Why Does Everything Have a Subscription Now?

BY THE PERPETUALLY CURIOUS

Because it makes way more money than selling something once. If a company sells you a product for fifty dollars, they get paid once and that's it. If they get you on a five dollar monthly plan instead, they get paid over and over, often for years, especially since most people forget to cancel things they signed up for.

Software helped start this shift, as programs that were once bought once became monthly subscriptions, often bundled with updates, cloud storage, or other ongoing services. The same idea has since spread far beyond software. Some cars now charge subscriptions for features that are already supported by the hardware, while games can be sold at full price and still offer subscriptions for additional content or benefits. 

Even printers can come with recurring ink plans. These things don't have much in common except that companies have discovered the same basic idea can work in almost any industry: instead of getting paid once, they can keep the customer paying over time.

Some of these subscriptions are genuinely useful. Automatic updates, cloud services, and other features that keep working without much effort can save time and make products easier to use. 

But that usefulness can also make subscriptions easier to justify, even when their main benefit to the company is simply keeping the payments flowing long after the original purchase.

What makes subscriptions easy to overlook is how small each individual charge looks. Five dollars for one thing, eight for another, and a free trial that nobody remembered to cancel don't seem like much on their own. It is only when you look at your bank statement and see how much is leaving your account every month for things you barely use that the total starts to feel significant.

This probably isn't going to change anytime soon, because recurring payments work very well for the companies using them. The most useful habit, then, is to check what you're actually paying for every so often and cancel anything you wouldn't choose to sign up for again today.