The Subscription Trap
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This is planet money from npr. A couple weeks ago, I got an email telling me I just paid thirty box for a subscription to fortune magazine that I didn't even know I had.

Yeah, that is a classic problem I think I subscribe to, like two workout apps that I never actually use.

Yeah, happens all the time. I realized i'd signed up for this one dollar introductory trial to read a single article about crypto bankrupts. And then i'd totally forgotten about IT for six months. But instead of cancelling this particular subscription and moving on with my life, I decided to call up someone who thought a lot about this dex ingy common annoyance, an entrepreneur r named heron motoza a .

all of the companies i've started started from just a problem that annoys me.

It's like Larry David approach to business.

sure. That's way to put IT.

About a decade ago, heron and his three brothers, who are all business partners, were trying to come up with a new idea for a, they gathered a few times a week to brainstorm, and one of their basements, which they given this kind of fun nickname.

And we called the the foundry because we said, like we don't know what we want to do. So what we're going to do is we're going to flaunt on ideas and then when something hits, that's when will know it's a good idea. And we just started kind of toss around mostly terrible ideas.

There was the virtual reality headset that customers could wear on their stationary bicycles to feel like they are on a real ride. They decided that idea was just a bit too sweet.

We had won. That was A A box that would send you goods from, like, your home country. So for like an immigrant, IT would be like an assortment of different kind of like foods from there, or either atoms from there.

That one, actually, my brother, yeah, I had decided to start run with a little bit, and I think he might have started with turkish products and my mother's turkish, my father's afghan, and he started getting orders and stuff. And like, then you realized that, oh my god, like, I don't like I need like a room to put all of these things in. And there's like inventory and is like, this is finally .

one day in late twenty fifteen, her run was in the foundry with his brothers when he started talking about this problem that was on his mind. While back, he'd come across an article about how more than a million a well customers were still paying subscription fees to A L. Even though the era of dala internet was long gone.

haroon thought a lot of those people might not even know they were still being charged in the age of automatic credit card payments and paperless bank statements. IT could just be incredibly hard to know what what subscriptions you were on at any given moment.

Now hero knew there were had to be some simple, elegant solution here. If he could get access to a customers monthly financial transactions, there should be a way to isolate and identify their recurring payments. The problem was that he didn't know how to .

get that information. And then my Younger brother dresses like, oh, i've been playing around with this company called plaid that does the whole bank linking thing for you. I was like, you're kidding me.

And so we basically like, jumped on this and we all go, and I put in my bank passwords and suffix that in the downloads, all the transactions, then we dumped them in this giant cl files. I've got like years and years of transactions in this giant cell ile. And then I like grab my older brother's zai and am I zeki? Look, we need an algorithm that's gonna a pick out from this large transaction list, you know, subscriptions, recurring stuff.

They need to be like maybe the same out of money. The name needs to be like similar. They need to be like some kind of regular occurrence.

And he's a math major. So if he like, I got this, and like he starts like writing this algorithm. And little while later, boom, like, a list pops out.

A list pops out. All the sudden, this chaotic jumble of obscure label transactions going back years appears as this orderly list showing all the recurring payments that are getting taken out of her own account on a regular caddice.

And IT was like, well, this is like a new view that i've never seen on my finances.

And as her oon starts to survey this newly revealed financial landscape almost right away, he finds a troubling series of line items.

And there's a four year subscription for a security system on a home that had moved out of, like, over a year prior. I had paid at least a year to two years. So somewhere between five hundred and the thousand dollars went out the door. So you are paying .

for the home security of whoever lived in your old home. I don't even know .

if they are using IT though I think I was thank for IT.

There was just free money .

for the company.

Yeah, exactly. Honey brothers then throw their bank statements into the algorithm and each of them starts to find their own forgotten subscriptions.

IT was like four out of four. All four matters out of brothers. We're not properly tracking their money.

And you're like, okay, this affects the four of us. IT might actually be a bigger .

thing yeah and if not, we clearly need IT. So let's build.

A little bit of a spoiler alert. He was not just the matter zada brothers who are experiencing at this problem. And in the years since that fateful day in the foundry, the number of people caught in this web of subscriptions has gone up and up. What's happened to the subscription economy? Since you started this company?

The subscription economy definitely exploded.

Hello, welcome to plan the money and alex I .

or gazi and i'm jeff go. Over the past two decades, there's been of tech tonic shift happening under our feet as more and more companies have switched from selling goods one by one. Two services available as a subscription, from razor blades to meal kids to car washes. But all that convenience has come with the dark .

side today on the show, how we all fell into the subscription trap. Who is winning and who is losing in this brave new subscription based world, and what the government and the free market are doing to try and fix IT.

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subscribe wherever, get podcasts. okay. So the problem that haroon moctar zada and his brothers were setting out to try and solve with their new APP about a decade ago that had not just appeared out of nowhere. IT was the result of this major economic shift, decades in the making, a shift from selling individual goods to one where almost everything feels like I could be replaced as a subscription style service.

To understand how that happened, we called the guide named teen as well. Team had a front row seat to the rise of what he calls the subscription economy as the founder and CEO of a company called zora.

These guys are like the infrastructural backbone to some of the biggest subscription services in the world.

That's right. So we're a little bit invisible, right to you. You might not know that we exist, but we're powers the money transactions behind anything from zoom to the new york times to general motors to power all sort of subscription services.

The basic outline of the subscription model, t explains, is at least as old as the magazines and newspapers and milk delivery service says of the nineteen century.

why own a cow when you just want a milk? right?

That's really the idea. Tim says you can trace the birth of our modern, subscription obsessed economy to silicon valley in the late nineteen nineties, and even more specifically, to one particular company where he was an early employee.

why? I think the company that people would point to is self force.

Sales force is a company that makes database software for other companies to keep track of sales and marketing and customer service. And up until that point in the late nineties, teen says the software industry was still organized around selling individual goods with programs like microsoft word or a dob photoshop.

Despite the fact the software was A A digital product, IT was very much sold on a unit basis.

Customers would buy individual programs on a disc to install on their computers for big pieces of corporate, often are companies might have to install more servers and higher, larger IT departments.

In this model, software was like a tool, like buying a typewriter that you could use as long as you wanted. When he decided IT was time to upgrade to the latest version yet to go buy a new copy at full Price.

the thing that teen and his colleagues at sales force realized was that in the age of the internet, this traditional model was no longer necessary. So they posited a new model.

Let's create software that people don't have to buy a great software that that we run, that we Operate and you simply point your browser at our servers and we will just take care for you ah so you can you can have the milk, if you will.

without having to buy the cow. Salesforce started offering their software as a service. Now instead of buying your own copy of some program for a hefty sticker Price, you can essentially rented and spread the cost into smaller recurring payments every month. More companies could now afford the sales force, and everyone could get access to customer service and new software updates in real time.

As for sales force, the subscription service model was appealing for a few big reasons. IT made software development less risky. Instead of making their money in monkey fits and starts every time they released, a new version of their software subscriptions meant that sales force would have a dependable stream of income month after month.

they could cover the costs of maintaining the software, fund the development of new updates and products and build on top of an existing customer base. They could more reliably plan their revenue and costs, and that would make them more attractive to outside investors.

Within a few years, sales force proved that this subscription model could be a billion dollar business, and their companies around silicon valley started to follow in their footsteps. Venture capitalists or vcs started investing more of their money into startups that offered software as a service or as the acronis goes.

So I think when sales first went public in two thousand and four and really did well, the VC is understood that this is a viable model. And you really started to seeing the shift. All startups, really, so all software arms interpret soft start became software as service companies.

Within a decade, netflix was offering streaming movies and shows as a service. Spotify figured out a new way to offer music as a service, both under the premise that I might be cheaper and more convenient for consumers to essentially rent access to these massive content libraries instead of individually buying songs or movies.

Even planet money has gotten into the subject tion game.

We see you planned the money plus.

And as subscriptions transformed the digital world, the enthusiasm for this model started to ripple out to more and more other parts of the economy.

Pretty soon you can get subscriptions to help you restock your household staples so you'd never have to worry about running out of razors or morning coffee or toilet paper.

Yes, subscription ans are everywhere you look these days, a lot of the basic infrastructure of the internet runs on subscriptions. Things like amazon web services, even tracor manufacturer, are now selling subscriptions to unlock all the features of the tractor.

They just solves you at this point, doesn't feel like there is a kind of pressure on almost any type of company if they're trying to convince investors to back them to use .

a subscription model. I think we're really telling us, if you look at the early stage venture market in in this definitely skews towards technology company is certainly, but I D hard press to see adventure capitalist a fund, a company that does not have a strong recurring description model.

which brings us back to our consciously floundering business man, her motorcade and his three brothers by twenty fifteen when they figured out a way to clearly identify recurring payments in their own financial statements, says IT was clear that helping people keep track of their ballooning subscriptions was only gonna more useful.

So they make a basic free website where people can link their bank accounts and find out what subscriptions they're paying for and might want to cancel. They send IT around to some family and friends, and over the next few months.

IT gets popular. But then came the request from users that, okay, that's great. But like why can I just hit a bug in you guys cancel this thing? Like, huh? That would be nice.

That would be nice indeed. Um and so we started doing that. We start right, we're going to do that.

Herenton his brothers install a cancel button onto the website, and when a user pressed IT, the request would arrive at the brother's safran is go office, where one of them, usually jaa, would take IT upon himself to brave the customer service gotland of whatever subway pan their client wanted to escape.

Yeah, I was in the corner of this very tiny office, just like making phone cause like, hi, yes, I want to cancel the subscription, please no, I don't use IT anymore. And no, thanks, i'm not interested.

please cancell IT. So it's the very familiar dance of trying to convince the company to let you go.

Yes, although we would like slightly increasing frustration as guy is on his hundred color.

whatever. Eventually, brothers were able to get enough users and raise enough venture capital to create an APP and outsource this laborious process to call center in the phillipines. But they were still having trouble figuring out how to actually make any money.

They considered charging a one time fee for the APP, but decided that would exclude too many would be users. They talked about collecting and selling their users financial data, but ruins says that option just felt like i'd be up the trail of their customers trust.

They did try a filat marketing. Basically, they earned the commission when their customers signed up for other company services through their APP.

We made a little bit we are making like maybe fifteen thousand dollars a months or something like that, but our expenses were in the hundreds of thousands at that point.

All of which meant that after just a few years, the company found itself in a dire financial situation.

And so we basically are like, guys know there's something here, but it's not a sustainable company IT can't we can't keep paying for the staff that we had hired in the engineers. It's like, what are we going to do? And when this meeting I was just like art, we basically have enough money for one other try, like one bag. What is the one thing we could do?

The brothers talk through their options. The affiliate marketing strategy had not worked. They're still don't want to sell customer data. And finally, yah asks the question they've all been kinder avoiding for years.

What if we charge a subscription for this service? And I mean the the sheer irony of that is why I personally was adamant opposed to IT. I just said this is crazy guys like we can't have a subscription cancellation service. The charges people have subscription for IT um IT just seems so ridiculous but when you're on deaf doorstep, basically you're willing to kind of do whatever.

So that is how after several years doing a battle with big subscription and his brothers finally seem to be sir song of the subscription model .

and within a matter of months, who can says they started to see the number of premium subscribers grow and grow.

And as soon as I saw that numbers, I was like a guys, there's something here. IT was three dollars a month too, like we weren't charging a lot of anything. But when we saw that, we're like, okay, we actually have a revenue model now.

So the subscription model came to the rescue.

Subscribe came the rescue.

That's right. Over the next few years, the brothers were able to raise tens of millions of dollars in investment. Turns out venture capital really does like a subscription model. And in the winter of twenty twenty one, her room and his brothers announced that they would be selling their APP, which they had named true bill, to the company behind rocket mortgage.

And how much should you end up selling the company for?

This is one point three billion with A B. A billion with A B. Yeah, it's a hard number to walk away from.

So in the six years since her, ron first complained to his brothers about his subscription problem in the foundry. The subscription model had exploded across the economy. And yes, IT brought untold convenience to consumers and consistent revenue to businesses. But it's also meant that we've been strugling with more subscriptions that we can keep track of.

And this no humber, an explosion of subscription offerings, has also exposed some of the deliberate and deceptive ways that companies have been trying to lower in and lock in as many customers as possible.

After the break, the subscription model breaks that and the government strikes back.

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understand why many of us are drowning in more subscriptions than we know what to do with, it's useful to step back and think about how the subscription model has incentivised businesses to behave, right?

So if you're a business that just goods like tvs or whatever, all that matters is how many tvs you sell, but subscription businesses are built around and not only how many customers you can bring in, but also how many customers cancel every month. That number, the percentage of customers who cancel is called the turn rate. And subscription businesses obsessed over IT. It's the key to their long term profitability.

And in a sort of ideal world, when the subscription model is working well, a company's incentives should be aligned with its customers to keep the turn rate low and convince customers to stay subscribed. The company might improve their offerings are keep Prices low.

but there has always been a sketchy side to subscriptions. There's famously, you know, a subscription male order record company called columbia house. They used to try to get customers to sign up by offering them twelve cities for a penny, but then they would charge the full Price for new records every month in perpetuity unless they opted out.

And you can still see the temptation for companies to try to gain subscribers or produce the turn rate by making little tweak that have nothing to do with improving their services. Like maybe we'll just make IT a little less clear how much the monthly fees will be after an introductory ory offer or they'll make IT just a tiny harder to cancel by adding an extra step. There's a temptation to take advantage of the fact that we might not have time to go through all the hoops to cancel.

Now if you, anna, get a sense of how much of the subscription economy is based on cheer customer inertia, you want to talk to stand for the economist neil mooney. Last year, he, his colleagues released state working paper about this very question. He says, usually when he talks about his work, people's eyes started, lays over.

This was one of the examples, where are people were sort shopping at the day to tell me you, very example of this phenomenon. So the anemic .

data were showing that a lot of people seem to be struggling with .

the same problem. sure.

A couple years ago, nearly as colleagues got access to this massive data set with the credit and debit card transactions of hundreds of thousands of people, and they designed a neat way to look at whether people were paying for subscriptions they didn't want, basically when people's cards were lost or stolen or inspired, they were forced to actively choose whether or not to renew whatever subscriptions .

they were signed up for. And what you see, you see this like, remarkably, Chris pattern, like on average, two percent of people cancel every month. And then in the month where the credit ds switches over, they have to make a active decision. Eight percent of people comes four times more likely to cancel when they are force to pay attention, decide, do I really want this product?

In other words, tens of thousands of subsidies in the study seemed have been paying for a service that they no longer actually wanted, which neil calculated meant that some of these companies are making anywhere from twenty to over two hundred percent more revenue than they otherwise might have. They were benefiting for my sort of a nurse premium.

I mean, that sounds like a pretty good deal for some .

of these companies. yeah. And I think that, that speaks to the issue, right, that there is bunch of business models out there which might not be viable if markets were working the way they should, which is if you're not getting good value for money.

you leave the product now explains subscription services that rely heavily on forgetful or trapped customers are benefiting from a kind of monopoly power. The fact that part of their customer bases are locked in means these firms aren't guided by Normal market forces that would lead them to improve their services or lower costs.

It's a barrier to competition and markets work when firms compete. And when you're not cancelling a product you no longer want because you forget about IT or it's impossibly difficult to cancel those forces of consumers taking their business to another product and are are blunted.

which is why the federal government has now entered .

the chat subscription trac. Faure.

same vein is the head of consumer protection at the federal trade commission, which is like the main federal agency in ge, of dealing with this subscription mess.

I don't know, and anyone who's not fed up with some of these subscriptions, and I know a lot of people who are now more reluctant to sign up for subscriptions because they just don't trust that they're gonna able to cancel IT easily. People are busy. I helped recently my partner's seventy five year old mother try to cancel or cable subscription. IT was perish. He had to convince .

them .

that this is what he wanted to do. He does not SHE is other things to do. I had other things to do. The fact that he needed the character of the consumer protection bureau, the ftc, to help her cancel an outrageous ly expensive cable subscription is a sign of how about this problem has gotten.

Sam explains that the ftc has had rules going back to the hundred and seventy is governing what is and isn't allowed when IT comes to subscription model businesses. But over the last few years, the agency has received tens of thousands of new consumer complaints about deceptive practices on the part of these companies. Techniques that are way more deliberate and destined leave than just benefiting from the forgetfulness of some .

your customers yeah they use so called dark patterns or deceptive design practices to obfuscates the terms of service or to deliberately make the process of canceling a subscription nearly impossible. Over the past few years, the ftc has brought several high profile losses against companies that they see as the most aggregation offenders.

Yeah I mean, warn litigation with amazon, but they called their own cancellation process the .

elliot flow like the homeric epic yes.

exactly which I think is a good example of how folks inside the company were thinking about the cancellation process uh, for amazon prime.

So will the customer be like a Kelly trying to get into the fourth fied city of joy in this metaphor? Or the customers, the trojans, getting tricked by the trojan e horse of dark patterns?

I think that's a good question I would direct to amazon rather than to me.

We did, of course, ask amazon to clarify what they meant by naming their cancellation process after the elliot seems like they might have meant the easy. They did not answer that part of the inquiry, but they did provide us a statement saying that amazon prime sign up and cancellation processes have, quote, always meant standard for customers, well above legal requirements.

And we should say amazon supports in pace to distribute some N P, R content.

Now in another ongoing case filed against adobe, the ftc alleges that a company executive there referred to an early termination fee, talked into their terms of service for a subscription as, quote, a bit like hiring for adobe, basically suggesting that they were financially addicted to locking in .

their customers. But sam is the solution to this problem has got to be bigger than just a few high profile lawsuits. He says. You have to change the basic cost benefit analysis that companies make as they design their subscription offerings.

Last spring, the ftc said they were gonna crack down on deceptive subscription practices. They propose something they're calling the click to cancel rule. And the idea here is to legally require companies to make IT at least as easy to cancel any given subscription as IT is to sign up. The ftc commissioner's recently voted to pass the role, and it'll go to effect in about six months.

What the rule will do is really change the cost benefit. Yeah you can track people and maybe IT or or new another six, ninety nine a month, but if you're caught, you could be liable for civil penalties of more than fifty thousand dollars per violation. And that's just basic deterrence theory. The cost of breaking the law needs to exceed the benefit, and this will will go a long way toward relying those incentive to ensure that IT does.

You know, since I got that email telling me had been paying thirty box for a forgotten magazine subscription a couple weeks ago, i've been thinking a lot about why IT is that so many of us might find ourselves oversubscribed these days. A lot of IT is explained by this broader economic shift, of course, where buying almost anything now IT is is just more likely to entail a subscription.

And some of IT can be chalked up to the fact that a lot of companies are specifically designing their terms of service to lock us in for as long as possible. But I think there's also something much more deeply human underneath that. Something that same reminded me about when we are talking.

It's the idea that there's this aspirational earning behind a lot of the purchases we make when we've sign up for a gym membership after new year's this kind of bet on ourselves that maybe this will be the year that will finally become the healthy ripped person we've dreamed of or maybe it's an incentive to finally change. Same says the subscription services have made IT so incredibly easy tube sign up and enter our credit card information. That we can make those aspirational purchases all the time.

You think, yeah, this coming years gona be the year of, you know, the year I really get into shape, the year I really start cooking. But then on the back end, when you realize, no, actually I don't really have time to cook all of this food and being delivered, that's when they make IT really difficult. The end result, people stuck with way too many subscriptions.

This year is finally going to be the year. I'm going to perch all the subscriptions that I have not been using.

That is an aspiration. And I understand their apps you can download to help you do that, but then good luck cancelling those.

I did not, in fact, feel like signing up for a new subscription in order to cancel all my other ones, but I did pull up her room muckers out as rocket money APP to at least get a look at the list of things I was paying for. I think IT is finally time for us to do the thing that kind of been lurking in the background, this whole episode, which is to confront to ourselves exactly how much money we've been wasting with all passive subscriptions. We totally forgot about jeffer you?

No, no, no, no.

To take a look in the financial mirror.

No, this is a journey that you're going to have to go on by yourself.

What you talking you about.

I do not want to know. I support you in your journey if you want to know the truth.

So I linked my credit card in blank statements, and suddenly I found myself staring at a list of all my recurring payments. okay? Oh god, there there are a lot of things on this list.

Apple store, eighteen thirty eight, he doesn't say what that is. Auditable fa ninety five. Google one, maybe that's storage to eleven per month. Paramount plus, twelve ninety seven. Peacock, I have p cock and paramo plus and hulu and max, I feel a little dishy.

I think it's time to face the music. You wanted this tell us the number hiding .

near the top was the number we had been looking for. Oh god, okay, i've got the, i've got the total money per year that i'm apparently spending .

in .

subscriptions. okay? Outrages seven thousand, three hundred and seventy .

nine dollars a year. No, what is happening makes .

you I think, I think I have to sit down.

That's six hundred doors a month.

Now, to be fair, about two hundred fifty dollars a month. We're going to car insurance and a bricklin storage unit, neither which feels exactly like a subscription. But in any case, i've been spending an of seen amount of money on subscriptions.

Is this going to make you do anything different going forward?

A well, I think I think i've got some decisions to make. Um I think I think enough to spend the afternoon doing a kind of mariko do style accounting.

We'll just remember what mary condo says as you're letting things go. Say a little thank you .

for their thank you for your subscription service.

okay. Well, good luck.

Thanks, man. Alright, what is still Sparking joy and what has to go? The chess APP cancell IT.

The triple a membership. I definitely need that. I'm going on a big road trip.

My co, my car insurance. I obviously have to keep playing kindle and list. I don't a kindle OpenAI today is .

epo de was produced by James sneed.

Next up we ve got, huh? Just take one last look at the .

offerings .

before I go. Oh, so gone IT was that .

by just just, oh.

what the hell is this my double paying for H. P. M. max? That is not ideal engineering .

by sea la re a alright.

we are making progress.

Our scold mark is planet moneys executive producer.

OK, see all trails here. I remember the last time I did go, something little sad about that. We are cleaning up here. Cancel, cancel, cancel. yes. Who free?

okay. So after all that, how you feeling.

I feel the way lifting, going to go into the world down, have learned my lesson. You know, I might go back to all trails that I don't know. I'm just low and i'm a lexi horo. It's cozy. This is M. P. R.

Thanks for listen, and thanks for describing .

to play money class. Oh yeah. Go mash that. subscribe.

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