Remember the old days when a handful of websites started offering monthly subscriptions instead of having to pay bulky one-time fees? Their pitch went something like this: “The subscription costs less than a cup of coffee.”
Spurred by the low prices and a genuine desire to support developers, I subscribed to many apps and services that I used regularly. Netflix, Spotify, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Todoist, Google One, iCloud, Waking Up – all made sip-sized debits from my bank account every month or year.
Then came the media companies. They tugged on my heartstrings (I used to work with a newspaper). ‘Save journalism,’ they said, ‘It costs less than a cup of coffee.’ I subscribed to NYT, The Hindu (nothing to do with religion, one of India’s most respected news organisations), Splainer (a cool new news service), and Wired. (The Atlantic, New Yorker, Newslaundry, The Morning Context, The Paris Review, The Economist, and many more are on my wishlist.)
I even became the co-founder of a children’s storytelling app, KathaKids, which charged – you guessed it – a subscription. I paid for it too – you know, for testing purposes!
You know where I am going with this, right? It’s 2021 and I am all hopped up on caffeine with no money in my wallet.
This is why a recent article on Wired’s Plaintext newsletter (requires subscription 😝) resonated with me.
“We are living in the age of subscriptions, where businesses now realize that having users who auto-pay every month frees them from constantly hawking piecemeal purchases,” writes Steven Levy, “Also, consumers are getting increasingly wary of internet advertising, where, as critics endlessly charge, you are the product. With subscriptions, the product is the product.”
The US is putting together legislation to regulate subscriptions. Called the Unsubscribe Act, it will require companies to be transparent about subscriptions and make it easy to unsubscribe from the service (looking at you, NYT). Back home in India, the Reserve Bank of India has clamped down on auto-debits occurring on credit/debit cards. Users were asked to opt-in to the auto-debit feature on their debit/credit cards.
While these measures are aimed at bringing in transparency and ease of use, the core question, according to me, is this: How many services can we really afford to subscribe to? Many subscription-based services are currently fueled by VC money. I don’t think that ALL of them can survive. There is bound to be consolidation at some stage. Bundled subscriptions are another option. However, for some reason, the concept never really took off.
Something’s gotta give. Because there’s only so much coffee I can drink.
P.S. There’s also the small matter of the Creator Economy, which I did not touch upon here. That’s a whole other post!