We get to choose

We like to talk about how bad subscription services are.

About how we’d prefer to own our media and tools, etc.

I sure do.

But then I realized, there are some things I gladly pay for, and others I only grudgingly pay for.

For instance, I’ve paid for Basecamp every month for about 15 years. Never complained, as the service is valuable, I trust their team to help me if I get stuck, and it’s proven reliable for my teams and I over that time. I get it: it’s hosted on their servers, they make small quality-of-life upgrades that are optional and useful, and their pricing options are flexible and fair.

Conversely, my Adobe subscription is a grudging one. I use Photoshop in almost exactly the same way as I used it in 2002. I owned it outright, but now I pay monthly for it, and have done for 14 years (since it turned into a subscription service). Every month, I think about how it’s gotten no better, there are no server nor hosting fees associated with it, how ‘new features’ would be ‘bugs’ to me, and how that bothers me.

Both paid for monthly for about the same length of time…

One I gladly every month despite cheaper or free alternatives…

The other I’d gladly replace with a cheaper or free alternative once one competes with its core competencies (the ones I use).

One’s a service (the more expensive of the two) I recommend gladly to others all the time.

The other’s a ticking time bomb, waiting to lose my business.

We get to choose which of these things we’d like to be.