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'm subscribed out of my tiny little mind. I've spent years creating my Apple Music library. I upgraded to a family package to get DD on it. She now uses Spotify. I refuse to pay for it but it's what her friends use.

I have pretty much all of the tv subscriptions as we don't have a tv licence or sky but I subscribed to paramount a few months back as I started to watch greys anatomy from the beginning and have spent about £18 unnecessarily.

Someone on instagram has developed a subscription for aesthetics. Up to £200 a month for one treatment every 2-3 months. In the comments everyone loved it saying she was such a fantastic business woman.

Nothing is really free. The early internet skewed our expectations. Free things like Mumsnet are paid for by advertising and data profiling.

I try to minimise subscriptions but sometimes it's the best model. Streaming TV makes sense to me because I don't often want to watch the same film or programme. My drawer of dvds doesn't get used much. It is funny how the streamers have become like TV now with adverts and FAST channels. I still watch tradicional TV.

I pay for online storage (apple Google one drive) because I used to hit hard drives and back up my photos and files, but online is a lot easier and was the same price (last time I calculated it) saving me time.

News is tough. Good news costs money, but we aren't used to paying for it. Daily mail has massive views, so ad reach is good. And even they are trying subscription. I wonder what the end game will be. I miss being able to read the times, but won't pay for it. The guardian is still free to read for now, but is struggling.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to get full value for your monthly debits - ads on YouTube means you can’t watch much -a +

There was a female whatsapp group that I became part of during lockdown… I think it might have been shared from clubhouse or something (remember that!).

So people would share voice notes about who they are, where they were at with lockdown, what their work was, etc. There was a woman in the group who would post a little self-produced, one-woman podcast from Switzerland, which was quite nice and everyone was very complimentary and positive about it. I think she may have started the whatsapp group. Anyway, she would post regularly and people would ‘love’ it and say love the podcast! etc.

Then about a month in she asked everyone to start paying her. The whole group had been set up as a marketing funnel to get paid podcast subscribers. The group literally emptied within hours. Think everyone was pretty grossed out!

Are the commenters all her peers in the beautician/injectables industry?

It’s quite funny when you can tell that some speaker or industry influencer has obviously been touting a new model and everyone has been to the same conferences and follows the same industry gurus.

During lockdown I wanted to get a PT to work with online, and as it was remote could obviously choose anyone in the country.

Almost every second PT that I enquired about had this same weird model: they would write up a list of exercises and send them to me with some recordings of them performing the exercises. When I’d done them myself at home I could tick off on an phone app that I’d done each one and then they’d tick that they’d seen it. Maybe once a month we could have a quick 10-min chat and discuss any issues or questions.

At no point in the month did we ever actually work out together. 😆😆😆

Most of these were in the £120-a month region, and every single one was north of £90.

I mean – I could see what was in it for them 😂☺️🤔😆🤑

I pay for the Times, FWFG Yoga and Nothing Much Happens. I might add Caroline Girvans onto that, I’ve been doing her free videos on YouTube and I like them. I don’t mind paying individuals producing content I get a lot of value from, I think that’s fair enough. But the endless huge media streaming companies annoy me- a tenner each to half a dozen different ones is too much, especially when we’re already paying Sky through the nose.

My mum's friend had all her teeth removed for her 21st birthday. 1960's.

I have a Roku. I get free access to stuff Sky wanted to charge £50 a month for. People don't understand why I don't have Netflix etc.

I won't pay a subscription for any service. If my hairdresser asked for one to secure an appointment I'd laugh and go somewhere else.

I'm a tutor who's popular because I operate on pay as you go. I know I have clients who can't fork out in advance or have kids who have other activities. Yes, it means some weeks I don't get money from them but they wouldn't have a tutor at all otherwise. I wouldn't feel right taking money from someone for doing nothing. Any planning or prep can just be used the following session.

OMG podcasts are demons for this. It's very dreary listening to them selling their subscription.

I do have a subscription at a blow dry bar because it means I can go as often as I like. I love it!

My mother's cousin, now passed on, was very bothered in her 90s by charities doing that. She felt worried and a bit guilty that she couldn't help them, or at least not all of them. Advice from family and friends was stop donating to the ones who made pushy phone calls, but I don't know whether she did.

So I do know the subscription model for charities has been going for many years, but what I'm complaining about now is they seem to have entirely replaced the simple collecting box on a table; it's subscribe or nothing. So I'm going for the latter, feeling mean especially when it's a cause I would like to support, but if they won't meet potential donors half-way they're cutting off their own noses as it were. And we're only talking about a quid or so, not hundreds! (That said, I did sign up for one a couple of years ago, but it was less than £2 pm and includes a cash prize draw. If/when they "kindly" offer to increase it that's when I'm pulling the plug.)

My grandma had all her teeth removed in her 20s too! The 40s would have been

The Mail's paywall is so easy to circumvent! You need to have the Firefox browser (maybe others but I use Firefox!). Click on the article and when it loads the browser will give you a little icon at the end of the URL which allows you to toggle on Reader View. This will give a plain text version of the page.

This doesn’t work everywhere tho! Some websites spoil it and give you a blank page 😆

I've got a few subscriptions but most are via Google Play so very easy to unsubscribe from again.

It is easy to get sucked in, but if you subscribe monthly it's easy to try something out and then stop again. Some are really expensive though, I pay £99 a year for a pilates app, but someone else is trying to charge £50 a month for a similar offering. I don't think it's any better than the one I have!

I am old school and have an MP3 player or use free Youtube with the ads for music.

I also subscribe to a couple of Substacks because I want to support their work.

I won't pay a subscription for any service. If my hairdresser asked for one to secure an appointment I'd laugh and go somewhere else

me too but I guess the issue is when they all start to do it

Yanbu. Stupid idea. Stopped reading alot of the papers now as a result online. Even notice the mail has it now. It has no news anyway. Online is not a physical service

someone else is trying to charge £50 a month for a similar offering. I don't think it's any better than the one I have!

It’s not, they're just trying it on to see what the market will bear

It’s feral capitalism. Only the terminally dim could concoct a link between it and communism.

That kind of cognitive dissonance goes some way to explaining why the country’s headed down the toilet with its waterways already full of faeces.

Ludicrous.

Interestingly the one I am thinking of is currently offering a 20% discount, but it's still expensive and there's no free trial - every other app I've tried provides a free trial of between 3 and 30 days.

Wow, as relatively recently as that!

There's something not right - in one of the wealthiest countries in the world - when that's considered a wise/necessary thing to do.

@PrimaDoner yes, from what I could see they were girls who loved aesthetics and girls who worked in aesthetics. I haven't seen any others do it and I'm looking into Botox so follow a lot of them.

I also tried an online coach over lockdown. Biggest waste of money for me. I got the "true coach" app where she "personalised" exercises for me. It was the same as all the free stuff on instagram.

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong in a business offering an all-inclusive subscription option.

It's just when they refuse to let people just buy what they want to buy, want a subscription to keep something that you thought you'd already paid for or would rather just buy outright, or charge a sub to get you the 'privilege' of then being allowed to buy something from them!