You know what really frosts my flakes?
Needing an app to manage all my subscriptions.
This rant idea came from one of my listeners, Don Gleason, and Don may have uncovered one of the greatest scams of modern civilization.
Has the subscription economy completely spiraled out of control? Why else would we suddenly need another monthly service just to keep track of all the other monthly services?
It used to be simple. You bought something and owned it.
- Today, you rent everything:
- Movies.
- Music.
- Television.
- Software.
- Cloud storage.
- Security systems.
- Fitness programs.
- Photo editing.
- Meal kits.
- News sites.
- Meditation apps.
- AI apps.
Even my thermostat wants $9.99 a month and a password now.
Apparently, we now have so many subscriptions quietly draining our bank accounts that companies created subscription-management apps to help us remember what we are paying for.
That’s insane. We need subscriptions to help us manage subscriptions and, naturally, many of those apps also charge a subscription fee.
So now you are paying monthly to monitor the monthly payments you forgot you were already making.
That’s like hiring a personal assistant to remind you that you hired too many personal assistants.
The entire business model today is built around hoping you forget.
They hook you with a free trial.
Then they offer a “special annual discount.”
Then they quietly auto-renew it at 2:14 in the morning 14 days before it’s due when nobody is paying attention.
Suddenly your credit card gets hit for $149.95 because apparently you agreed to lifetime premium platinum ultra-plus access to something you used twice in 2024.
And good luck canceling it.
Signing up takes six seconds. But, canceling requires solving a riddle, sacrificing a goat and navigating 14 hidden menu screens designed by escaped carnival workers.
“Are you sure you want to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like a temporary pause instead?”
“No.”
“How about 10 percent off?”
“No.”
“What if we emotionally guilt-trip you with photos of sad employees holding puppies?”
“JUST CANCEL THE STUPID THING.”
Now, to be fair, the subscription apps really do exist because people are drowning in recurring charges. Many of them either let you manually enter subscriptions or connect directly to your bank accounts and credit cards to automatically detect recurring payments.
Well, that sounds comforting. Now I can hand over all my financial information to another company so a robot can tell me I’m spending too much money on other companies.
That’s just what I need. Another app monitoring every nickel I spend so it can send me cheerful little notifications. “Congratulations! You spent $847 this month on streaming services you only watch while falling asleep.”
And I guarantee somewhere in Silicon Valley there’s a marketing executive saying: “You know what would really help consumers? A premium version with more AI-generated alerts.”
They call all this “budgeting technology” and “expense tracking.”
What happened to balancing a checkbook? Oh right, nobody uses checks anymore.
Now everybody waves around painless little credit cards that don’t even feel like money until the monthly statement arrives looking like a ransom note.
And what really frosts my flakes is that credit reporting agencies are now getting involved in the subscription tracking racket, too.
At this point I fully expect my refrigerator to send me a notification saying: “Your milk subscription renews tomorrow. Upgrade to Premium Dairy+ for ad-free yogurt.”
I’m Grandpa Grumpy and we used to own things. Now we rent our own lives one automatic payment at a time.
Ask nicely and maybe I’ll start a subscription service so you can pay me to complain every day.