An Inconvenient Truth: A Day of Reckoning, A Month of Savings ⭐

We spent last week with the kids in Nashville, Tennessee, which was good for all kinds of reasons. I’m eternally grateful that my children love and respect each other and are constantly in touch. But I’m almost awed that they still want to spend time with their parents and block out real time to do that. It’s a wonderful gift, something I can’t be proud of per se, as I didn’t make any of it happen. So it’s just nice.

We used to go on three week home swaps in Europe when the kids were, well, kids. And in the post-pandemic years, with both finishing up college and finding their respective ways in adulthood, they’ve joined us in Mexico for week-long trips in addition to our regular holiday visits and whenever else we see each other. Each lives in a different state, but both are close enough that any of us could travel and see the other the same day. They weren’t able to come to Mexico this past winter, so we booked the Nashville trip after we all discussed whatever places and times made the most sense.

Nashville is terrific. It’s also terrifically humid, which triggered an early exit from the “could I live here?” flowchart I run every time I visit any place. But that can be freeing in its own way, and because Nashville really is a special place in so many ways, there’s no doubt we’ll go back, and much more quickly than the 21-year gap between this visit and the last time we were there.

But this trip wasn’t just about experiencing a place and being with the kids. A couple of months back, when my wife and I were still in Mexico, Netflix committed the cardinal sin of raising the prices of its various subscription tiers, an event that served to shake my brain into activity and revive an all-too-familiar topic we all return to again and again these days. We pay for any number of subscription services because of the convenience and value they provide. But they add up and multiply, often without us realizing it, and then these services enshittify in various ways, typically through a combination of price hikes and service downgrades that rebalance the value equation, and not in our favor.

That’s central to the business model of any subscription service, really, an inevitable outcome. But so, too, is the idea that many customers of these services will pay and never even use the services. It’s a proven formula, and we sleepwalk through life, never paying attention to the bills we pay unless we break out of this gooey Matrix-like existence, open our eyes, and pay attention. Which is why I described Netflix’s price hike as a cardinal sin. This company reminded me that I pay a lot of money for this service and it made me think about what it was, exactly, that I was getting out of it. And the dozens of other things I just pay for. Because reasons.

I wrote about this in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️ and noted that we would be with the kids in Nashville and that I would use that opportunity to discuss all the services we collectively pay for with the goal of aggressively culling most of them. And while we were in Nashville last week, I wrote An Inconvenient Truth: Music ⭐ because it’s both a unique outlier and a typical example of the problem. I love music, I still actively seek out new music, which I feel is unusual for people my age, but I also pay for three music streaming services every month, and that is unsustainable.

Why? The reasons are many, but one issue for us as a couple, or as a family if you include the kids, is just where we’re at in life. My kids are now in their 20s and, as noted, they’re both out of college now. (Though my daughter will continue her education while she works, starting this fall.) But this transition from child to adult is not a clean, one-time break. I know of many examples in my extended family of parents declaring that when a kid reaches a certain age, the gravy train will come to an end and that kid will suddenly just be responsible for paying their own way. That might have made sense in some era, and it may make sense to some people now. But I see this as being much more complicated.

For example, my wife, kids, and my wife’s parents are all on the same Verizon account for their phones. This account has existed for decades and I’m sure it’s evolved to some degree over time. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that it’s cheaper for all of them to keep it. If we were just concerned with forcing independence on the kids, we could have just booted them out of the Verizon account, and I guess that might be a win to some. But it would raise the cost for us, and it would raise the cost for each of them. We keep this thing going because it makes sense. Each person handles their part of the bill, the cost of whatever upgrades they might want, and the account persists.

Last week wasn’t the first time I’d discussed these subscription services with the kids. And on previous occasions, I’d been surprised a few times when I discovered that our son, say, who is older, lives with a group of friends in a rented house and has his own life going on, had stopped using some family accounts, like Netflix, because he could share the cost with those friends and that made more sense. He wouldn’t think to text me and tell me he left, just as I wouldn’t think to check-in every few months to ask him what he was still using. Again, this is a big part of the business model, us being zombies. And I am a terrific customer.

Anyway, I had some idea about the services I pay for, but my wife handles the money and she has a more accurate view of this. So I asked her if she would take a quick look at the last month or so and just list out the repeating monthly charges. She did me one better by using an AI tool that’s part of the Quicken Simplifi service she uses to look at the past year, which uncovered at least one item, for HBO MAX or whatever it’s called this week, that we stopped paying for last year. That was confusing at first, but I should expected her over-delivering. This is why she handles the money.

The list she generated was interesting and, as it turns out, incomplete. But that’s fine, I wanted to cross-reference what I know with what the software told us. I quickly calculated that I could save close to $100 each month, which was simultaneously thrilling and aggravating. I also knew going into this that this wasn’t about a scorched earth razing of all subscription services, that we would retain many of them because they actually are valuable to us. This was part of the discussion with the kids.

This isn’t complete, but here’s a good sample of what I went through.

Amazon Prime. When I first brought up the subscription services subscription, my son blurted out, “you’re going to keep Amazon Prime, right?” As it turns out, this is one of the few family subscription plans that hasn’t yet enshittified to the point where it’s doing location checks on each member and charging more for those who aren’t physically in the same home. So he uses Prime regularly for the free shipping and all the usual reasons. But Prime was never on the chopping block, regardless of his usage. We pay for this here ($139 per year) and in Mexico (roughly $4 per month) because it makes sense, and just for the shipping alone. (I don’t remember the exact details, but I signed up for Amazon Prime in Mexico because I would save so much on one purchase that it covered that cost of the subscription for several months.) Until and unless this changes, Prime is safe.

Anthropic Claude Pro. I once said that I would never pay for AI, but that was two years ago and there is an important caveat: If I were a professional developer, I would absolutely pay for AI, And I have been paying for Anthropic Claude Pro at $20 per month since February or March, first so I could finish up my WinUIpad project and then more recently for whatever vibe-coding experiments. That will continue over the summer, and may or may not turn into a monthly focus. But I will almost certainly get rid of it in time. Since I haven’t yet, I will not count this towards whatever savings.

Apple One. Apple offers various Apple One subscription tiers, and like many subscriptions, this one started small (with cloud storage, I guess) and then escalated. Today, we have three (sort of four) people using an Apple One Premiere subscription at a cost of $37.95 per month, which sounds like a lot because it is a lot. But this is also an example of value being delivered, thanks to Apple’s family sharing rights and the sheer number of things we each use: 2 TB of cloud storage, which we all need if only for device backups, Apple TV, which we all watch, Apple Music, which my son uses exclusively and I go back and forth on, and Apple News+, which my wife and I both read every single morning; she uses an iPad Mini, the only Apple device she comes in contact with. And while I  sometimes idly wonder how much more valuable the Apple ecosystem would be if she just used an iPhone and an Apple Watch–she would love Fitness+–she’s in her own Samsung/Android world and couldn’t care less. But no matter. We actually use this service heavily and there’s no version of breaking it out to the individual offerings we do use that makes any sense. So Apple One, too, is safe.

Audible. I’ve been an Audible subscriber since June 2007, which is incredible. (That’s the same month that Apple shipped the first iPhone, for starters, 19 years ago.) I love reading, I love audiobooks, and you know the drill. But Audible Premium Plus, which gives me a credit for one audiobook each month, now costs $14.95 each month. Like many, I have limited listening time, and that time is spent between podcasts, audiobooks, videos that I just listen to, music, and maybe more. And my credits stack up because I don’t have time to listen. You can pause your subscription for up to 3 months, which I’ve done a few times. But it’s time to say goodbye. I will write about books/audiobooks soon, but there are many things going on here, and with so many free library-based options and so few books I would listen to more than once, this subscription doesn’t make any sense. So there’s $15 I can save each month.

Clipchamp. Microsoft’s web-based video editor is terrific and it’s particularly good for people like me who don’t need to edit video all that often. It’s free, but you can pay for something called Clipchamp Premium at $11.99 per month, and I was doing that because one of the perks is that it saves all the assets for each project to the cloud, so you could edit the same video on multiple computers easily. But things have changed since then, and I’ve not noticed that many Clipchamp Premium perks are free because I have a Microsoft 365 Family subscription. So this is another $12 I can save each month. For a total of $27.

Google One/Google AI Pro. My company pays for Google Workspace with multiple accounts, but I will leave that out of this conversation because it’s work-based and not something I’d do as an individual. But I do have my main/core photo gallery in Google Photos, which is attached to my Gmail account, and so I have to pay for some kind of Google One account for the storage. Right now, this is Google AI Pro, which gives me 5 TB (!) of storage and whatever Gemini usage, and this can cost as much as $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year (so $16.67 per month) when paid annually. I could see keeping that, but I could also just get Google One with 2 TB of storage for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, a savings of $10 per month (or $100 per year). And I probably will, though my Pixel phone usage has given me this subscription for free, with that deal ending soon. So I will do that when I have to, but there’s no monthly savings. And to be clear, that’s a good price for that much storage, and I do use it.

Hulu. This was the one that my daughter piped up on because she does watch Hulu fairly regularly. My wife and I do too, sometimes, but usually just during lunch when we want to watch a 30-minute (really ~23-minute) show while eating lunch. And then not all the time, because sometimes those shows are on other services. (Right now, we’re re-binging the original several seasons of Scrubs after watching the new season and being pleasantly surprised. It’s one of the top few shows ever made, easily.) But Hulu is expensive, at $18.99 per month for a no-ads version, and I wanted to get rid of it. Doing a bit of research (using Google for 10 seconds), I found that students can get Hulu (with ads) for just $1.99 per month, though there’s no similar offering for a no-ads subscription for students. This is a tough one, but I think it has to go, if only because the price is incommensurate with what you get compared to other streaming services. I haven’t killed it yet, but I will soon, so the total is now $56 per month.

Netflix. If you had asked me a year or more ago which media service would be the last one standing in my household, I would have told you Netflix immediately, and without any thought. Today, things are more nuanced. Netflix is getting expensive, and our subscription is now $21 each month. It aggressively monitors location and wants to charge $9.99 for each user outside the house, geographically, every month, so that would be another $20 if both kids used it. And we just don’t watch it as much anymore, with YouTube long ago moving into the number one slot. So this was surprisingly easy: Netflix is on the chopping block, bringing the total monthly savings to $76.

Spotify. I specifically targeted Spotify in An Inconvenient Truth: Music ⭐, which was confusing to some who thought I didn’t see the value in streaming music services and was perhaps thinking about ditching them entirely. That’s not the case. We get Apple Music through Apple One (above) and my favorite music service, YouTube Music, is part of my YouTube Premium subscription (below). I don’t use Spotify, and my son, who did, moved to Apple Music last year (or maybe the year before, actually). That leaves my wife, who rarely uses it, and my daughter. Who informed me that she already switched to a student account on her own. So this was a no-brainer: I will save $18 each month not paying for Spotify, and my wife can just use Apple Music, which she was surprised to discover would work on her Android phone. I killed this one immediately, and it was perhaps just an hour after I posted that last article. So the total monthly savings are now at $94.

YouTube Premium. This is perhaps the best value of any service we pay for. We watch YouTube more than any other video service, literally every day, and we do that together and individually. There are no ads, and you can click over sponsored segments with a single click. And it gives me a YouTube Music Premium subscription, the music service I use regularly. It does all this at a cost of just $10.59 per month, according to our bills, or $15.99 per month according to YouTube. Either way, this is astonishing given how the prices of other services have escalated. We’re keeping it and, as noted, this is now the last service standing if I had to make that choice.

So we’re close to the $100 figure I noted above. But there are other subscriptions, things I would stop paying for now if I was paying for them normally. These are specific to me, and this isn’t the type of thing that will help anyone reading this, but because of long-time relationships with individuals who work or used to work at Microsoft, I get preferential pricing on Microsoft 365 Family, Microsoft 365 Business, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions, each of which is now stacked out years into the future. Meaning, I paid low prices for each and bought enough of each in yearly increments that I will never pay for them again.

So, yay for me. But a Microsoft 365 Family subscription is currently $129.99 per year (which is how I would pay for it). The Microsoft 365 Business subscription I have would cost $150 per year, though I would get a $72-per-year Microsoft 365 Business Basics account if I did have to pay for it as I don’t need the Office apps. And Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which had been $29.99 for much of the past year, is now $22.99. I would drop all three of these things right now, at a savings of over $550 per year or $46 per month. But I don’t have to. I will just continue not using them for the most part, while my wife uses Microsoft 365 Family every day.

There’s more, like newspapers and other reading-based subscriptions. And I have absolutely forgotten a few subscriptions, but we’re actively monitoring this now. And there are some cross-overs here with the Little Tech thing, where some combination of NAS-based content and less expensive or free and often open source solutions can replace paid offerings. I will be writing more soon about books/audiobooks, as noted, but also about topics like music, video, productivity, and whatever else tied to the services noted above. That is, if you just kill Netflix, Hulu, and whatever else, what will you watch, and how? There’s a lot there.

I will keep cutting, but this is where I’m at now: Not ideal per se, but better than before.