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?
This might be a cop-out, but I'm absolutely sick of paying rent, and the open source alternatives aren't great
Subscribing to a worthless landlord eats up 50% of my meager income every month.
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.
What's the point of paying for a subscription if you still get ads 🤷🏻
Marvelous strategy model.
I'm still refusing to pay for P+ in the UK. They nicked us about so much with Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks all being on Netflix and Amazon, then started pulling the rug from under us with Dis S3 and it appears maybe LD S4 this year. I'm not paying for a whole new service for one franchise no matter how much I love it. At least Disney got Marvel, Star Wars and all the Fox content before trying D+.
Luckily I did the 6 month free trial and learned. 6 months is generous, ads are not.
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.
Old school runescape charging $120 a year. I get that they make new content but that's the cost of a AAA game each year.
It's only $80 USD if you buy the full year at once but yeah it's definitely on the expensive side. I get more fun out of some $20 games than I do out of RS.
I would be happy paying $60 a year for my main and then I could justify paying some extra for my ironman to be members.
Around the time when netflix started to suck, and new subacription services popped up everywhere.
Then a lot of other things that shouldnt rely on a aubscription started getting it. Random apps with a pro mode. The pro mode was now a subscription... its dreadful.
I refuse to get a subscription i would "need" to keep around fpr years.
Here we have 1 video streaming service for a month or two every once in a while. Never two at the same time.
I read and understood the dangers of SaaS as a school kid long before the term was cool and long before privacy community and corporate industry popularised it.
Ok, good for you, lol.
I just thought that your sentence about being the first, was stupid and something a 5 heard old would say. It was admittedly funny.
And then I wanted to inform you that r/ doesn't work on Lemmy, just in case you didn't know. !communityname@example.com is the correct format.
No offense meant.
Chromebooks
You can install Linux on them and make them real computers, though. Right? Right?
When I couldn't just purchase a season of a tv show (Drag Race). You should just be able to buy a show or movie if you want to watch it.
The most recent season was exclusively on Paramount +. I guess they had exclusive right because it wasn't available anywhere else. It was 3.99/month with a discount so I figured I'd keep it as long as the season aired. I was fucking amazed that there could be twenty fucking commercials in an hour show. If I wanted to skip backward or forward I had to watch three more ads first. Two weeks before the season finale they raised the price to 5.99 so I cancelled it. I didn't need to watch it that badly. Their other content was shit, all nineties MTV and made for tv movies. When I signed up they advertised Yellowjackets so I was going to watch that. But no, that's another subscription to Showtime.
It was the cheapest subscription I've had but the most aggravating experience, because it's not about the money. It's about feeling like I'm getting fucked over with every goddamn thing I buy lately.
I had it when Adobe started it with their suite. Let me just buy access to a major version and all patches and minor upgrades.
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.
I'm with Windscribe and as far as I know they're pretty secure?
Yeah I'm doing a mix of torrents and Usenet at the moment, cos I only started learning about usenet a month ago. It's not as complicated as I thought it would be, but it does take a couple of hours to sit down and nut it out. It's definitely not cheaper than a VPN though.
I have been thinking about building a server too, if only for the fun of it. I like learning more about computers. I'd probably just go with Jellyfin though, it seems to have a good reputation plus I'm a big fan of FOSS software.
I feel like I have to beg my friends to use my Plex server. Like what the hell? I'm offering you ~1000 movies free, and all you have to do is register for a Plex account, but for some reason registering for Plex is way too hard and confusing (even though it's the same process as any other service).
Whatever, guess I'll enjoy my movies myself then. 🤷
That's crazy. A friend of a friend runs a Plex server, and I've seen how much is on there. If he offered me access I'd be all over it.
I'm subbed to YT premium, Spotify, and Amazon Prime. I primarily use Steam. I pirate via torrents for movies and series. No streaming services interest me. I've used a free trial for Netflix way back when and I was disappointed that some content was not available to download for offline viewing. With torrenting I can watch content in a better quality, I don't have to worry about buffering, I don't have to worry about discs and menus, etc. All I really want is just the mkv file and that's it.
Be sure to set up a Plex/Jellyfin server so you can stream your content to your devices
I've heard about Plex, but Jellyfin is new to me. I'll check both of those out, thanks.
The first subscription I turned off is my gym membership 10 years ago. That was the first time I realized I was paying for air. With a few hundred dollars spread over years, I've amassed a pretty stellar home gym with machines and weights. Granted, the trade off is space.
In the digital age, really nothing. The wife has Netflix but nothing on that service does shit for me. I get a screen of Max from a close friend and in return she has access to my Plex, and I let her make requests when I go sailing the seas. Max has some ok stuff.
Anyhow, I do everything not to have a subscription to anything, minus my VPN. I also still buy blurays. Conversely, I haven't bought a physical video game in at least 5 years - so I've succumbed to convenience in that regard.
I pay for gym just to force myself to go. Uni had a free gym and I used it a lot the first month, then nothing. I just don't have the discipline...
Paramount +. I love Stat Trek, but I'm not paying for one service to watch 20 - 30 new eps a year of one franchise. Even more egregious is they were so slow rolling out in the UK, half their shows were spread across Netflix and Amazon already, if they pull them from there, I'm just torrenting.
Netflix. Price hikes with lesser content that no one in my house wants to watch. Subcriptions for occasional use stuff been purged since that.
