There's a pretty easy lesson here: don't sign up for services. Or more realistically, sign up for as few services as possible, and treat every service with suspicion until proven otherwise. If you can't obtain a company's goods without signing up for a service, then seek an alternative.
Services generally have two business models:
- Spread a large cost over monthly payments so that customers will spend more than they otherwise would.
- Trap a customer, either via coercion or convenience into keeping a service they don't really want.
For the business, the benefit to service offerings is clear: regular, reliable income. To the customer, there is often no benefit.
SaaS is an absolute cancer. I know a lot of those fat six figure salaries are contingent on people paying $9.99/mo for a grocery shopping list app, but its getting out of hand. Sorry HN.
You're being more than a bit hyperbolic & disingenuous. I pay $15/year for a grocery list app that solves several problems for me. That is, I pay money for concurrent access, web-scraping that works, and an organisational system to help me feed my family.
This is a great value to me: the $1.25 a month that I pay for my grocery list app has made my life easier.
I pay $40/year for Remember the Milk, a SaaS, and it's one of the most valuable ways that I spend my money - I easily get more than $40 a month in increased productivity (assuming a $20/hour personal time rate). Speak for yourself.
I think it's a signal to noise thing. There are definitely good services out there. There are just as many terrible, predatory ones. And sometimes, more insidiously, a good service slowly transitions into a predatory service.
I'm definitely not really suggesting that people should never use any services. Just that in general, these should be viewed with suspicion, and you should have an exit plan: you could find out nefarious things about your service, or the service could be modified leaving you high and dry.
This is a terrible solution to the problem. If there are services that make our lives easier and more pleasant we shuold absolutely be able to take advantage of them.
This is like saying don't buy food from restaurants because it may have prepared it unsafely or overpriced.
Overpriced is a real problem and the steps to make the price obvious to consumers is very difficult. But we solved the safety by mandating safety standards and labeling backed by real penalties. This law seems a lot like the latter and will make it easier for users to take advantages of services with the safety that they should be able to expect.
Services generally have two business models:
- Spread a large cost over monthly payments so that customers will spend more than they otherwise would.
- Trap a customer, either via coercion or convenience into keeping a service they don't really want.
For the business, the benefit to service offerings is clear: regular, reliable income. To the customer, there is often no benefit.