There's a saying that for every trend there's an anti-trend. I do wonder when we'll reach a critical mass of subscription services such that a preference against subscriptions in general becomes a trend.
I don’t care about subscriptions in general and why should I? Netflix adds new content and my VPS is also a subscription, it just doesn’t call itself that. They have running costs and I’m not dependent on them. But there are services where the sole intention of the subscription is to generate a steady cash flow (almost all software, things like ink catridge subscriptions), subscriptions where the platform prohibits alternatives (iCloud) and bait and switch offers like the remarkable. These should be better regulated.
In general, I don't mind subscriptions for the streaming services (so long as they're easy to cancel). I get a few, keep my eye on how much I'm using them, and cancel any that aren't giving me value. I can always get back in if I want to some day.
My philosophy is that there's pretty much no content I can't live without and the amount I save from canceling my cable TV pays for the other subs and more.
Software subscriptions I'm much more leery of. I do get Lightroom/Photoshop but I use LR a lot so don't really mind.
It’s hard because subscription services hit a sweet spot in human psychology - cheap on a monthly basis so many are happy (can you go back to paying 400$ for software unless it’s something you are 100% guaranteed to want and use for a long time), and expensive in the long run so businesses are happy (also recurring stable revenues)
It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see a reversal any time soon. If I was a developer I would also want to do subscription based services, would you (put yourself in the shoes of someone running a software company)?
It’s criminal how many times I have paid for Microsoft Office though.
I think we just need to be much more discerning about the added value from a subscription.
In the case of some SaaS tools I pay for (like Todoist), I don't resent the model because I've seen steady improvements and the cost is low enough relative to the value I feel like I get. If they increased the price more than ~20%, I would probably cancel and use an alternative.
Netflix is different; I actually don't watch much content and would happily live without it, but it appears to be good enough value during the times I do use it, particularly given that I'm well aware of how expensive their products are to create in the first place.
The problems with reMarkable here are two-fold. Firstly, the existence of any subscription is problematic when the device has such a high up-front cost. Secondly, the prices they have chosen far exceed the value their "extra" services can offer. If they had priced it at $12 per year I would have probably grumbled but accepted it. By $24 we are around my personal tipping point where I think they are being unreasonable and I want to get out of the ecosystem. The real price of around $96 is totally absurd and makes me actively root against the company, at least enough to write these long comments and post them into the void.
