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?
When my paid Paramount+ subscription included unskippable ads.
I loathe the trend where I pay money and they still expect me to sit through ads. That’s why we all left cable to start with.
by the time I had my own money I didn’t even think of getting pay tv because it was already running more ads than free to air.
Never had subscription fatigue because paid services have never been better than the free option in my experience.
What’ll really aggravate you is that way back when cable was first rolling out, it was billed as paid TV service without ads (as opposed to the ad-supported OTA local networks). Obviously that promise didn’t last long.
It’s a tale as old as time. Its happened before, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again.
What’s the point of paying for a subscription if you still get ads 🤷🏻
Marvelous strategy model.
Luckily I did the 6 month free trial and learned. 6 months is generous, ads are not.
This might be a cop-out, but I’m absolutely sick of paying rent, and the open source alternatives aren’t great
can’t you pirate it? (make it your own and become independent from your providers?) Even if sacrificing a couple of features.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
tent not rent!
Too real where I live.
i dont know whether to upvote in solidarity, or downvote because it’s wrong.
Adobe Reader needing a 5€ subscription for rotating pages. Fuck techno feudalism.
Oh my god I didn’t even know about that one. Why?? Browsers read them fine
Reading a PDF is something, editing is a whole other thing. For a while I had an Adobe Reader subscription it was the only one I know of that can edit a pdf were I can delete entire columns from a table. (It was a PDF generated by shitty sales software I was using)
I still have not found a competent (free) program on android that lets me mark up a pdf. They all claim to, but most (including fully-paid Adobe) won’t let you turn off finger marking. MFers, I have a stylus; I want my fingers to pan/zoom and my god damned stylus to make a line. Why is that so foreign?
Adobe: “You need to pay us over and over to edit PDFs! Suckers!”
Inkscape: “Hold my beer.”I mostly edit PDFs to fill out documents. I know browsers can do that but they don’t save the progress until you download (or I’m to stupid). Recently found out that Google Drive has a “fill form” PDF editor that works pretty well. But to my blood pressures detriment that works only on Android and not in your browser where I have a proper keyboard. Google fucking enrages me with their complete arbitrary shit sometimes.
Sejda is really good for a fee PDF editor
The default Preview app on Macs can rotate PDFs by default…but if your PDF is a fillable form, it’ll fuck it all up.
Alarm clock apps that require a subscription. Basically any app that doesn’t require backend server infrastructure to function should not be subscription based.
It started with the Netflix enshittification. I have had a Spotify and Netflix account essentially since these services were available, and that was great. Now only the Spotify sub is worth it, though I started to loathe that one as well because it at some point deleted all my local files or replaced them with what it thought matched them in their database.
Also every fucking app, no matter how mundane, wants to sell me a subscription. I have a web based game boy emulator on my phone, it works fine but everything beyond the absolute basic functions is paywalled behind a subscription. Not even a one time purchase.
Bro. RetroArch, gambatte or MGBA core. Thank me later.
Man, I already had subscription fatigue with the very first thing I subscribed to with my own money as a kid. Ultima Online. My friend recommended the game to me, not telling me it required a subscription. I bought a boxed copy at the store, not seeing the super tiny print where it mentioned the subscription. I was then upset when I was installing it and it asked for a CC#. I was 12. I didn’t have a credit card. I had to ask my dad to set it up and give up my allowance for it.
As soon as I found out about emulated shards (shards being what servers were called) that were totally free, I started playing on those. And having way more fun because they kept the game the way I liked it, while EA kept trying to make it more like WoW.
Similar story here, but it was EverQuest.
Man I can’t imagine getting a game that young and finding out after the fact that I’d had to give all my allowance to play it.
i cancelled youtube premium when they removed dislike count from view, i felt that i was getting a inferior product once they removed that tool from me, it wasn’t worth paying
I feel like I’ve avoided subscriptions for the most part, except for basics like rent, energy, telephony, a travel card. The software I use is mostly open-source (some of which I voluntary support on a monthly basis). I don’t need paid streaming because public TV streaming is good enough for shows/movies and YouTube with ad-block is good enough for music. I don’t game.
I never made it past Netflix. Once the quality started sliding and prices went up, it was back to the high seas for me. I guess I still have to pay for a VPN service though 🤷
This is basically my experience as well.
Tho I won’t be paying for a vpn service anymore now that PIA sold out, I’m going to set up the automated stuff and subscribe to Usenet indexers or whatever (I haven’t had a lot of time to look into it yet, but I have a bunch of info saved from a very kind person who helped me) instead because they will do what I want a lot better, automatically, and less risky apparently - no uploading and no seed ratio to maintain.
Beyond that, I do have a ps+ premium account because I will easily play $86 worth of games in a year (already have in the 2 months I’ve had it, with no effort of going to a place and hoping to find the games used. Im a collector, but I’m also not well off financially) but I otherwise go out of my way to avoid subscriptions and recurring payments.
If I need to pay for it more than once to have a better experience than FOSS, piracy, or just not having it, I’m not interested.
I paid $100 for a Plex lifetime subscription 10 years ago, not a penny since. I rave about the service to people, and get friends to sign up to use mine - and I always tell them if they like it, buy it outright. It’s stable and worth it, and if it dies tomorrow, I’d still be pleased with my purchase. If that hadn’t been an option I probably would have switched a long time ago when I learned there were FOSS options.
Pro-tip if you’re sick of paying for streaming: Stremio (app–I run on NVIDIA Shield) + Torrentio. Totally free and will have everything you ever need. For a few dollars, Real-Debrid adds more/faster stream options, but it’s purely optional/nice-to-have.
I would counter-argue for Jellyfin + Radarr-suite. I just like better Jellyfin’s interface.
Both options are valid, I use Plex instead, but selfhosting people need to understand that there is beauty on the streaming route, pirate streaming route.
I’ve seen it mentioned, but never tried it. I’ll have to read up on it, thanks!
I was happily paying for Spotify and Disney+ with price hikes I said fuck it I am not paying anymore.
Not really a discovery, bug when Disney Plus made their base subscription have adds like Hulu and then made the add free version double the price. The “Disney bundle” was $12 a month when it released. Now it’s $20 just to get Hulu and D+ without adds. I hold the star wars franchise pretty close, but I’m gonna have wait to see Ahsoka.
Either that or it’s time to get the paper hat out 🏴☠️
The phone game. Egg inc. It just updated offering a subscription for in game bonuses.
Completely agree, and I’ve paid this game for the upgraded storage and many piggy bank cracks over the last couple of years because I play often and appreciate them keeping the game running and updating stuff. I am not, however, paying a monthly fee to use it
Evernote. I’m not sure why I even stayed with them for so long; probably the pain of moving after so many years. Switched to Joplin before they doubled their fees for zero new (useful) features.
Yeah, I dropped EN years ago, when they doubled (at the time) the fees after acquiring Skitch. I floated around trying to make other things work, then found Joplin in the past year or so. Haven’t looked back.
Weather apps.
omg even weather apps now? 🤣😭
Official NOAA app is $1.99 a year. Worth every penny. Only subscription I’m happy to pay.
While many weather apps use published NOAA/NWS data, there’s no official app. Not sure who you’re paying lol
I use Weawow. Free, no ads, Aurora reports no trackers.
Wunderground FTW! It also lets me tap into my local home weather station, as well as those of my nearby neighbors and the weather forecasting is far superior to whatever the hell came with my phone.
