I pay yearly for my own private domain with dynamic dns and email. If you add email maybe you could add domain too?
It definitely counts. The question is how to determine the cost.
It won’t be the full price ($15/mo or $140/yr), since that also includes free shipping, Amazon Music and other things. Incremental pricing appears to be:
Purchased a-la carte:
- Prime video costs $9/mo with ads or $12/mo without ads.
- The Prime Video that comes with Prime is with ads. Add an extra $3/mo to get it without ads.
- Music Unlimited costs $11/mo if you have Prime or $12/mo if you don’t.
- There is no a-la carte subscription equivalent to the base Music service that comes with Prime.
So I’d put down $9/mo (or $108/yr) as the price for video. It’s probably not correct, because Prime used to cost $80/yr before Video was ever added to it. If you assume the cost of free shipping never changed (clearly not true) then the cost for video would be $60/yr or less (due to the other bundled features). But I don’t think we have anything better to use as a basis for comparison.
See also
Excellent idea! Suggest to include one additional category to the list, Finance related services or Apps (Quicken, Tax software).
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‘Subscription’ might need to be carefully defined in the Poll intro.
ie, are voluntary contributions/donations/memberships to web sites digital subscriptions? ie TidBITS etc.
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How often do you use each service?, might be a good question. ( As of three months ago, we dropped that last subscription that was not being used daily or weekly )
What subscriptions have you dropped over the last year?
I could even break out a few of these active services/subscriptions usage in hours by day.
We found that as subscriptions cost went up three years ago we got less value from them, this has saved us about 300.00 plus a year.
Indeed. I did a mass purge of entertainment subscriptions when that happened, and I quickly realized that I am quite happy without them. I still have Amazon Prime because I get a fair amount of packages, but I’ve completely avoided Prime Video ever since it added commercials.
I may relent and get my first music subscription for newer music, though. I have an extensive CD collection that has mostly been imported into iTunes. Historically, that has been more than adequate for me, but the truth is that I am trying to reduce my footprint of physical stuff.
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Amazon Prime would be a great topic to cover due over loss of value over the years.
we being a Amazon Prime members over 15 years, have weathered the recent changes with sadness.
But, if you only buy things at Amazon that you need, since you can no longer buy them locally & do not want to pay 9.99 for shipping an item or load the cart up to 25.00 for free shipping. Amazon Prime is a very good value at 140.00 a year.
If my math is right it should take only 28 orders a year to break even using Prime and that is without using all the other limited features the Amazon Prime now offers.
Same here. We try to only keep subscriptions we make use of heavily and consider actually important to us personally.
What remains is essentially the cheapest iCloud+ layer (primarily for iCloud backup for our two iPhones, ever since Apple broke convenient USB backups) and two newspaper subscriptions: one to a quality local online paper that focuses on public safety and one to a major EU newspaper for the ‘outside view’.
We don’t subscribe to any TV or movies or streaming — cable was always a ripoff (why pay to watch endless ad interruptions?) and streaming is headed the same way with all their “exclusives” and that malarkey. If there’s something really good I’ll either buy that individual show or movie, or I’ll sign up for just one trial month to watch that specific show. Haven’t done that a lot. In general, ever since I gave up first the TV set and then the set-top box-attached projector I haven’t looked back. Far too much time wasted as a couch potato watching garbage that neither sparked true joy nor made my life any better or me a better person. I prefer using all that saved time for some quality outdoor activity or just reading a book (on paper, not subscribed), or taking my wife out to a nice dinner.
I own my music. I do listen to FM music radio (classical, jazz, and some 80s stuff) in the car so rarely I’ll discover something new I like and I’ll go out and buy it. I still have plenty of stuff to discover in my late father’s 1200-unit CD & LP classical library so not getting bored there either. I have bought through the iTunes Store, but since I want to own rather than be licensed, that requires burn/re-rip to un-break and that’s not ideal either. I’d never do Spotify or similar.
So yep, I abhor subscriptions and in most cases will stay as far as I can from them. If the poll has an option to gauge subscription dislike, I’d score super high there. Also, since I want Apple to focus on hardware and strongly disagree with their whole services push to appease stock markets (and yes, I say that also as a shareholder), I’d also certainly get any subscription I would want from somebody else first. I’m really big on voting with my wallet and my feet. If Apple wants my money, they’ll do as I want.
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I consider so-called subscriptions to use software to be closer to rent, rather than a payment for something new every day/week/month such as from a publication. In the latter, people at the other end are producing new stuff for me and other subscribers, and copyright acknowledged, we can keep what they produced and use it as long and as many times as we want. So that is really a completed sale each period - I paid for that month’s issue and they sent it to me.
Unlike that, if I don’t pay rent, I lose my right to this home. I think “rent” is a much closer term for say, use of a software package. If I don’t pay Adobe/MS/whomever, I lose use of their software and often access to the material I created with their software. The companies claim I’m getting the benefit of their bug fixes and enhancements, but they’re not really sending me new work product that I want, and plenty of mature apps do fine unchanged for years. Look up “rents” in an economics textbook.
So I think the term “subscription” obscures some real differences in these relationships and transactions. Rather than quibble about words, maybe the survey could use subscription categories. What come to mind are: issuance (has a product received by subscriber), usage (time or bit-consumption-based), and access (permission-based). Might be more, or this might make it too complicated…
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You may need to do this as several separate polls. Software subscriptions occupy a special place in hell, as even companies with software I consider essential find ways to nickel and dime their customers. Techtool Pro used to offer an upgrade price for each new version, with new versions coming out in less than a year at times. Micromat now has a subscription model which is more reasonable. Many companies offer a purchase option that costs multiple times the price of a subscription, but the purchase only covers the current version, which is no bargain. Some offer so many options for purchase on top of their subscription that you can easily spend hundreds of dollars on options you rarely use.
Bundles are a unique and will be difficult to survey. For example, I buy most of my groceries from Amazon, Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods. Whole Foods is actually one of the cheaper options in Manhattan. I have a grocery subscription on top of Prime, but watch Prime Video less than once a month. Next day delivery is unimportant to me and not the main reason for having Prime.
I use iCloud+, Apple News, Apple TV and Apple Music every day, so my Apple One Premiere subscription is one of the most valuable I have. I recently cancelled my Hulu/Disney+ subscription, as other than Andor, I hardly watched anything during the past year. Likewise with Paramount+. Yes, I can sign up for a month at a time and binge-watch programs of interest, but a pay-as-you-go option would be much more useful to me.
Speaking of which, your survey absolutely needs to include something about churning.
I miss the Apple Apps in creativity and productivity tools.
I think @Shamino covered it well above.
Indeed!
Good idea!
I think they count as subscriptions—the only difference is that what you get isn’t all that much different than if you don’t pay.
This thread actually raises some interesting questions about how to categorize various personal and business transactions in financial tools like Quicken.
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My wife and I agreed earlier this year to tabulate our subscriptionse. In my case it wasn’t that bad. I dropped some, but kept the vast majority – value for money.
I recently accepted a “deal” from the Telegraph (UK) because they covered the cognitive shuffle, which I invented. 3 months for $1.99 or something like that. I went to cancel it, ahead of time (because too often I wait too long), and guess “what?” You can’t cancel it online! You have to phone them – in the bloody UK! Bast*rds.
I’m afraid the Times of London do the same. I signed up to see what the other side were thinking all through Brexit. Again, must phone to cancel. A nuisance, be prepared for a string of offers before cancellation. After a bunch of No Thank Yous from me, they offered me a full year for 1 euro. I stopped and it sank in, subscriber numbers mean more than the money I’m paying, the stats around churn and signup need bolstering. I thanked him again with another firm no.
This happens all over in the ‘developed world’ and elswhere. Part of the reason I as a customer despise subscriptions. Any company that insists on doing part of their business only by voice, has something to hide/wants to manipulate the customer/etc.
I think I read somewhere that laws are being considered for such things, to require things like describing cancellation process during sign up, making cancellation as easy as sign up, etc.
But of course the slime that implements this stuff will always ooze around the edges of laws…
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Very interesting question! To simplify, I would restrict it to personal, non-business, but ask people to be honest with themselves – if it is a sole proprietor/ very small business, ask the to answer if they’d likely be paying for that subscription if they didn’t have the business (for example, someone might legitimately be working from home, so pay for an enhanced Internet service as a business expense – but if they weren’t working from home, would they still have the same service?).
Regarding essential vs. non-essential. Maybe ask if people think a particular subscription is essential?
I think this is the question that many people are most concerned about. In the old days, many (if not most) Mac users used to upgrade their productivity software every few years at best. Some people were quite happy to keep using their old apps for as long as possible. This practice helped keep long-term software costs fairly reasonable. It’s true that subscription-based software is always up to date, but most of us don’t really need more and more features—we just need our apps to do the jobs we bought them for. Even without doing the math, it’s obvious that software makers have migrated to the subscription model to benefit their bottom line, not their customers. To me, business subscriptions are an entirely different matter.
This is true, but software was also much more expensive, with large productivity packages costing hundreds of dollars (I don’t remember this specifically, but Office apparently debuted at $895.)
The flip side is that software developers need to generate enough revenue to stay in business. I can name several companies off the top of my head that couldn’t ship an update quickly enough and went under because no one would buy until the update came out. Income was extremely spiky and hard to manage.
This is true, but I used to spend $199 every three years to upgrade Photoshop, which retailed for $699. That worked out to less than $6 a month; but I must admit that in today’s dollars, Adobe’s $10/month Photoshop subscription is a bargain.