Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly.

Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. If you want to cancel your thin client you have to build a PC. Most modern consumers live on a knife edge where $20/month isn't perceptible but $1000 is a major expense.

The classic VC-backed model is to subsidize the subscription until people become complacent, and then increase the price once they're dependent. People who self-host are nutjobs because the cloud alternative is "cheaper and better" until it stops being cheaper.

Difference is that if subscription goes up from $10 to $15, that doesn't seem to bad.

But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)

> wait the price hikes out for a couple years

Or much longer. The computers I use most on a daily basis are over 10 years old, and still perfectly adequate for what I do. Put a non-bloated OS on them and many older computers are more than powerful enough.

Netflix says hello lol

Every increasing prices

Password sharing forbidden

Etc etc

And still making more and more money.

People are willing to take a beating if they are entertained and pay a lot more

> I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up

Of course they will go up, that's the whole idea. The big providers stock on hardware, front-run the hardware market, starve it for products while causing the prices to rise sharply and at that point their services are cheaper because they are selling you the hardware they bought at low prices, the one they bought in bulk, under cheap long term contracts and, in many cases, kept dark for some time.

Result - at the time of high hardware prices in retail, the cloud prices are lower, the latter increase later to make more profits, and the game can continue with the cloud providers always one step ahead of retail in a game of hoarding and scalping.

Most recently, scalping was big during the GPU shortages caused by crypto-mining. Scalpers would buy GPUs in bulk then sell them back to the starved market for a hefty margin.

Cloud providers buying up hardware at scale is basically the same, the only difference is they sell you back the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.

People rent things they can’t afford to own.

Exactly, if you can’t afford the high upfront cost that you can stretch out over a longer period of time, you’re stuck paying more over the long term as the subscriptions get more expensive.

Because the World Economic Forum, where our political and corporate leaders meet and groom each other, point-blank advertised "you will own nothing and be happy."