Subscriptions Suck

TLDR; If you hate subscriptions as much as I do - use this trick to save yourself time, money, and unparalleled frustration.

💲 - Figure out the total cost of a subscription service for as long as you want to be subscribed. I usually use one or two years. Let's say the subscription service you want is $10 a month, so it's $120 for the year.

💳 - Buy a Visa or Mastercard gift card in the amount of a one year subscription. In this case, $120.

📺 - Use the gift card as your credit card within the subscription service.

"Why?" You ask. I'll tell you why.

1. The gift card has a $5 fee - that's less than one month of you forgetting to cancel the subscription. ($5 is also a hell of a lot less than an overdraft fee, so if it happens to be an annual subscription you forgot about and you're tight on cash, this stupid trick can spare you.)

2. Canceling some subscription services is a sadistic and sad, nigh impossible, process designed to frighten, frustrate, humiliate, and exhaust you. ☠️💣🔪💥 DO NOT EVER GIVE THESE ASSHOLES YOUR ACTUAL CREDIT CARD INFORMATION. If you use a gift card and the funds run out. 🤷🏽 That's it. You don't have to go through the hassle of canceling, because it doesn't cost you a dime. Plus, now it doesn't waste your time either.

3. If it does run out, and you still want to use the platform - no worries, you just log in and add a new gift card.

What else can I say, except…

You're welcome.

The Rant

I normally try to reign in my writing, and usually don't type a draft directly into the content editor for this site. But - I'm trying to stick to a deadline and midnight is fast approaching, so I'm just letting this one fly. It's going to be unhinged. If you're here for that, do enjoy. If you prefer coherence in the content you read, you already got trick above. It only goes downhill from here.

I loathe subscriptions. They deeply and truly irk me to no end. A part of it is because early in my career I was often broke, and the idea of adding another recurring expense on top of my already unmanageable costs including rent, gas, groceries, and utilities felt unbearable. I was regularly overdrawn by the end of the month for a number of years, and each overdraft fee felt like "the man" giving me one more kick while I was already down.

When you're tight on cash, you get used to only buying things only when you have the cash in hand. Ongoing regular payments with irregular income does not breed comfort. My car, while a necessity, was still something I despised. Month after month the money goes out. But with a car loan, at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel. In a few years the car will be paid off. You'll be done. The payments are finite.

With a subscription service, however, the payments are infinite. They never end! Sure... you can cancel at any time. But you don't. You forget and carry on with your busy life, and then a few months down the road you're up late contemplating the futility of your existence because your card was declined at the goddamned subway of all places. So, wondering why the hell you're still broke, you begrudgingly log into your account (which you try to do as infrequently as possible, lest you have to gaze upon one of life's most irritating "scoreboards" only to have it remind you, yet again, that you are not winning) to find that the service you signed up with to create a goddamned will (shows you what you get for trying to be an adult) has been charging you $15 a month for the last 3 years.

I know, I know... If you haven't been in this situation, you're probably thinking "Uhh, Chris, that is entirely your fault. If you kept an eye on your accounts, you know, like an adult you would have noticed this and could have canceled it." First of all, how dare you? And secondly, you're not wrong. Though I will say this is exactly what so many subscription platforms hope will happen. They plan for it in meetings. They have spreadsheets with tables full of calculations for "inactive subscribers" (code for "suckers") that account for millions of dollars of revenue. They specifically design their site to obscure these subscriptions and to make it difficult to cancel using deceptive UX and UI (often called "dark patterns.")Not to mention, this particular service, which I was told I was purchasing a single product, not a recurring subscription, was so difficult to cancel, it was easier to simply cancel my credit card.

Don't get me wrong - I don't mind continuously paying for something that I am continuously using, or something that is continuously improving. I'm more than happy to pay for landscaping, janitorial services, pest control, utilities, and so many more. These are things that are constantly being done. Some subscription services are incredible - I'm a huge fan of Figma (especially since the Adobe acquisition isn't going through) as it's a tool that is regularly improved. Spotify makes it way easier for me to access way more music than when I was managing my own library.

But why the hell do I need a shaving subscription?! To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg's doughnut joke; I bought a razor and they gave me a subscription for the razor. I don't need a subscription for the razor. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the razors, end of transaction. We don't need to bring credit card and postal delivery into this. I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would need a subscription for a razor.

They have all kind of weird subscriptions now - adult coloring books, toilet paper, car accessories, to skulls. Yes - you can subscribe to receive Skulls Unlimited. (Which, like yeah, kind of metal, but also why not just buy some skulls if you want skulls so fucking bad?! Why does it have to be a subscription?!) Don't get me started on the subscription apps that are total garbage - app stores abound with bullshit apps, like weather apps. So many weather apps just wrap ads around weather feeds that are already free and public!

I know the quote about the future - "You'll own nothing and be happy" and for a time I, too, thought this might be a great thing. If everyone is so interconnected, and people could have access to everything they need, it would ensure money is constantly circulating, not behind horded, which may be a great way to enrich everyone to some degree. That is, until, you are no longer "providing value" in the economy. Suddenly, you own nothing, have no income, and everything costs something. Without a safety net or something like a UBI, this is "just-in-time production" at a massive scale, which, while super efficient, is also not resilient, redundant, forgiving, or fault tolerant.

If we get to place where everything is a subscription, and we haven't built better safety nets...

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I warned you.