A year ago, I added up my subscriptions - and the number made me deeply uncomfortable.
Creative Cloud, cloud storage, the note-taking app, the other note-taking app, the task manager, the backup service, the VPN, the music, the password manager.
Each one seemed reasonable when I signed up.
Ten bucks here, fifteen there.
The psychological trick is that no individual subscription ever feels like a big decision.
You’re not buying a car or signing a lease.
You’re just agreeing to skip one lunch per month, forever, in exchange for access to a thing you might need.
Multiply that moment of minor capitulation by thirty or forty services and you’ve constructed a life with significant fixed costs, almost by accident.
Software used to work differently, and I’m old enough to remember the transition.
You bought Microsoft Office for three hundred dollars in 1998 and then you had Microsoft Office.
It sat on your hard drive.
It worked when the internet was down.
It still worked in 2003, maybe a little creaky, but functional.
The company couldn’t reach into your computer and turn it off.
This model had obvious problems from the vendor’s perspective.
Once someone bought your software, they stopped giving you money.
Revenue was unpredictable.
Wall Street analysts would furrow their brows at your lumpy quarterly earnings.
So Adobe figured out a better way.
Better for Adobe, anyway.
In 2013 they announced that Photoshop would no longer be sold as a product.
You would rent it, monthly, forever.
The internet erupted in complaint.
Petitions circulated.
People swore they’d switch to alternatives.
And then almost everyone just… paid.
The lesson rippled across the industry: customers will complain about subscriptions but they won’t actually leave.
Now we rent almost everything.
The subscription model changes your relationship to the tool in ways that go beyond the financial.
When you own something, you can master it at your own pace.
You can use Photoshop CS6 for fifteen years and become extraordinarily good at Photoshop CS6, and nobody can stop you.
When you rent something, you’re on the company’s timeline.
They update the interface and suddenly your muscle memory is wrong.
They deprecate features you relied on.
They add AI tools you didn’t want that slow everything down.
Your expertise becomes a moving target, and keeping up with the changes becomes part of your job, unpaid, indefinite.
Then there’s the cloud dependency problem, which I think about more than is probably healthy.
Where do your files actually live?
For most people the honest answer is “I’m not entirely sure, somewhere Google-ish?”
This works fine until it doesn’t.
Google has shut down dozens of products over the years.
You get an email, sometimes generous notice and sometimes not, and then that part of your life is over.
Maybe you export your data in some half-compatible format.
Maybe you don’t.
The asymmetry of power is almost funny when you think about it.
These companies have legal teams and PR departments and billions of dollars.
You have a terms of service agreement you definitely didn’t read and a vague hope that they won’t do anything too crazy.
What’s your recourse if Dropbox decides your files violate some policy?
You can tweet about it, I guess.
The free services are their own special trap, and this one is well-documented enough that I’ll be brief.
If you’re not paying for the product, your attention is the product, etc.
What’s less discussed is the opportunity cost structure.
Every hour you spend on an ad-supported platform is an hour that platform’s designers specifically engineered it to capture.
They have teams of people whose job is keeping you there.
You have whatever willpower you woke up with.
The matchup is not fair.
I keep coming back to the Minutemen’s concept of overhead.
Mike Watt talks about keeping your nut low, your nut being the monthly sum you need to survive and keep working.
High overhead makes you desperate.
Desperate people take bad gigs.
They say yes when they should say no.
They can’t afford to experiment or rest or pivot because the machine needs feeding.
Our subscription-based creative infrastructure is a form of overhead that would have baffled musicians in 1984.
Imagine explaining that in the future, artists would pay a monthly fee just for the privilege of using their tools, every month, forever, and that if they stopped paying, their tools would simply stop working.
They’d ask why everyone agreed to that.
They might ask why the hell anyone would agree to that.
I don’t have a satisfying answer.
The reason I’m laboring this: sometimes awareness is both the first step and the hardest.
The overhead trap works precisely because each individual piece seems reasonable.
You have to zoom out and see the aggregate before the trap becomes visible.
Add up your subscriptions.
Add up the hours you spend on platforms designed to capture attention.
Add up the risk you’re carrying by having critical work stored on services you don’t control.
The number might be fine.
Plenty of people run sustainable creative lives with exactly this setup.
But you should at least know the number.
The Minutemen knew exactly what their van cost, what their gear cost, what they needed to make each month to keep going.
That knowledge was power.
They could make real decisions because they understood their real constraints.
Most of us are vaguely aware that we’re paying for a lot of stuff, vaguely aware that we’re dependent on platforms, vaguely aware that our attention is being harvested.
Vague awareness isn’t useful.
Specific awareness is the beginning of freedom.
Or at least the beginning of choice.
And choice is everything.
Everything that costs me time or money gets evaluated based on: