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.

Sport annoys me, used to be mainly Sky, now TNT sports and Amazon Prime have jumped on the bandwagon.
What have Amazon got to do with Sports?

We're just cash cows 😭

The only subscription I have is £16 a month to the dentist for two checkups a year, two dental hygienist visits a year (don't go because she damages your teeth and pulls fillings out), free X rays and priority appointment in the event of an urgent problem.

The idea of renting a fridge or kettle horrifies me. That's what people had to do in the 70s/80s with washing machines and TVs (Radio Rentals anyone?). I'm not bloody going back to those days.

YANBU, this started with software and is now an ubiquitous bs model that’s transparently about lining the company’s pockets rather than offering value. Rip off Britain, ennit

The maddest one I’ve seen recently is qualifications that expire! You need to pay each year for a new certificate! 😂😆

I’ve got a dentist subscription and for various reasons (travel, etc.) haven’t been in about 2 years. In all that time I’ve had 1 text (no letters), about 3 months ago, reminding me to go. I now realise that dentists reminding you every 6 months to go for a check up was just marketing.

When I do go my gums are usually bleeding, but they say that’s fine and not to worry. No scale and polish (which would be free with the plan). Just keep brushing as usual. Cheers then. Really should cancel that plan.

I hear you but do feel for all the people who have submitted hours worth of content for free and unless they delete it people will be able to access it for free for ever pretty much, unless something changes...

Not sure I get your point? I post things online and know they can be seen/used for forever and a day so I’m careful what I post. I’ve had a blog in the past and did tutorials etc.

If someone is an expert and posting detailed classes or tutorials and they want to be paid for that fair enough, people up treat mentioned Caroline Girven who appears to do fairly advanced work out content both in a paid app and for free on youtube, if she want to charge for some of that then fine. However many people just want paid for what is essentially a blog where they talk about their own lives and stuff they bought or did and the content doesn't have any real value, a person may tune in for free but I'd not be paying to hear about their latest haul, what book they read or what the cat got up to.

@D20

Sounds like your content was freely given with no thought to anything mercenary. I'm thinking about content creators who did the same but now realise that it could have been monetised, if only they'd known, so to speak?

I have noticed this as well, also some podcasts will stop half way though and then say if you want to hear the rest of my discussion with this guest the second part is exclusive to paid subscribers so pay up to hear the rest. I always feel like someone has just tried to rob me when they do that!

Yep, they say piracy is making a big come back with how the subscription model is going with software and media content.

@MoveOnTheCards Exactly, especially when people seem to start channels and have tons of engagement just to up subscriber numbers so that when they hit a certain number they start a subscription, it was always the plan and it just seems really grifty they are just hoping enough of their subscribers will be dumb enough to pay and then forget to cancel, their content is not worth it.

With the benefit of hindsight many aspects of Internet provision should have been charged for from the start to soften us up, as it's a difficult sell suddenly charging for things that people have been accessing for free for years.

I don't pay these subscriptions either but it doesn't stop me being annoyed at all the constant requests to pay a monthly fee for literally everything. I am older but for a lot of younger people subs are just a way of life and there was a video on youtube recently where a guy broke down his monthly subscriptions costs and he was paying over £1000 a month!

@NeelyOHara1 What parts do you mean? An actually service like Spotify fair enough but there are a lot of "creators" who just hope you like their inane ramblings enough to pay them for it!

Good!

And stay away from those subscription-based coffee sellers who’ve posted blogs all over the internet advising you not to buy supermarket coffee beans.

I’ve heard it can be very difficult to get these small-time sellers to stop sending you coffee and taking your money when you try to part company with them and, in my experience, supermarkets sell beans at least as good (and often better) than these “specialist” weak and bland-tasting offerings in pretentious packaging.

I'd be happy to pay per article providing it was relatively reasonable, but I won't subscribe. I would have bought a newspaper or magazine in the past for just one article and read the rest, but that was a once off payment, not signing up to buy the newspaper everyday for a month, 3 months or a year.

I don't pay for anything I read online

Even LinkedIn learning is free through my job

Equally Microsoft Office - I am quite happy muddling along on an old version of Excel, but in future the only way I will be able to use Excel is by an annual subscription giving me updates I can manage without
^

Google sheets - free

Agree too. I pay for Netflix (via O2 because its cheap), and Prime (yearly and turn off automatic resubscribe) and Duolingo. I think thats it. Anything else I have used in the past that changed to subscription I have stopped using as all the little subscriptions start adding up to a whole lot after a while

The subscription model for cars infuriates me. You pay extra to have some of the fancy features - mapping, safety features etc, but then they want you to pay a subscription to actually use them! No way.

I think a big issue with the dentist, if NHS, is the huge balance of power that they have over you.

People are so frightened of being 'managed off' the lists if they're accused of not taking their dental health seriously - or just not making them enough profit for occupying a treasured place on their list - that they will attend 6-monthly check-ups that a great many people don't really believe are all that necessary and wouldn't do if they didn't feel pressurised to 'keep themselves known' to the surgery.

In effect, it's kind of like a subscription: you'll pay £26 twice a year to stay 'subscribed' to a service that won't leave you high and dry and with a colossal, unpayable bill (and/or leave you in agony) if you end up with a really serious dental problem.

Not all that many decades ago, it wasn't uncommon for less well-off people to save up for (or be given, as a special milestone birthday present from their parents) a full set of dentures - requiring, of course, all of their healthy teeth to be removed first. Such was the fear of what expensive dental problems could arise throughout their life, they figured that, if you have no teeth, they can't cause you any problems or cost you a fortune in the future.

That is a disgusting way to go about things: offer something apparently free, that requires a significant amount of time and level of engagement, and then suddenly slap on a price for your time not to have been completely wasted.

Nothing whatsoever wrong with saying upfront "Listening to this podcast will cost you £X - click here to pay and listen" if that's how you choose to monetise your creativity; but it's extremely devious - and, I believe, a sign of somebody who isn't really confident in the value of what they are selling - to suddenly spring a price on the second half of something out of the blue.

I read about one manufacturer - BMW iirc - that would offer all of the standard additional-cost extras to people buying a new car; however, they would come fitted as standard, whether you chose to buy them or not.

Thus if you had included a particular extra in your original purchase spec and paid for it, all well and good; but if you hadn't specified and paid for it, you could later change your mind and have it, BUT you would have to rent it and end up paying a load more than you otherwise would have paid upfront.

It either suggests that the extra parts (often just software, I suppose) only cost them a tiny fraction of what they charge you for them, and/or they are so convinced that enough people will later change their minds and cough up that it's worth their while to provide them for everybody.

Yes, it's always sold as somehow virtuous and noble to not get caught up with the 'obsession' to own things unnecessarily. Except that somebody still owns them - usually the extremely rich person/company telling you not to be so greedy as to want to pay a one-off price and take ownership yourself, when you could instead pay them a fee every single month for it, for years/decades - and then lose it forever the instant that you stop paying!

Sounds very like communism lightly repackaged to me.