Subscription Economy: Is it a good thing for users?
Subscription has become the most popular models for business development. Does this shift benefit the user?
We are quickly moving away from 100% ownership of digital values we buy. We buy books, music and fitness training from apple which we cant download. It only gets available to us offline. We also cant transfer them to other platforms because we only own some percentage of it.
The good thing is that owning amazon books through a kindle saves us the stress of carrying physical books while moving countries. Amazon will also continue innovating around it; provide software updates that improve your interaction with the book as you continue owning it.
One of the main benefits of using cloud-based products are the insights from the analysis of massive usage data. For example, Kindle will underline the most highlighted words by other users as you read through a book or magazine.
The downside, for the user, is that your usage of the product is limited to the features the platform can provide. You can’t also carry a book that you made important notes and highlights to another platform. You can’t even download it to your device.
Customers pay for the products to be available to them for a specific time. Freezing membership will mean that you will also loose the products you bought in their reused form. So if you paid for Amazon unlimited, borrowed a book and made notes on it, when you fail to pay for your monthly subscription you will also be unable to access your notes from a book.
For companies, they get to foretell their revenues before payments are made. Unlike 100% ownership models, subscription models keep the customers spending; because they buy the availability of a product for a specific period of time.
Is it worth it at a customer’s point of view? That will depend on the added value, product price and security of the company providing products.
