How much???

Do YOU spend on subscriptions every month???

The Hatch Restore alarm clock, which retails for $169, can light up your bedroom in every hue, soothe you to sleep with audio meditation sessions, and keep you in a REM cycle with a full catalogue of white noise options. To utilize these features, though, you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.

Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.

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Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They’re often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We’re effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it’s only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Full article, HERE from Mother Jones and additional from CBS HERE.

Grumble... I went through my subscriptions last night and I’m spending almost $150 a month between Amazon, Adobe, Weather.com, and Apple... dammit...

But my vehicle is old enough that nothing on it requires a subscrip...crap...forgot about Sirius, make that $168 a month... Well, that one I’ll keep.

My magazines are all based on life memberships, so at least that’s not a monthly and I dropped all the normal mags I used to get.

But I wonder about how many people are paying for all the apps on their phones? I only have the weather app on mine that has a subscription. Apparently most of the games DO have subscription hooks in them, along with a lot of the ‘shopping’ apps that require subscriptions.

Subscriptions is also one of the reasons I didn’t buy into a lot of the ‘writing’ programs, because I do well enough with MS Word.

What say you folks?