Kozminski Techblog

Today subscription services surround us everywhere. It is difficult to come up with a good or service that you wouldn’t be able to fit into a subscription model. At present, we can subscribe to anything. Among the known examples are – Netflix video streaming, Spotify music, YouTube music, Chewy for pets, PlayStation Plus, Xbox game pass, etc. Some of the largest companies in the tech world have at least one subscription service. And more companies appear whose business is fully based on subscriptions like Netflix. What’s interesting is that today, you are able not only to get the benefits of subscription in the tech world or online but also you could consider subscribing to dietary services that provide you with sets of healthy meals containing certain amounts of calories and nutrients of your choice. The food will be delivered to you regularly and the money taken from your pocket as well. You could subscribe to sausage or cheese services, you could subscribe to deliveries on such planforms as Allegro if you order packages regularly, you could subscribe to various events or business breakfasts that happen regularly, and so on and so forth. Although subscriptions always seem advantageous for the subscribers, not often do people ponder over the question of what makes large companies transfer to, or implement features of this exact business model, it’s got to be beneficial for the organizations as well.

First things first let’s make it clear how subscriptions work. As stated in the Cambridge dictionary a subscription is “an amount of money that you pay regularly to receive a product or service” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022). Taking into account a well-known example of Netflix. When you subscribe to it you make an agreement with the company that for a given amount of money you paid, you will receive a certain service, in this case, film streaming, for a certain period of time, here it is a minimum of one month. Sometimes you are provided a “free of charge” trial period to check out the service and decide for yourself whether you would like to use it in the future or not. What’s funny though, is that you can only get a free trial under the condition that you provide your bank card information to the service, so that the company at least has a chance of you not remembering or not even knowing that the money will be taken off your card with hardly any warning.

This is a genius way of getting money from people. It looks like a little legal scam. The trick here is that you do not consciously make a purchase every month, no, it could potentially make you think about whether you actually need it. On the contrary, it simply automates the task of taking money off your bank acc. As mentioned before, an especially controversial it is when the company makes you enter your bank account data for a free trial period. Hence, they purposefully want you to forget that you have entered the data and don’t even think about the money no more. You will start using the service and no matter whether you liked it and continue using it or not, they will get the money. And it is also important for them to make the money “you pay” seem insignificant so that you do not start wondering where did your salary go the moment you got it. They want it to be as seamless as possible so that when they gain thousands or millions of subscribers half of which would not even use the service, they will still gain the cash on a regular basis.

But don’t just take my word, check out the research recently conducted by C+R research. Survey has found that nearly half of the population who use subscription services forget that they pay for them, and when it comes to generation Z, the number rises to 55% of forgetful ones. 22% of responders, in turn, claim that they feel overwhelmed by the number of subscriptions they have to deal with (Subscription Service Statistics and Costs, 2022). However, there is a solution. Get a subscription for a mobile app that allows you to keep track of and manage your other subscriptions 😀

In the figure provided above, we can see that the easiest subscription to forget about is the mobile phone, the internet, tv, and movie streaming. Those are pretty much the ones that become an integral part of our lives, and are relatively inexpensive whatsoever.

Nevertheless, we cannot deny the fact that subscriptions are not pure evil. They are of good use to those who truly take the benefit of them. Those are the people who do interact with the service on an often and regular basis. Say you are a music lover or you make business on buying and selling stuff on Allegro. In these cases, a subscription to Spotify or delivery would make your life simply easier and cheaper. Furthermore, as mentioned in the research from Lin: “Rounding out the top 10 benefits of subscription models for customers are the ability to access a wider range of products and being able to avoid fraud and/or theft” (Lin, n.d.). Meaning that customers find it comfotable and troubleless to use subscriptions. It reduces the number of unnessesary worry/activitires we have in the modern world. That’s why crowd is keen giving up some extra money for a service that even potentially might be useful. It is connected to the feeling of security as well as feeling like the choice is bigger for smaller money, and it is difficult to argue with.

To conclude, what we can do to get the full merit of subscriptions and not suffer from losing our money subconsciously, is to make ourselves aware of the deals we make with organizations. Be cautious whenever we leave our bank account information, and make sure we either use the service we pay for, or we do not pay for the service we do not use.

Hope you found this post interesting. Feel free to share your thoughts on this matter in the comments section below 😉

References:

Cambridge Dictionary. (2022). subscription definition: 1. an amount of money that you pay regularly to receive a product or service: 2. an amount of. . .. Learn more. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/subscription

Subscription Service Statistics and Costs. (n.d.). C+R Research. https://www.crresearch.com/blog/subscription-service-statistics-and-costs

Lin, Y. (n.d.). Top Benefits of a Subscription Model | Oberlo. https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/benefits-of-subscription-model