Everything is subscription-based - so how much am I paying for the services I use every month?

I wrote about closing down my Dropbox account last week. During the weekend I had some time to reflect back on that decision (for which I am still happy with), and also the amount of money I paid for Dropbox over the months. It was close to  $1400 in total over 10 years, or so.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 10 years. For the first two years, I struggled, quite a bit, with making ends meet. I think it’s part of the journey when you decide to bootstrap your business. After a few years, the business started looking better and I was able to pay myself a decent salary. Far from the salaries and bonuses, I got while working at Microsoft, but still decent to get by. Even if in the last two years I’ve been a little better off, I still remember – with a little bit of fondness, too – the struggles and challenges I had.

This got me thinking further. Most services and offerings I’m signed up for are based are subscription-based – how much am I actually paying for the services that I use every month? And do I need all these services?

I decided to tally up the services I use and pay for and decide then. I’m also slightly late, as I did some cleaning up earlier this year but even then I figured it would be a solid financial decision to verify my subscriptions.

I came up with this list:

Service

Monthly cost

Used since

Total payments

Netflix

14,99

Jul, 2019

14,99

Spotify Family

14,99

Mar, 2016

595

HS (Newspaper)

30

Jul, 2019

180

Harvard Business Review

8,25

Mar, 2019

99

Google Photos Storage

1,99

Jan, 2019

17,91

Plex

4,99

Nov, 2017

104,79

Going through the list quickly; Netflix I haven’t had in years anymore. I finally relented and signed up for it this summer, as my kids kept complaining there is “nothing to see on TV/Plex/DVDs/Apple TV.” Okay, it’s only 14,99 € so why not. This plan gives me 4K support and 4 simultaneous streams.

Spotify Family has been a necessity for years now. I upgraded for the family model when my two oldest sons grew old enough and started asking for Spotify access. I use it quite a bit myself too, as can be seen from this snippet from Spotify’s statistics:

That’s about 29 minutes, each day. For 14,99 € I think it’s reasonable, but it still surprises me – it’s 50 cents a day for 29 minutes of music.

HS (Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland) I didn’t subscribe to for years. Their online portal is great, and many of the articles are free. Now that I’ve been working more from home I felt it would be nice to have something to read in the morning that wasn’t digital. The deal was 180 € for 6 months, so 1 €/day including print, online and digital (are these not the same? anyways).

I subscribed to Harvard Business Review in March this year. Partly for my studies, partly to broaden my horizon. I tried the New York Times and a few other US-based newspapers, but HBR felt best. Their vast online archive has been invaluable for some of my homework, so the price is well justified.

Google Photos grants me, I think, 10 GB of storage space for free. With the additional plan, I get to upgrade storage to 100 GB. My photos currently take 20 GB, so this makes sense. I used the service daily, especially for sharing photos of our family trips for the extended family.

Finally, Plex. It’s an interesting service, that I’ve used for a few years now. It’s free, but a Plex Pass is required for some of the premium features. For me, it’s the recording of broadcast TV and offline sync that I use most. I realize now that Plex offers a lifetime – one-time fee essentially – that I haven’t bothered to purchase. Perhaps it’s time to switch to that one, someday.

Plex offers a nice set of built-in statistics, which shows me that in our household we’re semi-active users:

To visualize my subscription cost, I plotted the values in Excel and it came out with this piechart:

HS (the newspaper) is about double for what I pay for any other service. Then again, it’s about 2400 pages of content each month – delivered to my front door.

Lifetime cost paints a different picture:

Spotify, which I’ve had for over 3 years, has obviously cost me the most – about 600 €, so far. That’s a lot to pay for having music in the background when you work.

Normalizing these for the current year gives some additional insights:

The newspaper is still the largest individual investment at 40 %, while Spotify is 20 %, as well as Netflix. The others are negligible in terms of payments, totaling 20 % of monthly subscription fees.

In conclusion

As much as I like to think of myself of being on top of things, it’s still eye-opening to list simple things like monthly subscription fees to see the state of things. It’s surprising how much Spotify, in the end, costs me. Even if I use it daily, it’s still 180 € a year. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, that would integrate so nicely with everything I’ve currently integrated Spotify (the car, Sonos speakers, TV, etc).

I’m happy I’ve pruned a lot of useless services from my life, some which cost me money, yet I’m still certain I could perhaps cancel a few of these services without sacrificing much at all. Amazon Prime is something I canceled before the holidays this year, as I realized I didn’t have any use for it.

I highly recommend anyone reading this to do this same kind of exercise, as it only takes a few minutes but can be very enlightening!