Harmful convenience: Rundle

I hate reoccurring payments. They feel a little bit like debt to me, it’s just something I want to avoid whenever possible. Obviously you can’t do it entirely unless you plan to live in a shed like Ted. So things like utility bills are unavoidable and not the kind of payments I mean. I mean the kind of reoccurring payments that have slowly started to become the new normal for a lot of people, because everything is a subscription based service nowadays. You now like Amazon Prime, Spotify, heated car seats, Netflix etc. Apparently this business model is called the “rundle” or reoccurring bundle. Sounds about as retarded as it is. I mostly know it from software as a service, where something that used to be a one time payment which resulted in you owning an actual digital or analog good is now a monthly payment. You pay five bucks a month and in turn you get access to one of the largest online libraries of music, audio books and podcasts. You pay another monthly fee and now you’ll get food delivered to your house multiple times a week. Or maybe you just want to view a live stream without ads so you shove another five dollars down the throat of someone you have never and will most likely never meet and most importantly is already filthy rich.

It once again comes down to convenience, at least for the most part. Spotify (and similar services) is easy to use. You just log in and you can search for thousands of songs, it syncs across multiple devices and if you’re willing to pay they even let you “download” the songs so you can play them offline… using their app to deal with the DRM. The average person wants things to be as simple as possible and is willing to pay for it to achieve that. Just like with other digital services there is no long term thought involved. Or people think that they can just keep paying for Spotify until they kick the bucket. If you miss a payment or you lose your account you’re locked out of that large library of music or movies. Maybe they’ll just hike up the prices in the future. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s just a hypothetical in the future, so who cares. And if it does happen people will just have to pay up, after all what’s the alternative? Buying songs? Pirating them? Ridiculous. What would be the advantages? Having a local copy that you can play on any device using any player you like? Once again: Convenience is key. Easily having access to all your music from anywhere is more important than FLACs and a myriad of different possible audio players to choose from.

This argument can be dragged on for most other digital subscription services. It does however get a bit harder when we start to get into things like subscriptions for car features. I feel like you’d be hard pressed to find people willing to justify paying a monthly subscription for heated seats or extra horse power. The only justification I’ve heard so far is that it’s good because then you only have to pay for the feature during winter, i.e. when you need it. I’m no car expert so I don’t know how much heated seats usually cost extra in a car, which means I don’t know if that would actually be cheaper, but I have a feeling that it is not. In fact I feel like this will save the manufacturer money and cost the car owner more. After all companies, especially the big ones, are interested in money. If this was going to lose them money or keep the earnings the same there’d be no reason to do it.

Ultimately I can’t stop people from burning their money on services. The problem is that it’s getting worse and worse. More and more things are turning into monthly subscriptions and I’d say that for a lot of people it has become so bad that they wouldn’t be able to tell you how many services they’re subscribed to and how much that costs them in total. In my opinion one of the only justifiable ways of using a subscription based service is when sharing it to drastically reduce the cost. Pairing that with tools that bypass the DRM means that you get access to the large library while being able to save and archive all the songs or movies you want. Other than that I can really only hope that the ever increasing amount of services will eventually be the downfall of the business model. We can already see it somewhat with streaming services. At one point Netflix was all you needed and you’d get basically everything you’d want but now you have to subscribe to like six different services if you want that same variety. So maybe people will just get tired of it all together. Pirating would definitely be easier at that point.

Finally I’d also always recommend considering self-hosting. It’s not exactly straightforward but it can save you some money and gives you control over your data. It’ll also replace a bunch of subscription based and privacy invading services with just one regular payment. If you end up hosting at home it’d be even cheaper. I pay roughly seven bucks a month for a VPS and get whole lot out of it and I’m not even close to using up its resources:

¹Examples, there’s obviously different ones, some might cost more
²Technically free, but they obviously monetize users in the usual ways
³Same as ², but also has free-tiers, which are limited
*Just took the first cheap service I could find, prices might vary

As you can see there’s almost always a “free” alternative for most services, but at the same time just one payed subscription already costs more than a cheap VPS. Now Neither Jellyfin nor Navidrome come with any music, so you’ll either have to pay for that or get it via the usual means. Either way you’ll build up a library that you actually own while still maintaining the convenience that makes Spotify so popular.

So while hosting your own stuff might cost you a bit of time, it can save you money and takes back control over your data. Also most of these services can easily handle a dozen or more users, so if you share the server with other people it would not only move more people away from the proprietary services but also significantly lower the cost.