An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot.
Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.
alt Hacker News
An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot.
Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.