The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

The Hatch Restore alarm clock, which retails for $169, can light up your bedroom in every hue, soothe you to sleep with audio meditation sessions, and keep you in a REM cycle with a full catalogue of white noise options. To utilize these features, though, you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.

Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.

This rant isn’t really about streaming platforms. While I do wish there were fewer of them, their relatively low monthly fees give you access to ever-growing libraries of content that you can easily stop paying for when your beloved comedy series ends. Nor do I have it out for wine clubs, laundry services, gym memberships, or the like—businesses that offer discount pricing for frequent customers.

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars.

Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They’re often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We’re effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it’s only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Companies would argue these models benefit consumers, not just their bottom lines. For example, HP’s Instant Ink program suggests you will never again find your device out of ink when you need it most. The printer apparently knows when it’s running low, spurring automatic deliveries of ink to your home for $7.99 per month if you select the company-recommended plan. But if you cancel the subscription, the printer will literally hold hostage the half-full cartridges already sitting in your printer. The ransom to use it? Re-enroll.

(As a workaround to the subscription madness, you can buy individual ink cartridges at Staples or Amazon, but as of nine years ago, only HP-branded ones will work. The company has added firmware to its technology that deliberately blocks cheaper, off-brand cartridges from working at all.)

I have subscription fatigue for those Oura fitness rings, too. Technology has come a long way in the wearables category, from the basic pedometers of the 2000s to the newer health devices that can prompt you to seek lifesaving care. It makes sense that the latter would cost more than the former, but I’d much prefer to pay a higher price upfront and not encounter arbitrary paywalls blocking core hardware functions.

The subscriptions that car manufacturers increasingly sell may be the most irksome of the bunch. General Motors has announced its new vehicles won’t support Apple CarPlay, a popular technology that enables drivers to connect iPhone maps, music, and other apps to their car’s built-in display. By blocking drivers from using something that works and is free, GM will be able to charge the people who buy its $37,000 Silverados for GM data plans that currently start at $10 per month. Remote start used to be a free perk or one-time-fee upgrade on new car purchases, but Toyota started charging $8 per month for it around 2021. Programming vehicles to open garage doors has been an accessible technology for more than 20 years, but Tesla now charges drivers $45 per year for it. In 2022, BMW even tried to make its customers pay $18 per month to use heated seats already built into its cars, but its customer base got so heated (sorry), that the car manufacturer backtracked on its decision.

If I haven’t convinced you we’re now living in subscription hell, just know that there’s even a subscription service that enables you to track and cancel your piling subscriptions—for just $6 to $12 per month.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed