I'm tired of subscriptions

I’m a little tired of subscriptions. Not in a dramatic, but in the quiet way of watching small monthly charges marching out of my account every month.

Not so long ago, software used to be sold in more one-time formats and used until it actually stopped working. It lived on your machine and did the job offline. It might not have had every new feature, but if it helped you get work done, that was enough. You paid once, and nobody emailed you every month asking if you still believed in the product and taking your money just because you have a CD. Now everything is a service, which is another way of saying "you only keep it as long as you keep paying".

This text isn’t meant to give instructions on what to do. It’s more of a reflection on how subscriptions have become so common, and on how dependent we’ve grown on other people’s platforms and services. If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s worth thinking about how much control you actually want over your own tools.

Why is everything a subscription now?

Subscriptions are everywhere now. Want to watch a film? Pick from seven platforms and somehow still miss the one movie you wanted. Want to watch all the sports leagues I like? Great - now I need three different subscriptions. Free delivery? Join Amazon Prime, because paying to avoid paying is apparently normal now. Want to lose weight? Monthly fee. Want to write down my thoughts and have them synced across devices? Monthly fee. Want to store data? Want to read the news? Make a subscription again.

Work is no better. Basecamp, Toggl, GitHub, Bitbucket, Figma, Surfshark - the list keeps growing. Now AI has joined the pile. OpenAI, Claude and the rest promise to save time, money, and effort, then they quietly take a monthly cut too, even when I might barely use some of them sometimes. That’s an easy hook. If something feels useful, cancelling it feels like giving up something important, so you keep paying while telling yourself it still makes sense.

Could you quickly answer how many monthly fees you have? I thought I had it under control because I only paid for the important things. Then I made a list, and the total genuinely surprised me. If I had to manually approve every charge each month, I would have caught it sooner. But the whole system is built to make that fade into the background. Connect a card, and the money starts drifting out of your life in tiny pieces.

Why does “only $10” add up so fast?

I’m not pretending companies invented subscriptions out of pure evil. Cloud infrastructure costs money. Security updates cost money. Good developers cost money. Managed services are often better than the old software-on-a-disc era, and recurring revenue makes sense if you’re the one collecting it. One-time sales are transactions. Monthly billing becomes a habit.

What bothers me is how easy it is to accept all of it without thinking. I’m often the one who says, “Oh, it’s only $10. I might need it once.” I may justify each purchase individually, but together they can have a much larger impact on my budget than I expect.

I do not blame companies for this. Nobody is forcing me to subscribe to three sports services, two cloud storage plans, and an app that tells me how many calories I added after eating a banana. The model works because it’s easy. That is also why it gets dangerous. It starts as optional, then it becomes expected, and then it becomes part of how you work, and that’s when the real dependency shows up.

How do AI tools make us dependent?

This is where AI tools make things interesting. Once something like Claude becomes part of your daily workflow, it stops feeling like a tool you chose and starts feeling like a tool you need. That is a strange place to be. I have already seen developers ask themselves when they last wrote code without an agent doing half the thinking. Even as a very experienced developer, I feel awkward when I reach usage limits and have to do basic research on my own.

The recent backlash around Claude’s pricing changes is a good example of what I mean by dependency. What stood out to me wasn’t just that people were annoyed, but that many people had already built their entire process around Claude itself. At that point, the tool isn’t just helping you work, but starting to decide when you can work.

Not because I think these tools are bad. They are amazing, and I use them all the time, too (you can read how we actually work with AI at Coditive if you're curious), but provider lock-in can make switching difficult once a workflow depends too much on them. Prices go up, usage changes, features disappear, and suddenly you’re paying more or rebuilding your habits from scratch. I’m never going to be fully independent, but I do want the option to move without my whole setup collapsing like a folding chair.

Can I replace subscriptions somehow?

So that’s the direction I decided to test in practice. I started building a small web app for myself: one place for the parts of my workflow that don’t really need to live across five different subscriptions. Notes, thinking, organization, and AI support - but in a setup that stays flexible enough for me to switch tools, providers, or even local models without rebuilding everything around one company’s rules.

I don’t expect this to solve everything, and for sure I’m not trying to cut every subscription. What I want to test is whether I can stop paying for the small $5-per-month services that quietly add up over time. I want to see what gets easier, what gets worse, and whether having more control is worth the tradeoff. I’ll share the results as I go: what worked, what failed, and what turned out to be harder than expected.

The community is filled with claims like "I vibe-coded an app, and I saved thousands of dollars",  but I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of it is marketing bait. I am a web developer who has created real change for clients for 11 years, so I want to test whether this can work in my own case. If that sounds interesting, follow along. I have a feeling the results will be at least as revealing as the experiment itself.

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