Products with subscription models suck your souls

Monthly subscription models are extremely detrimental to your mental health.

If you are a developer, you must have used a lot of tools with pay per use monetization models and they are great for two reasons:

1/ No unwanted anxiousness to get the maximum out of your 1st subscription (1st few subscription payments to any app can be blackhole for your time).

With pay per use, you can pay for just what you need to test out if the product fulfills your use-case or not. I won't simply believe their marketing collaterals (website, promotions, social proof, etc.) to assume that the product solves my use-case.

With subscription models, users can get easily addicted to the product with the inner want for justifying their blind trust in 1st few payments amplified with the human vices kicked-off by the top-notch engagement engines like that of Duolingo, Netflix, LinkedIn and more.

2/ Pay per use models pushes the company to fundamentally think about their cost structure & cleanly translate it into customer pricing.

For companies, launching & managing pay per use models is harder than simple subscription models with just a simple periodic date to bill the customer. Managing rolling credits & fragmented payment dates is not for founders who are looking to make bucks instead of genuinely creating & delivering value.

To be fair, consumer apps are hard with so much competition while differentiated b2b products (OpenAI & 3M) have immense leverage to delay value-capture.

Summary/ Subscription monetization models are a good solution to businesses' recurring-revenue problems. It's not a better solution to cunsumer's value-realization problems.

Pay-per-use or pay-and-own models are the best solutions for consumers. But, consumers being non-technical don't have a choice if everyone in the market decides to use subscription models for their benefits.

Which monetization model makes you satisfied without getting pulled-in into the abyss of modern digital-engagement engines?