I’ve never really felt subscription fatigue before but in these trying times I’ve needed to look closely at my finances and figure out what I can both let go of services that I don’t or rarely use and ones to get into to help others where I can afford to. It’s uncertain for a lot of folks in terms of careers and their livelihood and the first step for me to watch my outgoings was to look at the iOS App Store and the subscriptions that I had on-going - some of which I’m ashamed to say that I completely forgot I was paying.
Thankfully most were monthly so I cancelled everything apart from my Apple Music and iCloud subscriptions. With the Reminders improvements and widgets in iOS 14 I’m confident I can let subscriptions like TODOIST go and use Apple apps. If it doesn’t work out I’ll fall back to OmniFocus where I have already paid for the app. I’ve also started to use Apple Notes for my writing, something else that I was paying a third party app for, even though I hardly used the app. I can post from Notes to Micro.Blog easily enough - even if it means copy and pasting to and fro apps.
In terms of platforms I’ve been dropping ones that bring complication or negatively impact my wellbeing. I dropped my blog plan at Wordpress, deleted Twitter and invested in Micro.Blog, a platform where I can blog, share my thoughts and have genuinely great conversations. Not that I don’t have great interactions with some on Twitter but the negative outweighs the positive, especially since I started doing my own podcast. I also find the app infuriating and I cannot go near the news right now, I don’t have a choice with it being thrown at me in the official app.
Recently I’ve also been hearing a lot of membership options on podcasts and to be honest it’s helped me trim down my queue. Not that I have an issue with podcast membership, I don’t and support several but when I hear hosts seemingly throwing their money away or being rude to listeners then I just can’t support them. Whilst I do listen occasionally it annoys me when I hear hosts talking down to people trying to help, or seem to spend a large amount of money on unnecessary purchases.
With TV services I’ve stuck to buying movies on iTunes and subscribing to Disney+, I dropped Netflix and don’t pay for Amazon Prime. For me as a massive Star Wars fan I get everything I need here - if anyone fancies starting a Star Wars positive podcast let me know…
I think that’s it for tech related subscriptions, how are you feeling or managing these with everything going on the world right now?
