I’ve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.
Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;
Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)
Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.
Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.
I don’t judge anyone who decides to save their money, because we’re getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.
My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.
Just my perspective on it, and if we didn’t watch YouTube almost every night, we’d probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.
I started paying for YT Premium a few years ago when there was an election on, and one of the absolute worst minor parties that’s run by a billionaire just threw money at YouTube advertising.
I haven’t looked back. I watch YT content on my ShieldTV poetry much exclusively, so adblock doesn’t work anyway :/
Right? We used to be like “this is written like how some 60 year old executive thinks kids these days talk … nobody talks like this we just talk normally…”
I’m still slightly mad that everyone wanted to use AIM instead of ICQ, even though icq was better. It had offline messaging and you could change your display name, neither of which aim supported.
Anyone younger than like 30 probably has no idea that those were noteworthy features at one time. You could only send someone a message if they were actively connected at the same time as you.
No I don’t think we do. I sure as hell don’t. Yes indeed, we are, and we did. That’s why I think the whole comic is bullshit, like wtf is this whole thing? Feels like some Gen X or earlier is trying out this web comic thing. I don’t even know.
Yeah no millennial is doing that to fit in/not feel old (okay there are probably some but they’re a minority for sure), at best they’re doing that to be annoying/make fun of the crazy slang.
I would pay if it were more a more affordable price.
I haven’t browsed apps in ages so idk if it’s still common, but I remember lots of apps having a lite version and a paid version. Lite version has ads and a sometimes couple less features. Full version ad-free and potential extra features.
I liked that. Let me decide if I enjoyed the app enough to pay for the better version.
Before Reddit went down in a fire, I paid premium even though I already had adblocker and no need for the premium features. And I would do the same for YouTube now, if it wasn’t so high priced.
I am consciously learning now what I think I subconsciously already knew. If I value something enough, pay for it. And I DO value YouTube’s videos. The current cost is just a bit uncomfortably steep for a monthly subscription fee.
"They do want to pay for premium! They just don’t understand what a great value it is! SHOW THEM THE AD AGAIN! SHOW THEM ON EVERY VIDEO SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!!! "
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