Comment by muvlon
9 days ago
I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.
Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly.
Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. If you want to cancel your thin client you have to build a PC. Most modern consumers live on a knife edge where $20/month isn't perceptible but $1000 is a major expense.
The classic VC-backed model is to subsidize the subscription until people become complacent, and then increase the price once they're dependent. People who self-host are nutjobs because the cloud alternative is "cheaper and better" until it stops being cheaper.
My bank has an option to send me a notification every time I'm charged for something. I've noticed several bills that were higher than they should have been "due to a technical error". I'm certain some companies rely on people not checking and randomly add "errors".
Notably there's no way (known to me) that you can have direct debits sent as requests that aren't automatically paid. I think that would put consumers on an equal footing with businesses though, which is obviously bad for the economy.
Wasn’t aware about charge notifications. Looks like my bank supports that - thanks for the info!
> My bank has an option to send me a notification every time I'm charged for something.
Wait, your bank doesn't do that by default? I've always assumed it's default behavior of most banks.
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If it's random surely you'd get a discount sometimes!
> The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection.
I did Apple Music and Amazon Music. The experience of losing “my” streaming library twice totally turned me off these kinds of services. Instead I do Pandora, and just buy music when I (rarely) find something I totally love and want to listen to on repeat. The inability to build a library in the streaming service that I incorrectly think of as “mine” is a big feature, keeps my mental model aligned with reality.
I do wish these services would have an easier method to import/export playlists and collections. But that would make it easier to leave, so its not going to happen.
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> if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection
You don't need a whole DVD collection to cancel Netflix, even ignoring piracy. Go to a cheaper streaming service, pick a free/ad supported one, go grab media from the library, etc. Grab a Blu-Ray from the discount bin at the store once in a while, and your collection will grow.
Music is different, but I never understood buying movies. Once I see a movie, I've seen it. I very rarely watch a movie more than once.
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You can only boil the frog until it dies. If there isn't a true dependency relationship then at some point the industry will die.
In the 2010's, when short on money, I noticed my cable+Internet package was above $200. I took a look at things and cut the TV service, keeping the Internet.
Movies and theaters thought they were untouchable until they weren't. Games can keep increasing their subscription fees until people just stop playing them. There was a world before video games, after all.
This is something I’ve been seeing for a while. As a teen that kept his 300 dollar paycheck in cash that money would last a very long time. Now I make a good 6 figures and was seeing my accounts spending way more than I should. It wasn’t big purchases it was 50 dollars here 200 hundred there. A subscription here and there. By the end of the month I would wrack 8k in spending.
Going line by line I learned how much I neglected these transactions being the source of my problem. Could I afford it? Yes. But saving and investing is a better vehicle for retirement early than these minor dopamine hits
Sure but modern cloud subscriptions have a lot of service layers you otherwise won't pay for so effectively you may be buying the hardware yearly that's a lot different than renting a media collection that would be assembled over a lifetime for the price of one new item a month.
> Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people.
This is so apt and well stated. It echos my sentiment, but I hadn't thought to use the boiling frog metaphor. My own organs are definitely feeling a bit toastier lately.
the best con of all is convincing ppl they need Hollywood in their lives to be happy
Difference is that if subscription goes up from $10 to $15, that doesn't seem to bad.
But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)
Building a PC price is not double lol and RAM is nowhere near up 6-8x
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g...
That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC.
RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build.
GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP:
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-prime-nvidia-geforce-rt...
SSDs are up marginally, maybe $50 more lets say for a 2TB.
So from summer you are looking at like a $250-350 increase on say a $1500 PC
Where I live, a pair of Kingston FURY Beast Black RGB DDR5 6000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) has literally gone up from what is equivalent to $125 this summer, to currently selling for what is equivalent to $850.
Obviously this depends on where you live.
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Here is some proper data:
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
The same site also has price trends for CPUs, video cards, etc.
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Corsair Vengeance 128 GB (2 x 64 GB) DDR5-6400. $339 in Sept 2025. $1599 in Jan 3026. 4.7x increase. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/LPvscf/corsair-vengeance-12...
I cancelled my plans to upgrade my workstation, as the price of 256 GB of RAM became ridiculous.
The MRSP for those GPUs is already inflated. There's a reason Nvidia is going to start making more RTX 3060 GPUs. Because people (and system builders) can't afford 40XX and 50XX GPUs.
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I paid $150 for a 64GB DDR5 in Jan 2025. That is today $830 representing 5.5x.
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Difference is subscriptions need to support IT staff, data centers, and profit margins. A computer under your desk at home has none of those support costs and it gets price competition from used parts which subscriptions don't have.
Cloud (storage, compute, whatever) has so far consistently been more expensive than local compute over even short timeframes (storage especially, I can buy a portable 2TB drive for the equivalent of one year of the entry level 2TB dropbox plan). These shortage spikes don't seem likely to change that? Especially since the ones feeling the most pressure to pay these inflated prices are the cloud providers that are causing the demand spike in the first place. Just like with previous demand spikes, as a consumer you have alternatives such as used or waiting it out. And in the meantime you can laugh at all your geforce now buddies who just got slapped with usage restrictions and overage fees.
Subscription is still worth it for most people though. Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge.
If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However make sure you are comparing the real costs - not just the 2TB, but the backup system (that is tested to work), and all your time.
That said, subscriptions have all too often failed reasonable privacy standards. This is an important part of the cost that is rarely accounted for.
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> ...that doesn't seem too bad.
Yep, "seem". But the reality is more like 3 different subscriptions going up by $5/month, and the new computer is a once-in-4-years purchase:
$5/month * 3 subscriptions * 48 months = $720.00
And no bets on those subscriptions being up to $20 or so by the end of year 4.
But if you finance the computer (not hard to get 0% financing on consumer electronics), the price goes from $41 a month to $62 a month. It’s the same difference.
For whatever reason, people are just more into paying for $10 / subscription fees, than they into financing stuff.
To such a degree that they able to pay for a bunch of subscriptions they completely forget about.
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For some reason I think people are less likely to finance a computer, but maybe not, given that phone financing is a thing.
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> wait the price hikes out for a couple years
Or much longer. The computers I use most on a daily basis are over 10 years old, and still perfectly adequate for what I do. Put a non-bloated OS on them and many older computers are more than powerful enough.
And Linux being good for gaming now (thanks Valve!) makes this option more attractive than ever.
And the inability to run rootkits is a bonus, not a drawback.
Netflix says hello lol
Every increasing prices
Password sharing forbidden
Etc etc
And still making more and more money.
People are willing to take a beating if they are entertained and pay a lot more
There must be a breaking point. We’ve reached ours last year, when price went up again and my grandfathered plan wasn’t accepted anymore. So I talked to the missus and we cancelled our Netflix.
It had been my account for, what, a decade? A decade of not owning anything because it was affordable and convenient. Then shows started disappearing, prices went up, we could no longer use the account at her place (when we lived separately), etc. And, sadly, I’m done with them.
I think most people will eventually reach a breaking point. My sister also cancelled, which I always assumed would never happen.
> I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up
Of course they will go up, that's the whole idea. The big providers stock on hardware, front-run the hardware market, starve it for products while causing the prices to rise sharply and at that point their services are cheaper because they are selling you the hardware they bought at low prices, the one they bought in bulk, under cheap long term contracts and, in many cases, kept dark for some time.
Result - at the time of high hardware prices in retail, the cloud prices are lower, the latter increase later to make more profits, and the game can continue with the cloud providers always one step ahead of retail in a game of hoarding and scalping.
Most recently, scalping was big during the GPU shortages caused by crypto-mining. Scalpers would buy GPUs in bulk then sell them back to the starved market for a hefty margin.
Cloud providers buying up hardware at scale is basically the same, the only difference is they sell you back the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.
People rent things they can’t afford to own.
That's one common reason for renting, not the only one.
I've rented trailers and various tools before too, not because I couldn't afford to buy them, but because I knew I wouldn't need them after the fact and wouldn't know what to do with them after.
You could never afford a hyperscaler size data center. You could always just buy a server and stick it into Colo. it’s just not totally the same thing
I can't afford the ram and storage in the server anymore though. So it kinda is the same thing.
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I also couldn't afford to rent one.
I can afford to rent fractional use of one, but by that token I could also afford to buy a very small fraction of one too.
Is this true? I'm trying to think of a solid example and I'm drawing blanks.
Apartments aren't really comparable to houses. They're relatively small units which are part of a larger building. The better comparison would be to condominiums, but good luck even finding a reasonably priced condo in most parts of the US. I'd guess supply is low because there's a housing shortage and it's more profitable to rent out a unit as an apartment than to sell it as a condo.
It seems to me that most people rent because 1) they only need the thing temporarily or 2) there are no reasonable alternatives for sale.
Check out the furniture rental industry. Car rental (lease) industry. Electronics rental industry.
Lots of people rent houses, it’s not just apartments.
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or just not ready for commitment (try first, buy later, etc...)
Exactly, if you can’t afford the high upfront cost that you can stretch out over a longer period of time, you’re stuck paying more over the long term as the subscriptions get more expensive.
Because the World Economic Forum, where our political and corporate leaders meet and groom each other, point-blank advertised "you will own nothing and be happy."
We’ve been raised to believe “experiences make you happy, not things.”
Everything as a service is the modern marketing ideal.