7 ms·

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just sub

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet. Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

beAbU 2y ago
Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.
- aimazon 2y ago
  I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand. If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates. It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host. The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
  - jaza 2y ago
    I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.
import 2y ago
You’re the main income source for the Netflix :)
larusso 2y ago
Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that. About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
- vasco 2y ago
  I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.
- quser1 2y ago
  that's called car rentals :)
  - larusso 2y ago
    Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :) I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
  - BossingAround 2y ago
    With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA. When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks. When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available. In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it. [0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes
tedsanders 2y ago
5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.) https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-account-cancellation-453241/ https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...
- BossingAround 2y ago
  To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn. I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle. The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
    - stavros 2y ago
      I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.
      - 2y ago
idle_zealot 2y ago
> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it. Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.
  - InfiniteTitan 2y ago
    Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?
paranoidrobot 2y ago
Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too. I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.
mihaaly 2y ago
We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly) Kagi in the other hand is useful. Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )
vachina 2y ago
lol we’ve gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a movie model.
kmacdough 2y ago
Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.
omega3 2y ago
I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.
jcul 2y ago
Yeah I do this for some services, subscribe and cancel immediately so I don't forget. It works quite well.

beAbU 2y ago

Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.

aimazon 2y ago
I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand. If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates. It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host. The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
- jaza 2y ago
  I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.

import 2y ago

You’re the main income source for the Netflix :)

larusso 2y ago

Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that. About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.

vasco 2y ago
I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.
quser1 2y ago
that's called car rentals :)
- larusso 2y ago
  Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :) I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
- BossingAround 2y ago
  With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA. When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks. When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available. In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it. [0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes

tedsanders 2y ago

5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.) https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-account-cancellation-453241/ https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...

BossingAround 2y ago
To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn. I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle. The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
  - stavros 2y ago
    I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.
    - 2y ago

idle_zealot 2y ago

> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it. Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.

robertlagrant 2y ago
See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.
- InfiniteTitan 2y ago
  Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?

paranoidrobot 2y ago

Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too. I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.

mihaaly 2y ago

We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly) Kagi in the other hand is useful. Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )

vachina 2y ago

lol we’ve gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a movie model.

kmacdough 2y ago

Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.

omega3 2y ago

I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.

jcul 2y ago

Yeah I do this for some services, subscribe and cancel immediately so I don't forget. It works quite well.