Anyone else getting subscription burnout?

[Hedge]

I ditched a lot of subscriptions recently and I was encouraged by Scott Galloway in doing so.

 

[Malevolence]

Prime and Game Pass is all I have.

Still have Prime, but ditched Game Pass and now have PSN.

 

[Mekrel]

I'm not quite sure how you came to that logic.

Their costs will have gone up over the past 5 years by probably 20% or more. They will likely have gone up that much simply on salary increases due to inflation unless they haven't paid their staff in line with inflation.

Their profit margin might have been comfortable 5 years ago and now its not comfortable. They may have been eating into their cash reserves or barely turning a profit as a result of these cost increases.

This might not mean anything to you but Zwift did the same thing. Didn't raise prices for 7 years or something and then suddenly raised them by 25% saying that they wanted to invest in the product and that they hadn't increased prices in years. They would have been far better off and received far less backlash if they charged 3% more every year despite the delayed increase being better for customers because of the shock and the backlash.

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What did really **** me off recently was getting a letter from three saying that due to changes in the rules about making price increases transparent they have to do it in monetary amounts not a percentage. So they have increased contracts arbitrarily by X pounds depending on the type of contract.

Mine was £16/month and it was going up by £1.90. Thats basically 12%. I would have just ignored it if it was 3-4% on the price I was paying but the ******* cheek to use rule changes designed to make it more obvious what increase you were being charged to just charge way more annoyed the hell out of me.

Phoned up and threatened to cancel and ended up on a £7 month contract for the same plan essentially. If they had just been remotely fair instead of complete *****...



I'm sure if you asked them to explain it i'm sure they would have a decent list of cool things they have added. All software runs into the same fundamental issue though. There comes a point where the vast majority of your userbase either doesn't want to learn new features or has no interest in them. They use 20% of your product and the value proposition is based on that usage. You can make the product 100x bigger and better but if they don't care, they won't pay more. Adobe found this out with photoshop. A hell of a lot of people simply want to do really basic stuff to images with a good UI, myself included. Thats worth about £5/month to me. Its not worth £20/month. I don't doubt that professionals who use a lot of the advanced stuff see waaaay more value in it but I don't.

They should have put the price up at the time, explaining what the features were that justifies the more premium price.

In fairness, if they need me to ask them what's improved then perhaps the improvements aren't that valuable.

I absolutely get that businesses are facing higher costs, but they should say that's the reason, rather than spinning some PR story about it being about features. Our local brewery have put costs up several times in 18 months, and they're quite open about it:

We are very sorry to let you know that our shop beer prices will be increasing by an average of 3.8% from today (Monday 16th February).

Like many businesses, we’ve recently been affected by significant ongoing cost increases including recent duty increases. We’ve worked hard to limit this increase as much as possible.

In practical terms, this means an increase of 20p per litre (11.4p per pint) on fresh beer and 15p on 500ml bottles. Our Membership Club will also see a small increase. There is no change to pricing in the Tap Yard at this time.

We know price increases are never welcome, and we truly value your continued support and understanding.

In fairness to them, they have tried to limit alcohol duty previously by reformulating their IPA to a lower abv.