Your own little cloud storage. Watch yourself make the setup cost back in the blink of an eye when you cancel all your cloud subscriptions. With the added benefit of knowing no one can snoop through your data under any circumstance.

Let’s be real for a second here, subscription services aren’t going anywhere. Not because they’re “innovative,” but because we’ve proven time and time again that we’ll throw away more money the more things are kept from us. But if we keep paying, they keep charging, it’s that simple. The only way to make companies innovate again is to starve the beast. The customer is always right, and if the demands are showing otherwise, the companies have no choice but to adopt it. So as customers, it is our responsibility to keep companies in check and find better alternatives if a company is going down the greedy route.

And it’s not to say that the whole idea of subscription services is bad either. It is absolutely reasonable to expect us to pay for content and services. And it’s been happening for hundreds of years. Heck we even pay the government subscription fees to live in our country. But as responsible consumers, we owe it to everyone to only pay what a service is worth and to pull out and look for better alternatives when the service worsens. Subscriptions were supposed to be convenient. Now they’re just digital leashes. And as long as we keep paying, the leash only tightens. Sure subscriptions make sense sometimes, but make sure you’re paying for what’s worth it to you. And cancel the rest. Otherwise, congratulations! You’re not a customer anymore, you’re a piggy bank.