I Would Like to Own Things Again

I am getting increasingly tired of being asked to rent everything I use.

Not rent in the traditional sense, either. There is at least some honesty in renting a flat or a car. Everybody involved understands that I am paying for temporary use of something somebody else owns, and when I stop paying I give it back. The modern subscription economy somehow manages to make that arrangement considerably more annoying by selling me something which looks, feels and behaves like a product, putting a Buy button next to it, taking my money and then quietly explaining in the terms and conditions that I have actually purchased a revocable licence to access it until somebody decides otherwise.

Software, games, films, music, cloud-connected hardware, features inside physical products and things which are already installed on my computer all increasingly seem to want another £4.99, £8.99 or £14.99 every month forever. I would quite like to own things again.

Subscriptions are not inherently bad

I need to get this qualification out of the way because otherwise somebody will inevitably point out that servers cost money. I know. I am a software developer. I maintain online services myself. Domains cost money, servers cost money, storage costs money, bandwidth costs money and developers need to eat. An application which continuously provides an online service obviously has continuing costs, and charging continuously for that service can be entirely reasonable.

I use subscriptions myself. I rely on my mum's shared iCloud+ subscription, for example, and that is exactly the sort of thing where a recurring payment makes sense to me. Apple is continuously providing storage, synchronisation and infrastructure to several people in the family. There is an actual ongoing service behind the payment, and sharing the plan makes it more practical than each of us buying separate storage.

I subscribe to music streaming for similar reasons. An enormous continuously maintained catalogue of music is genuinely a service. If I am using somebody else's compute, bandwidth or infrastructure every month, I do not expect them to provide it forever because I handed them £20 several years ago.

I also receive money for my own software. People support me through GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi, sometimes on a recurring basis, and I am enormously grateful that they do. The distinction is that they are supporting work which I otherwise make available for free. They are not renting access to my repositories from me, and I am not going to disable the software on their computers if they stop sending money.

Someone supporting my work because they find it useful is choosing to help me keep making it. They still get the same software if they cannot afford to support me next month, and somebody who has never sent me a penny can use the same free software as somebody who has supported me for months. The payment is support, not permission.

What annoys me is not money changing hands or developers earning recurring income. It is when the subscription is not funding an ongoing service so much as replacing ownership because recurring revenue looks nicer on a spreadsheet. There is an enormous difference between pay us while we continue providing something and pay us forever or the thing you already have stops working, and the technology industry seems increasingly interested in pretending those are the same thing.

Software used to be something you bought

There was an extremely complicated purchasing model for software which worked approximately like this: you bought the software.

That was basically it. You bought a particular version, installed it and used it. Eventually a newer major version appeared, and if its new features were useful enough, you could buy the upgrade. If they were not, you could continue using what you already had until compatibility or your own requirements eventually made upgrading worthwhile.

This arrangement had an interesting consequence: the company making the software actually had to convince you to buy the next version. If version 12 was perfectly adequate, version 13 needed to contain enough improvements that handing over more money made sense.

Subscriptions reverse that incentive. The ideal customer is no longer somebody who looks at a new version and decides it is worth purchasing; it is somebody whose bank account quietly loses money every month and who cannot stop paying because their workflow depends on the software. The product does not have to earn another sale so long as cancelling remains sufficiently inconvenient.

I do not think software should receive free updates forever, and I do not think developers should be expected to maintain an application indefinitely because somebody bought it once fifteen years ago. I just think there was something healthier about the transaction when both sides knew what was being sold. Give me version 1.0 for £30, let me keep version 1.0 and make version 2.0 good enough that I want to give you another £30. That seems considerably less hostile than charging £8 every month until one of us dies.

A subscription for something already inside the thing I bought

Software subscriptions annoy me, but subscriptions attached to physical hardware make me question whether we have collectively lost our minds.

If I buy a physical product and the hardware required for a feature is already physically inside that product, I have an extremely difficult time accepting that I should need to continue paying the manufacturer to let me use it. You manufactured the component, I bought the device containing the component and it is sitting in my house. Why am I renting permission to use part of my own property?

This is where the subscription economy stops looking like a convenient financing model and starts looking like companies trying to discover how many times they can sell the same object.

There are reasonable exceptions. A security camera using somebody else's cloud servers has continuing infrastructure costs. A satellite-connected emergency feature has an external network behind it. If the thing I am paying for actually involves somebody continuously providing something outside the device, fine. That is the same reason I do not object to something like iCloud+: the storage and synchronisation do not magically exist inside my phone or Mac. Apple is actually providing infrastructure on the other end.

But if a feature can function entirely locally and the only thing preventing it from doing so is a Boolean somewhere saying subscription_active = false, fuck off. That is not a service; that is a toll booth somebody installed inside my property.

"Purchase" has developed a very flexible definition

Digital media makes this even stranger. I have absolutely no problem with renting a film. If something says Rent for £3.49, I know exactly what I am getting: I pay £3.49, watch it within the allotted period and then lose access.

What I object to is a storefront using the word Buy when the transaction underneath it is considerably closer to an indefinite rental.

This distinction matters because digital ownership can exist. A DRM-free music file can be copied between computers, backed up and played with whichever compatible software you want. If the shop it came from disappears next week, the file does not suddenly notice and self-destruct out of solidarity. That is substantially closer to ownership than a game which requires an authentication server to approve your presence every time you launch it, a film which exists in your library only for as long as a licensing agreement remains intact, or an ebook which can theoretically disappear from the ecosystem through which you purchased it.

Maybe there are perfectly good legal reasons why those things are licences rather than property transfers. Fine. Then stop calling the button Buy.

I never actually experienced owning music

This is where I have a slightly strange relationship with the usual argument about streaming replacing music ownership, because I never really experienced owning music in the first place.

There was no point in my life where I had built up a large collection of CDs or records and then watched Spotify and Apple Music gradually replace it. By the time I was old enough to develop my own taste in music, accessing music through the internet was already normal. Streaming is not something which arrived halfway through my life and displaced the way I previously listened to things; it is basically the environment I started in.

When somebody older than me talks about their music collection, they can mean a collection of actual objects or files they bought and possessed. They could still have the same album decades later regardless of whether a record label had renegotiated a licensing agreement. My idea of a music library, by contrast, has mostly been a list of things a service knows I like.

That difference is quite strange when I think about it. I can have thousands of songs neatly arranged in a library, playlists I have spent years building and a listening history going back a significant portion of my life without actually owning most of the music involved. The interface makes it feel like a collection because it looks permanent, right up until a track becomes unavailable, an album is replaced by a different release or some licensing agreement changes and the little square in the library reminds you what it actually represents: permission.

I am not angry at music streaming for working this way. The whole product is explicitly an enormous library I pay to access, and I know that when the payment stops, the catalogue goes with it. That is a subscription doing exactly what it says it does. Frankly, I like streaming. Having millions of songs available from my phone is fantastic, and it has let me discover an absurd amount of music I probably never would have encountered if listening to an unfamiliar album first required buying it.

What I find more interesting is that I am young enough that the access model does not feel like a new replacement for ownership. It feels normal. I did not lose music ownership; for the most part, I never had it. That makes it particularly weird watching the same model spread into more and more categories of product where there is no technical reason ownership has to disappear.

"Freemium" increasingly means "we will annoy you until you pay us"

There is another part of the subscription economy which I find particularly irritating, and that is the modern version of freemium.

I understand the basic model. A company lets people use a limited version of a service for free, advertising or paying customers subsidise it, and some users eventually decide that the paid tier offers enough value to upgrade. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

The problem is when the free version seems deliberately designed to make itself unpleasant.

Spotify is probably the most obvious example from my own experience. Advertising on a free music-streaming service is completely reasonable; somebody has to pay for the music being streamed. What got particularly obnoxious was Spotify advertising Spotify Premium to me through Spotify itself, repeatedly interrupting the thing I was using to explain that the thing I was using would be better if I paid Spotify to stop interrupting it.

That was actually part of what eventually pushed me towards Apple Music. The irony is obvious: I did not escape subscriptions, I moved from a freemium service to a paid subscription service. That is exactly why I do not think the subscription itself is the problem.

I would rather knowingly pay for an ongoing service I use than spend my time inside a deliberately degraded version of that service being repeatedly reminded that the company has manufactured a better experience and will give it to me if I start paying. Apple Music is still access rather than ownership, and I am under no illusion about that. If the subscription disappears, so does my access to most of the catalogue. At least the basic relationship is straightforward: this is a paid music-streaming service, I get the service while it is paid for, and the application does not need to spend half its time trying to upsell me to the service I am already using.

The same pattern is everywhere in mobile software. A perfectly ordinary app opens with an advert, you dismiss it and use the app for thirty seconds, then another advert appears. A banner sits permanently at the bottom of the interface, something starts flashing in the corner, and eventually a full-screen prompt explains that all of this unpleasantness can disappear for only £5.99 per month.

Mobile games can be even worse. Finish a level and get an advert. Retry it and get another. Claim a reward and watch an advert. Decline the advert and receive another prompt asking whether you would like to buy the ad-free subscription instead.

There is an obvious distinction between this free product contains advertising because advertising funds it and we have engineered the free experience to be sufficiently irritating that paying us feels like the only sane option. The second one barely feels like a free tier at all. It feels like a demonstration of the punishment you can escape by subscribing.

I don't want to subscribe to remove artificial problems

This is what makes some modern app subscriptions feel particularly cynical. The subscription is not always adding a genuinely ongoing service; sometimes it is removing problems the developer deliberately inserted into the unpaid version.

Pay monthly and the adverts disappear. Pay monthly and the artificial limits disappear. Pay monthly and the pop-ups stop asking you to pay monthly. Pay monthly and the application behaves like a normal piece of software.

I am much happier paying for something because the paid version does something valuable than because the free version has been deliberately made obnoxious. There is a meaningful difference between Premium includes cloud syncing, additional storage and server-side processing and Premium makes the interface stop attacking you. The first is a product offering. The second feels uncomfortably close to extortion with rounded corners.

Obviously, developers need some way to fund free applications, and advertising can be a perfectly legitimate part of that. I would rather have an ad-supported application exist than have useful software become completely inaccessible to anyone who cannot afford it.

What I object to is the escalation. Advertising becomes intrusive advertising, intrusive advertising becomes deliberately inconvenient product design, and the inconvenience then becomes the sales pitch for the subscription. At some point the customer is no longer being shown why Premium is better; they are being shown why Free is worse.

Mobile software has normalised an absurd purchasing model

Mobile apps in particular seem to have normalised subscriptions for things I would once have expected to simply buy.

A small utility does not necessarily need to become an ongoing £2.99-a-month relationship. Neither does a basic photo filter, a calculator, a scanner, a wallpaper app, a simple note-taking utility or whatever other tiny piece of software happens to be passing through the App Store that week.

Again, there are exceptions. If the application is paying for AI inference, cloud storage, external APIs, continually updated datasets or some other recurring cost, a recurring payment can make perfect sense. But when the application is largely running locally and the justification boils down to "we would like recurring revenue", I start wondering why I cannot just buy the thing.

£2.99 per month sounds tiny until you remember that it is nearly £36 every year. Keep an app for five years and that £2.99 utility has now cost you about £180. For something like a calculator, that becomes absurd very quickly.

This is part of why subscription pricing is so good at disguising how much something actually costs. The monthly figure is deliberately small enough to feel disposable. Nobody would necessarily pay £180 upfront for a basic utility, but £2.99 feels like barely anything, so the total cost remains abstract. Repeat that kind of monthly charge across five, ten or fifteen services and suddenly the subscription economy becomes a permanent tax on your digital life.

I don't want everything as a service

There is something slightly dystopian about the phrase as a service when it gets applied to enough things.

Software as a service makes sense when the software actually is a service. Email hosting, cloud storage, a hosted website and a continuously updated online database all involve somebody continuing to provide infrastructure after I start using them. A calculator running locally on my laptop is not a fucking service.

At some point we need to be allowed to distinguish between infrastructure and products again. Not everything improves when it becomes an ongoing relationship between me and a corporation. Sometimes I want to hand somebody money, receive a thing and then never speak to them again.

I do not need an account, a membership, an app or an onboarding email congratulating me on joining the community of people who own a fucking kettle. I bought the kettle. Please leave me alone.

It also makes everything feel temporary

This is the part of the subscription economy I dislike beyond the actual cost: nothing feels permanent.

I have software from years ago which I can still open. I have games which will continue functioning whether the company which made them remembers they exist or not. I have files copied through several computers which are probably older than some of the services I currently use to access media. There is something reassuring about knowing those things can continue existing without somebody else's server giving them permission.

A subscription cannot provide the same feeling because its continued existence is conditional. The price might increase beyond what I can justify. The company might change the plan, discontinue the application, get acquired or decide that maintaining the service is no longer profitable. I might lose access to an account, or some licensing agreement might change in a meeting I will never know happened.

I can make backups of things I own. It is considerably harder to back up permission.

That does not mean I need to own the infrastructure behind every service I use. I am perfectly happy benefiting from shared iCloud storage without expecting Apple to hand my family a server rack. It does mean that I want the things which can reasonably belong to me to actually belong to me.

This is partly why I care about local-first software

I think this is also tied to why I keep gravitating towards local software, open source and protocols where my data does not have to belong entirely to one application.

I like knowing where my files are, being able to export things and having software continue to function when my internet connection disappears. I like formats which another program can understand, and I like the possibility that if a developer disappears tomorrow, somebody else can still make the thing work.

None of those things require everything to be open source, and open source does not magically solve ownership on its own. It is just a much healthier relationship with computers than pretending every interaction needs to pass through a company's server forever.

My computer should primarily work for me, and a product I bought should primarily work for me. That really should not be a radical position.

Recurring revenue is wonderful when you're the one receiving it

I understand perfectly well why recurring revenue is attractive. I benefit from recurring support myself.

Some people choose to support my work through GitHub Sponsors or Ko-fi. That money genuinely helps. Maintaining software takes time, domains cost money, and there are things I would find significantly harder to keep doing without people voluntarily deciding that the work is worth supporting.

I therefore cannot sit here pretending that recurring payments are somehow inherently exploitative while happily accepting recurring support myself. The difference is what the payment controls. If somebody stops sponsoring me, the software does not suddenly lock itself, their copy does not deactivate and they do not lose access to a repository they were previously allowed to use. Someone who has never sent me a penny can use the same free software as somebody who has supported me for months.

The payment is support, not permission.

I am planning something slightly different for Inkwell: a flat £3 (or equivalent) price through the major app stores, while the existing free methods of downloading it remain free. That is about as complicated as I want the arrangement to be. If somebody wants the convenient store distribution, they can pay once for it; if they do not, the free routes remain there.

A voluntary recurring donation says, essentially, I want to help you continue doing this. A one-off app purchase says this product or distribution method is worth this amount to me. A mandatory software subscription says continue paying me if you want to continue using this. A particularly aggressive freemium model adds a fourth variation: continue paying me if you want me to stop making this deliberately unpleasant.

Those models can all put money in a developer's pocket, but they create very different relationships between the person making something and the person using it.

I understand why businesses prefer predictable recurring revenue. One person paying £100 once is worth £100, while one person paying £10 every month for five years is worth £600. Companies can forecast it, investors like it and customers become recurring entries on a spreadsheet instead of people who need to be persuaded to purchase the next product.

From my perspective as the customer, though, I now have to periodically inspect my bank statement to check how many organisations have attached small financial leeches to it. £2.99 does not look expensive, neither does £4.99, and neither does £8.99. Then you have eight of them.

The entire model relies partly on each individual subscription feeling small enough that cancelling it is more effort than continuing to pay. That does not make every subscription malicious, and clearly I am not opposed to developers making money or receiving recurring financial support. I just much prefer recurring payments which exist because somebody still wants to make them rather than because something they already rely on is being held behind them.

Ownership should still be an option

I am not asking for subscriptions to disappear. I do not even necessarily want them to.

Subscriptions are useful when I genuinely want an ongoing service. My family sharing one cloud-storage subscription is an obvious example. Music streaming is another. Sometimes spreading the cost of expensive software over time can also be considerably easier than paying hundreds of pounds upfront.

What I want back is the choice.

Sell me the subscription with cloud storage, constant feature updates, online services and technical support, then, where it actually makes sense, sell me a licence which lets me keep the current version forever. Charge for major upgrades, servers, additional services and the work required to maintain them. Just stop pretending that everything must remain permanently attached to your billing system in order for software development to be economically possible.

There are other ways to sustain software as well. People can pay once for an application. They can pay for major upgrades, hosted versions of otherwise free software or additional support. They can donate because they value the work, or sponsor development because they want it to continue.

That obviously will not finance every piece of software on Earth, nor am I pretending it will. My projects and a company employing hundreds of developers have completely different financial requirements. The point is simply that making money from software, receiving recurring revenue and making continued access conditional on recurring payment are three different things.

There is room for several models. One customer can want ongoing cloud services and updates; another can want to buy an application and keep that version of the application. Someone else can use free software and voluntarily support its developer because they want it to continue existing.

What I do not think we need is every application converging on the same model where the free version is full of adverts, the paid version is another monthly bill and the concept of simply purchasing the software has mysteriously vanished from the interface.

Let products be products

I think that is ultimately what annoys me about the subscription economy. It is not the existence of monthly payments; it is the slow erosion of the idea that buying something should result in owning something.

A subscription used to describe an ongoing service. Now it increasingly describes a business strategy, and "freemium" increasingly seems to describe the funnel used to get you there.

Give somebody enough functionality to become dependent on the product, surround that functionality with adverts and restrictions, repeatedly explain that all of the irritation can disappear for a small monthly fee and then keep collecting that fee indefinitely. It works, and in Spotify's case it worked well enough on me that I eventually decided I would rather just pay for a different music service.

That does not mean I have to like the model.

The product cannot simply be finished and sold. It needs an account, a cloud dependency, recurring features, a free tier designed around conversion, a Premium badge, a reason to keep charging and some mechanism through which the manufacturer remains involved in the relationship long after I have handed over the money.

The strangest part for me is that I am not really nostalgic for some glorious age of ownership because, in several areas, I am too young to remember it. I never had a personal music collection for streaming to replace. Subscription services, accounts, adverts and digital licences were already normal while I was growing up. Much of the erosion had happened before I was old enough to notice there was anything to erode.

Maybe that is why I care about it.

I do not want to reach thirty and realise that practically nothing in my digital life can survive a missed payment, a dead company or a server being switched off. I am perfectly happy paying for something which continues to provide me with a service, paying a reasonable one-off price for software, or accepting recurring support from people who voluntarily want my own work to continue.

What I do not want is a relationship with every company whose products I use where continued payment is the only thing separating ownership from a kill switch, or where the "free" option exists mainly to demonstrate how irritating the company is willing to make my life until I subscribe.

Sometimes I just want the product.

Take my money, give me the thing, and then, unless I decide I want to buy something else from you, please fuck off.