I honestly just don’t use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn’t littered with ads, I don’t mind paying at all. Like I wouldn’t mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it’s fair. There’s a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don’t just run by themselves for free.
But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it’s incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that’s when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.
I expect to use the product or functionality provided by x on a regular basis
The use of x has no added utility
The functionality and/or feature set (e.g. content) of x may degrade significantly without warning and/or recourse
Unavailability of x is likely to render it completely useless
If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.
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