Or $4.17/mo/device. Office 365 using your data is $1.67/mo/device for Personal and $0.36/mo/device for Family.
That said, my cost is $0.00/mo/device because I use LibreOffice! 
An interesting hybrid model for software licensing is the subscription with perpetual unlock license used by Agenda (Get All Features - How To - Agenda Community) and another version used by Keepassium (What is rent-to-own (perpetual fallback) license? | KeePassium). Essentially, everyone gets updates and bug fixes, and when you subscribe, you get any āpremiumā features released during (or before) your subscription period. If you stop subscribing, you get bug fixes/updates but not any new features. I like that model because it gives me an incentive to subscribe to software I use heavily and where I would benefit from new premium features, but I have the comfort of knowing I can fall back to a perpetual license for the existing features if I ever stop subscribing.
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I have monitored my TV Shows-Movies streaming subscriptions for years. Last year I spent $41 per month, not including internet access. I donāt have cable. I get ordinary TV over-the-air. Iām not responding to your poll because I donāt have a fixed list of services I subscribe to every month. Iāll do Netflix one month and Amazon Prime the next, then ESPN, then HBO, etc. I subscribe to services that have something I specifically want to watch, never to simply have a large amount of stuff available. I spent less than $85 per month on internet + TV-Movie streaming services last year. I always had much more TV available than I had time to watch.
I do have subscriptions that donāt fall in the TV-Movies category. Things like magazines, the Berlin Philharmonicās Digital Concert Hall, and Met Opera on Demand. They are more complicated to categorize. I donāt much watch Met Operas, but think of my subscription (in part) as a contribution to the arts.
My monthly expenses are so much less than everyone I talk to that itās not worth worrying about. I think my sister spends over $200 a month on cable. I think of that as largely a waste, and she only uses a small fraction of what she pays for. She has convinced herself that she has to have access to every sports event. I, on the other hand, see the sports I want to see because I pick up services that broadcast them on a month to month basis and without paying for things Iām not watching.
Very nice timing. I was doing this as part of end-of-year cleanup.
We typically do not subscribe to more than one video service. Weāll get Netflix use it a bit then change to Apple, etc. It is rare we subscribe to more than one video service at a time.
We also have cable TV and internet subscriptions Iāve included in my replies.
I did not see news sources. We have three digital news subscriptions and one of those is also a hard copy newspaper delivered weekly.
Thanks for the poll.
I agree, the model used by Agenda takes into account our variable engagement with different software. I wish others used it.
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Surprised to find myself at the high end here, despite not really doing streaming services for more than a month at a time each ā in part because I subscribe to a postal Blu-Ray service (yes, itās still a thing in the UK), which probably doesnāt really count here. And Iām counting in a couple of paperless magazine subscriptions (among which I suppose Marvel Unlimited qualifies). I find a subscription tracking app like Subscription Day is pretty essential these days.
There are some developers I appreciate so much I actively want to give them more money; Wotja is one app that for me is beyond price, though they do also very civilisedly offer an annual featuregrade option as an alternative. And Iām surprised not to have seen Setapp mentioned yet; an app like Cloud Outliner is so absurdly cheap as a one-time purchase but so central to my workflow that I use the Setapp version by preference just to throw the dev a little more change.
The question of how many apps in Setapp we actually use is a slightly tricky one, but I see Iāve favourited 48, which feels about right.
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Only Strava I pay for personally out of all things mentioned. As I am interested in music I wonāt have any streaming services. As I am not interested in movies I have no such streaming services either. All else is paid for by my company. Only yearly fees to two foreign bicycle clubs. Thatās it I think. I would much rather pay for RidewithGPS than Strava as they are more valuable, but can do all for free there that I need.
Finally bit the bullet and dropped Adobe ā¦ using Pixelmator took a LOT of getting used to, but Iām getting there. (I really, really, really miss automatic fill). Dreamweaver is tough, Iām running a legit CS3 on an old laptop and a legit CS5 under Crossover Office for when I just have something quick to do. CS5 and CS6 never really worked well, I think they peaked at CS3. (CC is almost identical to CS5-CS6.)
It ends up that I pay for MS Office, password linking, a health app on and off (snoring detection), and ONE streaming system at a time, right now PBS (Passport?). I have music, purchases make a lot more economic sense for someone who doesnāt like programmed/cloned āmusic.ā And then thereās $1/month for iCloud, well worth it, and the oddballs like AP News (replacing Reuters when Reuters got cowardly, replacing the Washington Post when they fired the reporters). Then two email services.
I understand subscriptions for things like newspapers but itās weird to pay for software that way. I donāt use the online extras (save for iCloud and password) but I still have to pay for them.
The big subscription for me is Ancestry, which costs about $50 a month, which is both for the genetic testing and their extensive data base. Itās interesting - both my wife and I have found previously unknown relatives. But they have polluted their data base with poorly screened AI garbage that made my sister abandon it, and itās getting hard to justify the expense.
Quicken is a justifiable subscription. We need it to keep track of our finances and taxes. I get annoyed with it from time to time, but I donāt see anything comparable for the price. I use Moneydance as treasurer of a very small nonprofit, which does not require a subscription, but it would be totally inadequate for my taxes, which include retirement income, investments, a rental property, and my writing business. By the way, retirement income can be complex if you have your own IRA.
I use MS Office, which I buy and use as long as it works. All I need is Word. I have no use for MS 365.
To me, the worst case for subscriptions is companies that keep updating their software just to have something new to charge for. For me, that means Zoom which keeps changing so much it has destroyed the wonderfully clean interface that made it a success in the first place.
One of the advantages of subscriptions that I hadnāt really thought through until now is that by paying regularly, youāre the customer rather than the product. Which should mean no ads, etc.
(Also Iām flashing back to the 70s & 80s and all the subs then ā magazines, newspapers, book of the month club, Columbia House Music club (get those letters back before the deadline or get an unwanted book/tape/CD!), milk, furniture & TVs (hello, Rent a Center!), etc.)
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I have never seen an icon better than the one for Streamwolf. Itās a lesson for Appleās liquid glass fail.
Like others - this comes at a good moment. I had just completed my 2025 spend analysis and had all my transactions across all cards and bank accounts in one place - but I hadnāt had a chance yet to dig into all my subscriptions.
@ace your suggestion to use ChatGPT was a good one. I took a sanitized version of my transaction list (no account numbers or anything - just vendors, amounts, descriptions) and fed it to ChatGPT and pointed it at this article and asked it to summarize things for me in context of your poll. After clarifying a few things - and adding a few things that werenāt in the transaction list (some of the Apple managed subscriptions) I had answers for your poll and a good idea of what my subscriptions look like.
I had already cancelled a bunch of subs from my initial analysis - but this uncovered a couple more I could get rid of (because I donāt use them or they are provided by my work so I donāt have to pay out of pocket for them). I also realized that I didnāt have an annual TidBits subscription - so I added that back into the mix, too!
Thanks for all you do!
PS - My intro to the internet was your first edition Internet StarterKit for Mac. If I recall correctly it included the World Wide Web as a āand there is new upcoming thing called the web, but itās still pretty new so weāll see what it turns out to beā - which is just so crazy to think about how much things have changed.
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The only recurring digital-related subscription I have is my Frontier.com autopayment each month for fiber and VOIP phone service. Not really interested in any other āsubscriptionsā.
For a while, I had also signed up for YouTubeTV via Frontierās autopay/autocollection, but I was paying almost $75 a month and wasnāt using it. So I discontinued the service. I only turn on the tv once a weekday (to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, heh), and then I turn it back off. It never gets used over the weekend.
I bought some 1x2 pine and wire, along with a 75/300ohm transformer, and built my own āhillbillyā tv antenna, which I mounted on an old microphone stand so I can raise it up and down.
Each day before 7pm, I set up the antenna.
Then I put on the shows, and at 8 lower it down and move it out of the way.
This routine saves me about $900 (or more) a year.
What worksā¦ works.
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Yes! The Web existed in 1993, but there was only MacWWW, which was pretty weak, and NCSA Mosaic, which I got my hands on for a very brief time before the book went to press in September of that year. Talk about a universe far, far awayā¦
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Affinity V3 is my choice, free. Before that Affinity Appsā¦ very inexpensive. And I owe them forever. Adobe hasnāt been on my desktop for over 8years now.
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Category: Other
I collect Take Control Books PDFs and subscribe to Joeās Take Control Premium offering.
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How about a way to find out how many subscriptions I actually have?
Seriously, I have NO IDEA how many I have. I completely lost track. Everything I do Mac-wise is both business and personal, so thereās no real way to separate.
I kind of hate the idea of subscriptions, but the old shareware model has all but disappeared and commercial developers see dollar signs everywhere.So, subscribing is difficult to avoid, especially if youāre selective about the software you use or things you want to watch, in terms of video streaming.
I wish I read the comments before doing the survey. I included 7 subscriptions, but forgot Netflix, Prime, BritBox, my internet service, my cable service.
Regarding the subscription model, I support the idea but the cost is stupid. When most companies went to a subscription model, one year cost the same as buying the non-subscription version. I feel that the cost to subscribe should be 25% to 50% of the non-sub version.
Iām a little surprised to now compare the top 5 categories and the amount spent question.
I had the impression that streaming and online storage were fairly expensive, so to see 25% are spending $50-99 is surprising. But then, $50-149 is 45% of responses so maybe thatās about right.
Depends on what youāre subscribing to. In my case:
- $3/mo - iCloud+ 200 GB storage
- $8.25/mo - Apple TV+ ($99/yr)
- $10/mo - Disney/Hulu bundle
- In reality, we have the Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle, which costs $36/mo, but itās paid for as a free perk on my mobile phone contract, and we never use ESPN, so Iām listing only the non-ESPN a-la-carte price.
- $18.50 - HBO Max
- $18 - Netflix
- $13 - Paramount+
- $30 - Starz
- $9 - Amazon Prime (fraction of the larger price, which includes free shipping and music and other things)
======
Total: $106.75 for streaming and $3 for storage.
But our Starz subscription is new. That wasnāt in the mix when I took the survey. Removing it brings the cost down to $76.75/mo.
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