Unscrewing Subscriptions

Can we solve an eternal problem in the next year? Or ever? How?

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Count the number of companies you pay regularly for anything. Add up what you pay for all of them. Then think about the time you spend trying and failing to "manage" any of it—especially when most or all of the available management tools are not yours. They are provided separately by every service provider’s own self-biased subscription system, or by Amazon, Apple, Google, Roku, and other siloed intermediaries. You have to manage them too.

Now think about how all of us are swimming upstream constantly against a tide of promotional BS and manipulation—all just to keep steady money flowing from our pockets into corporate banks.

For more stories on how subscription systems are out to screw you, read David Lazarus’ Canceling a service shouldn’t be this difficult, my own One example of how subscriptions suck, or just look up subscription hell.

There is a large business in worsening the problems outlined in those three paragraphs. You can see it when you search for subscription management. Do that and you’ll get a pop-down list like this:

All of those search results are for sellers of services that help enterprises “target,” “acquire,” “buy,” “manage,” “control,” and “lock” subscribers into systems that treat them like slaves or cattle. (As those verbs imply and those links demonstrate.) None are ways for you to manage them.

This industry will not fix itself. It is too fully committed to making subscribing as easy as possible—especially with “ramp-up pricing” promotions that are cheap up front and expensive after you forget to cancel—and also making canceling as hard as possible.

And the subscription service business doesn’t work for you and me. It works for subscription sellers, all of which have no interest in solutions for buyers that scale across every seller.

As for subscription services you or I could hire (e.g. Truebill, Billbot, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me), none of them (as far as I know) give you a way to manage all your recurring expenses from one dashboard that is yours and not theirs. And by yours, I mean they are substitutable in the same way browsers, email clients, and apps such as spreadsheets and word processors are substitutable. You should be able to manage all your subscriptions with product A or swap that one out for product B.

You also won’t get much help from the subscription management systems offered by  Paypal, Amazon, Apple, Google Sheets, and Google Doc templates. Your only useful tool so far is a spreadsheet. (And maybe some macros can help. If so, I’d love to hear about it.) That’s what I use, and it’s clunky as hell.

To sum up the situation, existing choices are too narrow, too closed, too exclusive, too easily purposed for surveillance of subscribers, too vested in the status quo, or all those at once. Which royally sucks.

So clearly it's long past time to unscrew subscriptions. But how?

The better question is where?

Because the answer is on our side: the customer's side.

See, subscriptions are a class of economic problems that can only be solved from the customers' side. They can't be solved from the companies' side because they'll all do it differently, always prioritizing their interests over ours.

Also, most of them will want to hold you captive, just like Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy did with online services before the Internet solved that problem by obsolescing them.

A refresher on that point: the Internet is ours, which means everybody's. It doesn't just belong to platforms and other service providers.

Subscriptions should be as easy to make, change, and cancel, in standardized ways. Having those ways will make companies living on subscriptions do a better job of making their goods competitive. We’ll have an intention economy that rewards services for being good and not just because they’ve trapped customers.

Now to how.

The short answer is with open standards, code, and protocols. The longer answer is to start with a punch list of requirements, based on what we, as customers, need most. So, we should—

• Be able to see all our subscriptions, what they cost, and when they start and end

• Be able to cancel or renew, manually or automatically, in the simplest possible ways

• Get the best possible prices

• Be able to keep records of subscriptions and histories

• Show our actual (rather than coerced) loyalty

• Be able to hear constructive help from customers

• Join in collectives—commons—of other customers to start normalizing the way subscriptions should be offered on the corporate side and managed on the personal side

Practically speaking, our best odds right now might be with Apple and Google, because we use their phones. But both those companies also make big bucks from subscriptions, and have no economic interest in making it easy for customers to make and cancel subscriptions easy, and to see past come-ons that are cheap up front and expensive later.

Some tech already exists for at least some of this, but we'll leave that topic for another post. Meanwhile, give us suggestions.

Bonus links: From coffee to cars: How Britain became a nation of subscribers, by Tim Lewis in The Guardian. (Via John Naughton's excellent newsletter.) And One example of how subscriptions suck.

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The modified image above is a Doctor Who TARDIS console, photographed by Chris Sampson, offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license, published here, and obtained via Wikimedia Commons, here. We thank Chris for making it available.

A version of this post appeared here more than two years ago. The ancestor of that one ran at Customer Commons, here a few months earlier.