Subscriptions
A drain or cost effective?
Seen a few posts recently with people listing their subs. Thought I’d join in.
I really don’t like subscriptions, and would much rather pay once and be done with it. Once you join and commit, they have you, it can be hard to leave. The upside is that if you don’t like it, it’s minimal expense to stop. Photoshop used to be hundreds of pounds but now it’s just ten. Of course in those days, 30 day demos or similar were common. Anyway here goes (Monthly prices):
- Amazon Prime - £95 per year (£7.92 per month)
- Netflix - £16 increasing to £18. We have premium to get downloads on more than two devices.
- TV licence - £13.25. Required to watch BBC, even via iPlayer. A weird one.
- Spotify - £10.99. Currently just premium for my wife, but we have had the family one in the past.
- Apple iCloud 50 GB - £0.99
- HP instant ink - £4.49. This is for 100 pages a month. I could probably drop down a level, we had a brief patch of printing a lot but think that’s past. £2.99 gives 50 pages a month.
- Domains - I’ve seem to have spent £75 (£6.25/m) this year on six domains. Can definitely cancel one and I should investigate transferring them elsewhere.
- Liteserver VPS - €26.40 per year (£1.93 /m). A Black Friday deal. Might see what they have again this year and transfer if it’s cheaper. Although less hassle just to stay
- MXRoute email hosting - $5 per year (£0.25/m). Another Black Friday deal from years and years ago. I just keep it as it couldn’t be matched again. Don’t even use it though…
- Two SIM only phone contracts for us - £8/m each. Usually sign up for another deal each year to reset the price.
- Tesco delivery saver - Currently about £0.20 per month but only as we used clubcard points to buy vouchers for this. It’s £29.94 for 6 months of offpeak delivery.
- Amazon kids+ - £38 per year (£3.17/m). Did get last year on a promo for £20 but haven’t seen any recently. We have two Kindle fires which the kids play on and having access to everything is pretty good. They’ve got a lot of use out of it. If I can find another promo that would be good, although the annual fee just hit recently so maybe not much scope in the near term.
Total: £83.44 per month
That includes netflix increase, which will put it at 22% of the total, with TV licence next.
Other subscription services we use but only when free, generally via promos:
- Apple music
- Apple TV
- Disney+
- Oracle free VPS
I debate about getting Apple One for 2TB of storage, music, TV, and to some extent apps. The kindle fires are ancient, and were $20 refurbs from 2018, but still going. However, at some stage I suspect they’ll die and we probably won’t replace them, but rather we’ll have enough hand-me-down iPads to take their place. This plus the likeihood our eldest will get a phone next year means that the free apps might be useful. The 2 TB of storage would be nice to then backup all my photos into Photos.app and enjoy the benefit of that. TV is nice add-on, which I wouldn’t pay for separately. Music would be great if we could leave Spotify. We think Spotify is a better app to use, and works much better with streaming to our house speakers (powered by Google Chromecast audio). Better off paying for family spotify as I think everyone would rather have it. This just then makes Apple One not that worthwhile. If I want the photos back up then I should just pay the £7/m for the storage.
My wife does have yoga apps she subscribes to, not sure the current status of those but likely paid annually, and maybe there are some other annual things lurking that I’ve forgotten about.
So not too bad overall. I keep thinking about raising the subject of cancelling Netflix but it does get watched a lot by everyone.