It seems like everything is a subscription these days and, in many cases, it makes perfect sense. I still pay for a Spotify subscription despite also collecting physical CDs. I understand what I’m paying for and why I’m paying it.
However, the crusade to turn everything into a form of continuous and recurring income can go too far sometimes. Some things should not be a subscription, and we all have to draw the line somewhere. For me, these are clear examples where a subscription has no business being part of the deal.
9
Heated Seats in Cars
I’ll start with possibly the most infamous example, where BMW thought it was a good idea to charge people a monthly subscription fee in order to use the seat warmers in their cars. I can only imagine how that board meeting went: “Ve vill charge zem to varm ze tushies in ze vinter!” I hear the CEO saying as the whole board bursts out in evil laughter around the table.
Listen, if there’s a seat warmer in the car I bought, then it’s my seat warmer. If you don’t want me using it, don’t put it in the car. Luckily, BMW saw the light and dropped the plans for real-life video game microtransactions—for now.
8
Remote Start Features
The Japanese have long admired the Germans and their engineering in particular, so Mazda probably saw that BMW had tried and failed to convince customers to subscribe to the hardware they’d already paid for and thought “We can do better.”
Lo and behold, in 2024 Mazda decided to start charging customers $10 a month for “connected” services such as remote start. These services used to be free, and in all fairness, Mazda made it clear that at some point it would start charging money, which is fair. However, the company also managed to kill a free open-source alternative. Which really doesn’t make this look like anything other than greed.
Whether Mazda was transparent about this is beside the point, however. Core features of a car should not be locked behind a paywall. This is the same sort of issue with smart homes that are only smart as long as you subscribe or have a connection to a remote server. This sort of thing should never be behind a subscription in principle. Luckily companies like Ford with its FordPass app still offer these features for free, but that can always change at any time.
Mercedes-Benz wasn’t going to let BMW have all the fun, and basically said “hold mein Steinkrug” and decided to charge their EV customers $60 or $90 per month for 60 and 80 extra horsepower respectively. You know, I could almost get behind this if it was a one-time payment that served as some sort of service fee to account for the extra wear and tear of the extra power. After all, we’ve been paying for aftermarket ECU remapping to get more power out of ICE vehicles for decades.
However, paying to unlock my car’s true performance on a monthly basis just doesn’t feel right.
6
Smart Home Appliances
The tendency to offer us “smart” appliances that have their actual brains in a far-off data center means that the companies have the ability to cut off or otherwise reduce or disable the functionality of the stuff you’ve bought.
In 2020, home automation company Wink hit users with surprise subscription fee for functionality that had been free for years. It’s pay up, or lose all your home automation build on Wink hubs and other hardware in the ecosystem. Likewise, Sonos got flack for its “recycle mode” feature on Sonos speakers which let the company remotely brick a perfectly functional (and expensive) speaker, turning it into e-waste.
It could happen tomorrow that your smart fridge or smart TV suddenly tells you that if you don’t pay a subscription fee, some features will stop working or you may have to put up with advertising everywhere on a device you bought and didn’t start out that way. Honestly, I don’t think any home appliance should have its core functions locked behind a subscription, and the bait-and-switch tactic is especially egregious and we shouldn’t let companies get away with it when they try it.
5
Printers and Ink
Yes, I’m talking about the infamous HP Instant Ink service. This is a system where you pay a monthly fee and HP sends you ink when things are getting low. What sucks about it is that your subscription fee doesn’t cover a specific amount of ink, but how many pages you’ve printed. So even if there’s ink or paper in the machine, it won’t print if you’re at your limit unless you pay for more pages. Even worse, if your subscription lapses, your printer will refuse to print anything until you pay up.
This may make sense to some people, but I honestly don’t see why someone who only prints 15 pages a month or even 50 pages per month won’t just buy a printer with full cartridges and use it as needed.
4
Cloud Storage for Your Own Security Cameras
IP security cameras are great products in principle, and they certainly make me feel safer, but they have plenty of problems too. It’s not enough that hackers can compromise these devices to spy on you and your household. They often have subscription fees if you want to do anything beyond watching a live feed.
While it would have been simple to simply add local storage or at the very least an SD card slot, these companies obviously prefer that you pay them a monthly fee for cloud storage on their servers.
Setting aside that I might not want my footage going to a server somewhere on the other side of the world, there are so many options for local network storage (e,g, a NAS) that there should be no reason to have paid cloud storage as the only option. It should be an option, but disallowing any other solutions just feels cynical.
3
Smart Thermostat Features
You’re supposed to be a “smart” thermostat. All you have to do is maintain the temperature and save me money on energy. Why do you need a paid subscription to phone home? What are you going to do if I don’t pay? Freeze me to death?
2
Map Updates and Navigation in Cars
Some of you might not have been around or may not remember, but in the early days of consumer GPS navigation, you’d buy the satnav unit, and then pay for any additional maps you may need. Usually these were once-off and you’d get updates included.
Then we all forgot that navigation is something you need to pay for, because of Google Maps and so you might be surprised to hear that if you buy a car with built-in navigation, you might have to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee to keep those maps up to date. Usually, I’d say that’s fair because it does cost money to maintain those maps, but you know they’re just using Google Maps data at this point too!
1
Garage Door Openers
Help! My garage door won’t let me into my house, but that’s where my credit card is!
I don’t know about you, but I think that a good economy should have a healthy mix of products and services. Everything can’t be a service, especially if I bought all the necessary machinery to make it work. They say possession is nine tenths of the law, but apparently we’re just one missed payment away from proving that’s not true.
