The subscription market, especially for subscription services, streaming content seems to have reached a ceiling. The new measures and prices of Netflix have caused more than one (including me) to unsubscribe from the service, and it seems that the increases in fees are ending up tiring users.
Given this, there is a type of integrated purchase or plan that seeks to convince with a somewhat extreme tactic: either make a very large payment but obtain use of the application “for life” in exchange, or a cheaper monthly fee than normal which is also “forever” if you never unsubscribe. But these offers end up having a trick.
It’s not your whole life, it’s all HIS life
We have the best example with the offer that HBO Max offered as soon as it was launched in Spain: its standard price was 8.99 euros per month but it was offered for 4.49 euros per month if you signed up before a specific day. The price was maintained as long as you did not unsubscribe.
A year and a half later, drums beat to break that promise. HBO Max wants merge with Discovery, calling himself simply ‘Max’. And that may be the excuse for the lifetime plan of 4.49 euros per month to disappear.
SkyShowtime, which has just landed in Spain, has a similar offer: 2.99 euros per month if you subscribe now and “forever” if you do not unsubscribe. But nothing prevents SkyShowtime from deciding to close or merge with another service, making that offer dubious. Usable, but doubtful.
Would you pay a 3-year subscription to an app all at once to use it for the rest of your life, with no guarantee that the app will disappear at any time?
So far we have examples of subscriptions that if they are canceled do not harm us at all, but the worst can come with lifetime single payments. That is to say: services that offer you a subscription but alternatively a large one-time payment with which you get “lifetime” rights.
Here we can mention the Agenda application, which has an annual subscription of 41.99 euros in the App Store but alternatively you can purchase lifetime rights to use your plan premium for 139.99 euros. Or what is the same: pay in advance 3 years and 4 months in exchange for using it all your life. But of course… Will Lifetime Agenda be available in the App Store? What happens if you make that lifetime payment and after six months they decide to close?
For an application, a lifetime may be too long. Everything changes, new software appears, new devices, which can change the rules and make the applications we use now obsolete. Let’s look at GPT-4, without going any further.
Therefore, before deciding to make these large payments, you have to think carefully if the service will be there forever. I remember how many paid the lifetime bills of megaupload, a service that has been dead for years. It must not be nice to have something like this happen to you.
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