More and more businesses adopt the subscription service approach. From a company's perspective, of course, it makes sense. It gives you a little bit more certainty on what income to expect for the next few months. However, as a customer, each subscription adds up. Even though it is only the price of a cup of coffee to sign up for this streaming service, or to support this creator, it quickly adds up.
I've recently gone through my bills to see which services I am paying for monthly, and cut out all the ones that seemed useless. These are the 4 ones I for now cannot or don't want to cut out.
- Dropbox: ~120 Dollars/year. Paid by my employer, so for now, I don't care, but if I ever leave this employer, I might have to drastically clean up data as this would be a significant cost.
- Google One: ~20 Dollars/year. Own pocket.
- Coupang premium (Korean Amazon-style shop): ~4 Dollars/month. Own pocket. Not that expensive, and much better service. Hard to avoid.
- ChatGPT: ~20 Dollars/month. Own pocket. Expensive, but quite worth it. Thinking of cutting it or finding a cheaper solution, but got used to it in my current workflow.
Got rid of Spotify, and a few other low-profile services I wasn't using anymore. Netflix, I'm lucky to have someone else paying for it. No other streaming services.
Hard to get rid of Dropbox and Google One storage without having to spend days cleaning up and filtering through old data and pictures. Kinda stuck there.
How about you?
- What service is worth it?
- What service isn't, but you can't avoid paying for it?
- What services have you cut out?
Bonus question: Do you think we'll have subscription services soon with Lightning once the technicals allow for it? Or do you think this is a fiat cancer?