You’re Subscribed, Like it or Not.

I’d like to focus on one thing I have a lot of experience with, and you do, too: subscription services. “The average American spends $219/month on subscriptions,” reports justcancel.io. They run a service for scanning your bank data to determine what subscriptions you are paying for. More to come about JustCancel.io later -- stay tuned.

In some ways, subscriptions make lots of sense. Anything that creates ongoing value requires ongoing funding. The question is this: do subscriptions really generate enough ongoing benefit for their cost? Is it worth it? For instance, Netflix’s library has continued to grow over the years, which is great for their marketing, with nearly 8000 titles! But over 60% of that content is made in-house by Netflix, and not all of it is great. Not to mention that content leaves Netflix (and other streaming services) regularly, as licenses change hands. Shows I used to have access to, I don’t have anymore, despite remaining subscribed for increasing prices. Not to mention, the need to combine many services to get access to everything I want (like Paramount+ just to watch TNG).

With this said, I’m increasingly convinced that subscriptions are not worth the value in many cases. Streaming services are a slam dunk for me, but I feel stuck, and despite investing thousands of dollars into streaming subscriptions in the last five years, I’m no closer to cancelling them. I don’t own a DVD or Blu-ray player anymore. Same with Spotify: the strange AI DJ is cool, but I wish I didn’t have to open my pockets every month or lose my entire music library. I’m reminded of a controversy a few years ago when Danish politician Ida Auken said, “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” If a company sells you a video game but then revokes it later, that’s theft. But if a company loans you a video game license and then takes it back, that’s business. It’s why major video game distribution site Steam added this disclosure to their checkout page.

All in all, I’m renewing my mission to cut as many subscriptions as I can. That being said, computers for work and computers for hobbies have me pretty entrenched. It’s not likely I’ll stop paying Microsoft anytime soon (yes, I know about Linux, I’m thinking of switching, actually), and many games are subscription-based these days, all without mentioning Game Pass. Heck, soon the computer itself will be a subscription (maybe I can subscribe to 64GB of DDR5, specifically).

Mini-blog

How would I manage all these subscriptions if I wanted to cut most (if not all) of them?

I couldn’t possibly dive into a bigger topic, really. Consumer rights in the digital era are a very nuanced and widespread category. But I believed it was important to say why it matters to cut subscriptions before I brought your attention to how. It’s super easy to lose track of all these charges in your bank account, which is why there is a market for services to help you cancel your subscriptions. RocketMoney comes to mind, and they’ll even call the providers for a discount on the services you can’t or don’t want to cancel. I’ve used them before but left unhappy; it helped me realize two criteria for a good subscription canceller program:

1.          Privacy

2.          One-time cost

RocketMoney’s premium features require a subscription to engage, like the “cancel/discount on your behalf” service I mentioned earlier. I’m hopeful it’s obvious how that’s not helpful for our end goal. The first criterion is a bit harder to explain, and I wish I had more space to write about it in this blog. In short, sharing your bank data through a service like Plaid is not a great idea. Advertisers ⁠and companies have a lot to benefit at your expense with a full record of all your purchasing habits. They might even pass that data onto the retailers you cancelled with so they can target advertisements for you to get you to re-up in the future.

That eliminates a lot of services, and no service can truly help you with this task without some access to your data, but preferably in a limited fashion, where it is destroyed after. You’ll essentially have to trust any service provider if they promise to do that, but I definitely don’t trust RocketMoney or Plaid. So it leads me to justcancel.io: I haven’t used them, and this isn’t sponsored, but if you’re looking to cut subscriptions, you might give them a look.