I went through my bank statement last week. Not for taxes, not for anything responsible — I was looking for a charge I didn't recognize. Eleven dollars, some company name that sounded like a Scandinavian furniture line. I never found out what it was. What I found instead was worse.
Twenty-six subscriptions. Twenty-six separate companies with standing permission to take money out of my account every month, in perpetuity, forever, until I die or remember to cancel.
And here's the part that actually got me: I don't own a single thing any of them provide.
I Used to Own Things.
I had a CD collection. Physical discs in a book with plastic sleeves, alphabetized, because of course it was. If the record label went out of business, I still had the album. If I stopped paying anyone anything, I still had the album. It was mine in the plain, boring, unambiguous way that things used to be yours.
Now I pay a monthly fee for access to roughly every song ever recorded, which is objectively an incredible deal, and I own exactly zero of them. The day I stop paying, the entire library evaporates. Not the ones I never listened to — all of them. Including the sixty songs I've played a hundred times each. I've spent more on streaming over the last decade than I ever spent on CDs, and I have nothing to show for it but a playlist that only exists on someone else's server.
Same with movies. I "bought" a film once, on a platform, for fifteen dollars. There was a button that said Buy. Two years later it wasn't in my library anymore — licensing changed, the studio pulled it, and I got a store credit. That's not buying. That's a long-term rental with a nonrefundable deposit and a button that lies to you.
There was a button that said Buy. That's not buying. That's a long-term rental with a button that lies to you.
Software Was the First Domino.
People forget that software used to be a thing you purchased. One number, one time, and then it was on your machine and it worked until you decided otherwise. I still have discs somewhere for programs I bought in the early 2000s that would probably still run if I had anything left that reads a disc.
Then everything went to a monthly seat and the industry never looked back, because why would it. Recurring revenue is the best business model ever invented. I say that as a guy who runs businesses. I'm not mad at the model — I understand the model, I've used the model, the model is correct if you're the one collecting.
What I'm mad at is that it colonized everything else. It didn't stop at software. It went for music, TV, books, storage, fitness, news, my car's heated seats — an actual physical object I paid for, sitting in my driveway, with features locked behind a monthly fee. Somebody in a boardroom looked at a chair that already had wires in it and thought: what if the chair was a service.
The Real Cost Isn't the Money.
Twenty-six subscriptions is a number that sounds insane until you list them and realize almost every one of them is defensible on its own. Nine dollars. Twelve dollars. Six dollars. Nobody ever made a bad decision signing up for a six dollar thing.
That's the design. The price is set at the exact level where auditing it costs more attention than it saves you money. They're not competing for your dollars. They're competing for the twenty seconds of friction it would take you to cancel, and they are winning, because you have a job.
Subscriptions on one bank statement. I use maybe nine of them in a given month. I could not name all twenty-six from memory right now.
But the money isn't what bothers me. I can afford it. What bothers me is the permanence I gave up without noticing. Everything I "have" is now conditional. Conditional on a company staying solvent. Conditional on a licensing deal renewing. Conditional on some terms-of-service revision I'll never read agreeing that I still get to keep what I already paid for.
I build infrastructure for a living. I spend my days thinking about what happens when a link goes down, when a provider folds, when the thing everyone depends on stops answering. And then I go home and keep my entire personal life on other people's servers under month-to-month terms. That's not a philosophy. That's just what happened while I was busy.
What I'm Actually Doing About It.
I'm not going full analog. I'm not buying a turntable and telling you about the warmth. Streaming is genuinely better for ninety percent of what I do, and pretending otherwise would be a costume.
But I've started drawing a line. Things I actually care about, I want a copy of. Books I'll read twice, I buy on paper. Albums that mean something, I own a file of — a real file, on a drive I control, that nobody can un-license out from under me. My website is hand-built HTML on a domain I own, and now I understand that wasn't just stubbornness. That was the last thing I never rented.
And I killed eleven subscriptions in one sitting. Took me forty minutes. Two of them I had to phone a human to cancel, which tells you everything about how much they wanted me to succeed. One of them I had been paying for since 2021 for a service I stopped using in 2022.
Own the things you'd be upset to lose. Rent the rest. It's not complicated — it just requires paying attention once.
Go Read Your Bank Statement.
Not the summary. The line items. All of them, one month, top to bottom.
You're going to find something you forgot about. You're going to find a price that went up eleven percent last spring and nobody told you. You're going to find at least one thing you've been paying for since a year you can't remember, for a reason you can't reconstruct.
Cancel it. Then go buy one thing — one — that stays yours after you stop paying.
I never did find out what the eleven dollars was for. I canceled it anyway.