What subscription finally gave you "subscription fatigue"?
Learned the term recently and really enjoy it, subscription fatigue is the feeling we all have had now where we are just over how everything is subscription based.
Which one was the last straw or most annoying/frustrating to you?
Not subscription, but the first service I thought “wtf is this money-making model?” was Plants vs Zombies 2. The game wasn’t that good. And, oh, my most recent guilty pleasure is Monopoly Go; it’s entertainingly boring?
Apart from that, I’ve tried to keep subscriptions that I really like or use constantly:
UberPass Uber One (mainly for when depression hits)
Deezer (just because I get 20% discount)
Kagi (first month atm, but it has a minimum % of trash results)
Correction: The service I referred to was renamed to Ober One.
Kinda. Basically you pay for occasional coupons and credits on UberEats, and a (5%) discount for every Uber ride.
For 70 MNX (~3.5 USD) a month there is no delivery fee on anything you order. It’s obvious their business model is to charge an obscene fee to then roll out a “better” option. But hey, it’s been convenient nonetheless.
I end up ordering from the same few places when I’m on my lowest, so their system usually gives me 100-200 MXN (~5-10 USD) discounts on those specific restaurants. The subtotal almost never exceeds 600 MXN (~30 USD).
Succinctly, it’s not free free. It’s a 5% discount on Uber rides, and a variable 15-30% discount for two orders a month.
Definitely Netflix with the password sharing lockdown garbage. Then I looked closely at my Spotify. I realized my yearly rewind was almost always the same artists at the top, so I pay over $100 a year to listen to the same music every year. I bought the album’s I like and I feel so at peace now that Spotify can no longer tnrow shitty podcast recommendations in my face.
Oh I’m the opposite. I listen to so much music I’d be spending so much money on it.
My dad is the same and he spent thousands on CDs and later on iTunes for his music collection. Spotify and other subscriptions definitely saved him money.
The important part is that people have options, and as long as these options exist, I can’t complain. But if some day in the future, everything becomes a subscription, then I will riot.
And it sure seems like more and more services are going that route. I want to ditch Adobe for example and use Affinity instead, but if they ever move to a subsciption model too, I’ll change careers and become a garbageman.
Probably pays better than any design agency anyway.
I’m the same. I think Spotify is a great service if you constantly seek new music and listen to a variety of artists and genres. However, I still find it shitty that they constantly remove tracks, especially from smaller relatively unknown artists. Half of my playlists I made 10 years ago have their tracks disabled.
iirc a lot of tracks and albums get removed if it’s later found out that samples or royalties weren’t cleared on the record. For instance Death Grips’ “Exmilitary” mixtape was removed a few years ago because a lot of samples on the mixtape weren’t cleared with their original creators.
Yeah it’s usually copyright disputes, because some of the tracks have stopped being available in my country for some reason or another. But what if I do enjoy that particular remix and it gets taken down? I have tons of tracks like that. Spotify makes a great case of what happens when you’re not the one in control of your music library, and it won’t completely replace music collection for me.
I bought a lifetime subscription for the Android app Cerberus. The dev suddenly decided to cancel all lifetime subscriptions and force people to get real subscriptions instead.
My first subscription was World of Warcraft, back in vanilla and when I was a dipshit high schooler only starting to get a feel for things like managing money.
And even then, right out the gate it felt like bullshit. Did it anyway cuz peer pressure, but back then and ever since, subscriptions almost all feel like blatant ripoffs.
I think the one that did it for me was Xbox game pass. I’ve never been much of a fan of digital games, but Xbox game pass made me see what the future of games will be.
You will pay an ever increasing amount per month to play whatever Microsoft or whoever decides you can be allowed to play. You will own nothing you play and if you cancel your subscription, your console is worthless. Meanwhile the service will be crammed with ads, the games themselves crammed with ads, and your data harvested and sold for “personalized” ads.
None, because I never subscribed in the first place.
Most of my media consumption is video games, and I often revisit decades-old games, so only temporarily having access to a game is not acceptable. Neither am I interested in paying more than once to retain access to content I already paid for; that’s a scam. Perpetual license or GTFO.
I don’t generally watch movies, but if that ever changes, I’ll be buying them on disc, keeping them, and ripping them so I can play them on my Linux PC. If I can’t rip a disc because available tools can’t break the DRM, then the disc is defective as far as I’m concerned, so I’ll most likely return it for a refund without watching the movie.
I’d like to credit early-2000s Slashdot for teaching me to think this way. If everyone did, a lot of today’s problems wouldn’t exist, including the subscription scam we’re discussing in this thread. Shame what happened to that website and its community, but it was good while it lasted.
Yeah I stopped using Spotify when I got YouTube premium. Though I never paid for Spotify but still. Like what’s the point of listening to music with Spotify when I only have to pay less than $10 to get both YouTube benefits but also YouTube music.
I do miss Spotify wrapped, but YouTube’s wrapped isn’t so bad.
Netflix, and when they said I’d have to pay for password sharing for my stepkids, because they use my account when they’re at their dad’s.
That was the last straw. I cracked the shits, bought a couple of ex-enterprise servers, and setup … something different. I then cancelled all streaming services (I got wind of the second Disney hike coming).
The cool thing is they now email me with cheap rejoin offers, telling me about all the cool shows I need to be aware of. ;)
How are your kids coping with, uh, something different? I imagine it’s a tad less convenient, even with your server. Also, I haven’t done something different since the rise of Netflix. Is the quality of something different generally higher with streaming services just putting their content on the internet themselves?
I admit, last time I tried something different years ago, it wasn’t that good, but thought I’d give it another go. I’d bought a lifetime pass way back, so had nothing to lose by trying.
The kids are coping fine - the apps for something different are all pretty rock-solid now - macOS, iOS, Android, Chromecast GTV. Plus I’m on a decent fibre internet connection, so even full high quality things work just fine when they’re not at home. Honestly, there’s not a lot of difference, except my catalogue of things is better than any single service.
Plus I take requests. :D Actually, I allow automated processing of requests, within certain limits.
It doesn’t compress video more on mobile devices, that’s all I need to know. When I connect an iPad or iPhone to the home cinema setup, the compression is much worse then on an old laptop.
Mine are handling oit perfectly fine - and we have the added difficulty of having German as mother tongue, and wanting to keep the English language content in the kids library low. Finding german language torrents is rather tricky.
I started again since a year or so. And decided to set up a home server (from an old pc) with the whole *arr suite this summer. Automation these days really is marvelous. You just tell it once which show you want to watch. It fetches you all the shows that are already out and also fetches you each new episode every week. And it’s all in good quality. And you can set automatic subtitles straight from the app’s interface.
I used to pay for software subscriptions. I had a subscription to Substance 3D software and then they sold their company to Adobe 🤮 so now I 🏴☠️
also stopped paying for Spotify after the Rogan deal. I still use the free version for the “discover weekly” playlists, and I can’t tolerate ads so I use an app called Mutify which mutes the ads as soon as they start playing which is a godsend
never paid for any streaming subscriptions and never will, VPN+piracy+Plex is an objectively better experience. no ads, no content removal, no paying $$$ to rich psychopathic ghouls
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