to be saturation point with everyone and everything wanting me to pay them a subscription fee?

[Brystar]

There is a well known chef and cookbook writer whose newsletter I subscribe to, I have all their books and even paid £100 to buy an online course that they made to teach various cooking methods. I love their work, am a big fan of their books and recipes and feel like their work has really helped me to become a better cook.

Today in that newsletter they said how they were moving their online blog and content to a paid platform where I could pay a monthly fee to read their musings about food and get access to recipes which are already in their book which I bought so it would be paying to read a blog.

I get that if you have an online audience and you look around and see everyone moving their content behind a paywall that it is quite likely you feel like a bit of an idiot if you don't do it yourself. I also understand if people are actually providing a service of some kind or producing courses but for lots of these paid sites it is just milking your fans for cash at this point.

Lots of musicians and youtube people are doing it and for not very much and sure it is only a few pounds a month but everyone wants you to pay and I feel like I have total monthly subscription fatigue and anyone asking me to pay to get a link to their spotify playlist of the month, their monthly mood board and exclusive behind the scenes musings is just off putting to me now.

Add to that there are the various apps and bits of software which want you to pay £8.99 a month or more when it used to be a one time payment. Hairdressers locally now are saying that you need to be on their subscription plan to ensure you can get an appointment, ditto for any beauty service.

I do get it makes good business sense but as a consumer, a customer it is wearing me down and is putting me off the people who keep insisting on this model.

I once bought a couple of underwear sets from Fenty, Rihanna’s brand.

The next month I was charged a £50 subscription fee, which I’d automatically been signed up for by virtue of buying their products.

The only way to cancel was to call and be held on a line for 30 mins, and then insisting that yes I definitely want to cancel this subscription when the call operator gave me a long spiel about the benefits of the subscription.

It was to provide a “discount” on underwear purchased, but you’d be charged £50 a month even if you didn’t buy underwear. I’m not buying new sets every month!

I’ll never buy underwear from Fenty again. I’m surprised they’re still going with that mercenary subscription approach.

I hate it too. On YouTube I follow an English horse trainer who I greatly admire, but was so disappointed in him when he decided to make a "members area" with extra content. Reason being, his videos are extremely amateur (filmed on a phone by his wife who is clearly not a film-maker bless her), include way too much waffle, and are poorly edited. They go off regularly to the US to do horse training there, so clearly not short of a bob or 2, and will film their hotel room, the view of the beach from their window, their food. I can't get my head around them thinking anyone might be tempted to pay for their content when the quality of the free stuff is so poor, despite his training being extremely interesting. Feels so grabby.

Urgh I hear you microsoft, Adobe, paying for extra apple storage

The new direct debits. I only have the wonderful Spotify on a monthly basis and have become adept at rotating my TV subscriptions to suit my habits, as some others here have done. I cringe now thinking of the money I effectively wasted when I had two or three TV subscriptions on the go for a few years because I wasn’t watching much - I was just too damn lazy to cancel.

I see NowTv have stopped people signing up for the odd month and now it’s six months minimum. I may have to take the hit in the autumn when the third season of The White Lotus is broadcast!

I used to watch a couple of BookTubers until they started Patreon - greed is such a turn off.

I pay for Spotify family, and we hammer it between the six of us. CDs would be useless for us, half of what we listen to isn’t available as physical media, and I don’t miss those horrendous portable players.

I don’t see the point of subbing to a kettle or a fridge, and I think that adobe/microsoft should still offer a bought product as well as a rented one if people want to pay in one go.

The worst is the recurring payment model. You can't cancel it. I had to shut down my credit card to stop Match taking £9.99 for some Incognito Viewing I once bought and it had somehow become a 6 month thing.

I rarely have any TBH. The only ones is Spotify as I can't find an ad blocker that works.

And monthly ink. And Focus Mate. Haha.

The challenge for those moving from ad funded ‘free to access’ content providers is once they start to charge on a subscription model, the content really needs to be worthy of that payment. Many just don’t up their game enough to realistically justify the payment. What was ‘ok, acceptable and worth following’ for no cost to the consumer, generating enough views/hits/followers to make it worthwhile to an advertiser simply isn’t the same as content that has more value to the viewer/subscriber. This will end up seeing many binning the subscription model (looking at crap YouTubers and instagrammers).

I think Microsoft still allow you to buy a single 1-PC licence - they did recently, although they may have stopped it completely now - but they framed it like Gerald Ratner probably would have done, had he been in the computing industry.

I'm paraphrasing slightly here, but they offered you the choice of either the monthly subscription, which was what any wise person with even a modicum of intelligence would naturally choose, comes with all the essential updates to niche features that you've never heard of, much less actually use, is safer, preserves your precious files, protects you from viruses, can be used anywhere, across multiple devices, connects you to the cloud whether you want to or not and might well save your life; or the one-off licence that is specifically tailored to the requirements of the stupid and close-minded customer who mashes the keyboard with their heels, came without any of the important features that you would depend on, would burn up in a big fireball and die forever as soon as that particular PC broke down and was extremely likely to eat your grandmother and mix your whites in with your colours when you weren't looking.

But other than that, it's entirely your free choice; no pressure.

Slightly off-topic, as they've never asked me to subscribe at all; but we bought a Serious Readers reading light, which was an expensive investment but well worth it; it's brilliant.

However, their incessant frequent marketing afterwards leads me to strongly believe that they too expect me to be buying another one every few weeks, presumably so that I can see clearly to survey and marvel at my impressive vast collection of new socks and leggings that keep right on a-tumbling through the door every month.

@MereDintofPandiculation agree with all of what you say - but this in particular:
A trouble with the subscription model is if you stop paying you lose access to the stuff that was available when you were paying. This matters when it's for example a scientific journal which you will want to refer back to time after time. Much prefer the paper journal where, once you've bought it, it's yours to keep

Exactly - as I found to my cost with The Economist. I couldn't read all of the content as it appeared but after two years thought I's stop for a bit. I lost access to everything. Some of it I'd never read. Now I buy a paper copy every so often and keep it.

I can't even remember the name of it, as I click away the pop-up as soon as it buzzes into view, but what's that nasty little scheme that a lot of big retailers try to entice you with, after you've made a purchase?

That one that promises you vague discounts on future shopping and remains very quiet about the fact that it's a substantial monthly subscription which many people may believe gives highly dubious benefits, is difficult to extricate yourself from and is thus arguably something of a con?

This one is an interesting one for me. I work in an area with a lot of freelancers and many of them offer subscriptions to Substacks, Patrons etc. Some of these freelancers produce stuff I love but I've never been moved to subscribe and I do wonder who is their audience and how much they revenue it actually generates? It must have something in it because managing a dedicated newsletter seems too much work for peanuts but it can't be sustainable because it feels like everyone is at it.

The more successful ones seem to offer it WITH a service like an in-depth online course or in person workshops along the content and this seems more reasonable. You wouldn't dive in unless you were committed to learning more.

It costs money to create content so I quite happy to Patreon for podcasts I listen to. But BBC good food app costs so I just stopped using it. I like it, but not that much. I pay for a yoga app but that's 20 quid for a year and is EXACTLY the app I want.

YANBU. People say Spotify is worth it, but they too have moved audio books that were previously included behind another effing paywall. I recently won a FirBit and thought 'Great, I can keep track of my sleep and exercise', when I realised I need to pay a subscription to access this data. Ditto Ring Doorbell. I'm sticking to my MS Office license from 2010.

Yes, this. So many people and companies see the prospect of earning money, without ever stopping for a moment to realise that people will actually want something decent in return for their money.

They're a bit like when you're a little kid and you eagerly sell your parents a glass of squash (that they've already paid for!) - because you want some extra pocket money for sweets, rather than from any conviction that they might be desperate to buy it!

Plenty of these 'influencers' probably overestimate how important they are in people's lives, when a great many of them will sign up and might glance over with mild interest now and again; but would never dream of paying anything for it if it weren't free.

It's part of the transference of wealth. We don't own anything anymore. No assets. Nothing to hand on. We stream or rent so much.

I fiercely resist any subscription charges. I put up with the ads on YouTube rather than pay to get rid of them. I keep
old tech going for as long as I possibly can, because so many new things come with stings attached.

And online shopping is just so complicated. Endless pressure to
”create an account”, review your purchase, take survey, pop ups offering too-good-to-be-true cashback. I have abandoned purchases if the “checkout” process takes more than two minutes.

More than once I have accidentally signed up to Amazon prime, because they’ve designed it so it’s easy to to without meaning to.

I agree that what you're describing is insane, but it's not my experience of life. I am against shifting to the the subscription model. I would say that I have no subscriptions, but depending on the flexibility of the definition, maybe it's not true. If I pay a fee to have a VPN for a month or a set number of months, but it's not rolling, is that a subscription?

I have several items I buy on Amazon subscribe and save. Not a problem to adjust or skip if I don't need an item or want to add/ cancel. Microsoft office, because the one off cost for the products I use cost more than 5 years worth of subscription and i would have had to pay out again whenever I wanted the latest version. Drinking chocolate, again, easy to adjust or skip if I need to. I don't mind paying for those or TV services by subscription, but do get annoyed when I am badgered to subscribe to news sources. Charities are the worst, if I paid the 'only' £3 a month that they all ask for, I wouldn't be able to pay my food, energy and house bills. Plus they then increase their demands. I no longer give to charity unless I can do so in cash, anonymously.

Totally agree. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have done for many years, it’s frustrating how many of them have additional episodes via a paid platform. I understand they want to make money but it’s the constant referral to additional episodes or the slip-in of ‘how funny’ or ‘shocking’ the additional episode is on the main platform. I wouldn’t be able to pay for all of the additional platforms it would cost an arm and a leg! Not to mention it’s usually another app to download.

I'm in the US and I have one basic TV subscription service. I alternate seven or eight others monthly, so that I'm only paying for two of those at a time. What I'm tired of is the 'come back to us' emails. Netflix is the worst.

yeah…and don’t forget the subscription that change (erm…Prime video) and offer the same amount, same services but now WITH advertisement.

I mean…seriously…so you just want to have the money from everyone and there is no client 🤷🏼‍♀️

Photobucket annoys the hell out of me. It used to be free but now they're charging for it, which means that the photos I had stored there are now behind a paywall and are effectively being held to ransom. If I pay up, I can get them back.