Subscriptions have seemingly appeared out of nowhere and become an enormous part of our lives.
Unless you're a better person than I, you will likely have a or subscription at the very least, plus whatever other apps and services you use daily.
Every day, you idly flick away dozens of notifications demanding you pay to get more out of an app or get rid of ads on your TV.
It's exhausting. I hate subscriptions, even though I have many. But there's one I will always buy when I get the chance. The lifetime subscription is almost always great value, and worth picking up if you can.
Subscriptions are the most annoying part of apps
Financial death by a thousand subscriptions
Once upon a time, you could buy an app outright and never have to worry about ads or missed features. Those apps still exist, but they're rarer than they used to be, replaced by app subscriptions.
I get why subscriptions exist. A steady drip of funds is better for ongoing app support and development than a one-off purchase. It makes sense; I it.
But I don't have to like it.
Apps and services begging me for spare change have become a constant and annoying part of my daily life. I can't download a new app without hitting a seven-day free trial and entering my credit card details.
Apps I use every day are flooded with more and more ads, promising a Faustian bargain to get rid of them for a little bit of my money.
All while Netflix, Disney, or whoever else slowly creep up the price of their services, while losing beloved titles to new services I need to pay for.
To an old-school RPG player, it's hard not to see subscriptions as a form of damage-over-time attack, slowly draining my wallet in tiny bits. It's hard to see how much money you're losing too, since it disappears in small amounts.
I'm tired of them, and I've started looking into ways to remove them from my life. But there is one subscription I will still buy, if I get the chance to. A lifetime subscription.
Lifetime subscriptions are a bargain
A purchase by any other name would smell as sweet
Lifetime subscriptions are effectively just "buy it and own it" under another name, and that's why I love them.
Granted, they're usually more expensive than buying through the Play Store, and whether you want to pay that much is up to you.
For instance, a lifetime subscription is currently priced at a staggering $750. That's a lot of money, especially when you consider a five-year subscription is $250.
But if you're a hardcore Plex user and can see yourself using it for more than 15 years, it might not be a bad shout.
On the other end of the scale, I have a lifetime subscription to the because I bought the app when it was $5 to download. That converted to a lifetime Plus subscription when it changed its payment model, and it hasn't asked me to pay a cent more ever since.
I also bought lifetime access to a VPN for $50 almost 10 years ago, and considering NordVPN charges $15 a month for just its VPN, I'd say I got a bargain.
The problem is, these sorts of deals are becoming vanishingly rare, largely because subscriptions are more lucrative and better if you intend to add support going forward.
Don't get me wrong, subscriptions are sometimes better. They're good for when a service is vast and expensive, and buying outright would cost an enormous amount of money. Buying access to Netflix outright would be expensive.
They're also better if you only intend to use a service infrequently, or for a month at a time. I know of many people who rotate between streaming services to save money.
But ultimately, companies are increasingly eager to push us into subscriptions, and it's getting old fast. "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy" is the phrase that usually comes up at this point, and regardless of what was originally intended, we all know what the tech billionaires mean by it.
And unfortunately for us, they're the ones with the power to make it happen.
More lifetime subscriptions and purchases, please
I'll sacrifice new features for it
We've dipped into the reasons companies and developers prefer subscriptions to one-off purchases a few times, and beyond simple greed, the biggest reason is likely that it provides steady income that justifies working more on the app or service in question. In short: more money in, more updates out.
The thing is, I would absolutely bop those new updates on the head if it meant losing the subscription. Take my podcast app, Pocket Casts. It's an extremely capable podcast app, and I love it dearly.
It was great when I bought it, and it still is now. But it keeps adding new features I don't need, and I suspect that's partly to justify the ongoing subscription cost.
I don't begrudge anyone a living, but I would forgo any new features in favor of a one-off purchase. Because oftentimes, an app is great, and all it needs to do is stay that way. And you don't need a subscription for that.