The Subscriptions I Forgot I Was Paying For

Author's note

I promised this one at the end of the last two issues, and then almost didn't write it, because it meant being honest about my own spending in public. But this whole series is about software that fails the people who use it - I'd be a coward to point at everyone else's unused tools without looking at my own. So I opened my statements and counted.

I pay for eleven software subscriptions.

I know this because I finally sat down and counted, which I'd been avoiding for about a year. Eleven. Some are work, some are personal, and some I genuinely couldn't tell you why I'm still paying for.

Then I asked myself one question, tool by tool: when did I last actually open this?

For three of them, the honest answer was "I don't remember." Not "last month." Genuinely couldn't recall the last time I logged in. One I'd been paying for over a year and used maybe twice.

I'm not telling you this because I'm careless with money. I'm telling you because I don't think I'm unusual. I think most people reading this have their own three - the tool you signed up for with real intention, used for a week, and quietly stopped opening, while the payment kept going out every month, on time, unnoticed.

→ See what a tool built around one person looks like → thinkroot.dev

The pile everyone's paying for

There's a particular guilt attached to these subscriptions.

You don't cancel them, because cancelling means admitting it didn't work - and somewhere in your head, you still believe you'll "get into it properly" next month. So the unused tool sits there, a small monthly tax on your own hope, and you look away from it.

Multiply that by everyone. A whole industry partly funded by tools people bought, didn't fit into their lives, and feel too guilty to cancel. The unused gym membership, but for software. Except you have eleven gyms.

And here's the part that connects to everything I've been writing: you didn't stop using those tools because you're lazy. You stopped because they didn't fit. They were built for the average person doing roughly what you do, and you bent yourself to them for a week or two, and then real life won and you went back to whatever actually works for you. The spreadsheet. The notes app. Your own head.

The subscription is the receipt for a tool that was never yours.

What I started asking instead

Once I'd seen the three dead subscriptions, I couldn't unsee the question underneath them: what was I actually trying to do when I signed up for each of these?

Not what the tool did. What I needed. The tool I bought to track something, the one to organize something, the one to remember something. Underneath each dead subscription was a real need I still have - the tool just wasn't shaped like my need, so I stopped using it, but the need never went away.

And that flipped the whole thing for me. I don't have three tools I'm wasting money on. I have three needs I never actually solved, that I'm paying a monthly fee to keep not solving.

The uncomfortable part

Here's the question I can't put down now, and it's uncomfortable because of what I do for a living.

If I could describe the tool I actually needed - the one shaped exactly like the need under each dead subscription - and have it built, for me, in an afternoon... what exactly am I paying eleven monthly fees for?

I don't think the answer is "nothing." Some of those tools are genuinely good, and some needs are common enough that a shared tool fits fine. But three of mine were always going to be too specific to me for an off-the-shelf tool to fit. Those three were never going to work, no matter which one I bought, because the problem wasn't the product. It was that I needed something built around me, and that wasn't possible - so I kept buying the closest average and feeling like a failure when it didn't stick.

That's the part that's changing. Not that software got cheaper. That software can finally be yours.

I cancelled the three. I'm building one of them this week.