Title: How do you “stay afloat” in the subscription economy? Are we slowly drowning in subscriptions? How do you prioritize what you pay for? Are subscriptions too expensive?<p>Backstory:<p>I was looking at an email I received this morning from Oku (A GoodReads SaaS alternative that I have no connection to -- You can easily swap in any of the hundreds of services that get posted to HN). Like so many others I&#x27;ve gotten from the various apps and services for which I&#x27;ve signed up over the years, the email espoused all the latest updates and changes happening on the platform. I was immediately hit with a sense of excitement and mild despair.<p>While I love the idea of Oku, it&#x27;s become so difficult to justify paying yet another monthly fee for yet another service. Oku is even on the lower end at just $6&#x2F;mo! Instapaper and Todoist are others that I can think of on this end at $2.99&#x2F;mo and $4&#x2F;mo respectively, but it seems the majority are $8-12&#x2F;mo. This doesn&#x27;t even consider the expensive subscriptions like Netflix or YouTube Premium that can be upwards of $15-30.<p>I say &#x27;despair&#x27; because I&#x27;m torn between two realities:<p>1. If a service is valuable to me, I should be paying for it. Not only due to “you are the product”, but because if a service is not profitable, it will inevitably shut down and thereby remove my access to it; I should not depend on it if I&#x27;m unwilling to pay for it (no free tier usage).<p>2. There are a LOT of services out there (like Oku) that are not necessities, but are useful, beneficial, and deserve to be compensated if used. I really don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s crazy to think a person could spend $200&#x2F;mo+ on recurring subscriptions.<p>Part of me thinks this could be a “power user” problem, but a large portion of the services I can think of are top downloads on their respective app stores: Music streaming, file sharing, video streaming, task management, delivery services, etc. are all pretty mainstream.<p>All of that to say: What do you think?
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