*Yes, I know I already used “Apocalypse” in my book title. That’s called branding, or lazy writing, or both. Speaking of which, you should buy “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse” where I discuss other ways modern life is systematically destroying us. Consider this essay a preview of my inability to let go of a good metaphor.
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
I had a moment of clarity last Tuesday at 2 AM while doing a quarterly credit card review because sleep is for people without anxiety disorders. This wasn’t the good kind of clarity, like finally understanding quantum physics or remembering where you left your keys. This was the bad kind. The kind where you discover the full extent of hidden subscription costs bleeding you dry while you sleep.
There it was, nestled between “Gas Station, Richmond” and “Amazon, Probably Socks”: Inhale.io Premium, $4.99
An app. That teaches you. How to breathe.
I’ve been doing this since 1966. Successfully, mostly. I mean, I’m still here, so clearly my lungs have figured out the basics without a subscription service. But apparently, during a panic attack in 2022, I decided that five dollars a month was reasonable insurance for the option of remembering how oxygen works. Downloaded it, used it once, then forgot about it the way you forget about that gym membership, except the gym membership at least has the decency to make you feel guilty.
That was the gateway into the subscription trap. The first crack in the dam. Once you start looking, you can’t stop. It’s like finding one cockroach in your kitchen. You know there’s an entire civilization behind the baseboard, probably with a mayor and a public transit system.
The Streaming Services Subscription Trap We All Acknowledge
Let’s start with the obvious culprits. The ones we know about and have made peace with, like hostages developing Stockholm syndrome.
Netflix. Hulu. Disney+. Max, which used to be HBO Max, which used to be HBO Go, which used to be just HBO back when names made sense. Oh, and Paramount+. AppleTV+. Peacock. Amazon Prime Video.
We’ve successfully reassembled cable television, except we somehow made it worse. We went from “there’s nothing on TV” to “there’s everything on TV, but it’s spread across seventeen different platforms, and I need a PhD in Streaming Architecture to remember that The Office moved to Peacock but Parks and Rec didn’t, and also Peacock? Really? We named a streaming service after a bird that screams at you and shows you its ass?”
I’m paying $247 a month to maintain access to content I’ll never watch because I spend all my time scrolling through menus trying to decide what to watch. We’ve created a digital hellscape where the decision paralysis IS the product. The content is just bait. The real service they’re providing is the illusion of choice while you slowly die inside.
But fine. That’s the stuff we talk about at parties. That’s the devil we know. The real horror of hidden subscription costs lives in the middle layers, like some nightmare archaeological dig through your bank statement.
The Layer Where Forgotten Subscriptions Go to Multiply
Somewhere between “responsible adult with streaming services” and “why does my bank account hate me” lies a stratum of auto-renew subscriptions that made sense at the time but now exist purely as monuments to optimism we no longer possess.
Headspace Premium, $12.99/month to learn meditation from an app narrated by a British guy who sounds suspiciously chipper—like he’s selling you a timeshare in nirvana rather than actually having transcended earthly suffering. I used it twice. Both times I fell asleep during the “body scan” portion and woke up disoriented with my face on a corduroy pillow (“They’re making headlines!”), which feels like the exact opposite of mindfulness.
HelloFresh, $89.99/week for the privilege of still having to cook dinner, but now with more cardboard and less ability to improvise. Oh, you need half an onion for this recipe? Great news! We’ve sent you exactly half an onion. Do NOT think about using your own onion. That would be chaos. That would be anarchy. We’ve pre-portioned your life into plastic bags, and if you deviate from the instructions, you’ll probably burn your house down.
Premium LinkedIn, $39.99/month to see who’s been creeping on your profile, which is mostly recruiters for jobs you’re not qualified for, and that one guy from high school who’s now selling insurance and also possibly in a cult.
The Patreon/OnlyFans Industrial Complex, the real minefield of recurring payments. Five bucks here, ten bucks there for your favorite podcast about true crime, or D&D, or true crime committed during D&D. Twenty bucks for “exclusive content” from that comedian whose Netflix special you watched once. They’ve convinced you that giving them money makes you “part of the community,” which is just capitalism in a friendship bracelet pretending to be grassroots support.
And then. THEN. There are the ones that show up on your bank statement as innocuous transaction codes that you desperately hope your spouse doesn’t ask about.
“Honey, what’s this $19.99 charge to ‘Content Creator Platform LLC’?”
“Oh. Uh. That’s… I’m supporting independent journalism.”
“Which journalist?”
“You wouldn’t know them. They’re very niche. Very… educational. Lots of… investigative reporting. On… contemporary issues.”
“Are you paying for porn?”
“It’s not PORN, it’s… it’s artistic nude photography with a focus on… look, we all make questionable financial decisions at 1 AM, Karen.”
Some people drunk-order replica swords from Amazon. Some people subscribe to OnlyFans accounts they’ll look at exactly once, feel vaguely ashamed about, then forget to cancel because the cancellation process requires you to re-enter your billing information, and nobody’s horny enough at 9 AM on a Tuesday to do that kind of paperwork. The real crime isn’t the subscription. The crime is that it auto-renews, and there’s no “I made a mistake and would like to pretend this never happened” button in the settings.
Cloud Storage, $29.99/month for 2TB to store photos you’ll never look at again. Thirty-seven near-identical pictures of your cousin’s baby. Four hundred screenshots of tweets that seemed important in 2019 but now read like archaeological artifacts from a civilization that worshipped dunking on strangers.
Password Managers, $35.99/year to remember passwords for all your subscription services. We’ve reached peak absurdism. We’re paying a subscription to manage our subscriptions. It’s recursive capitalism. It’s the snake eating its tail, except the tail is also paying rent.
The Hidden Monthly Charges: An Archaeological Dig Through Forgotten Subscriptions
But those subscriptions? Those are the ones I remembered. The ones I could at least justify with “well, I meant to use that.”
The real treasures of hidden subscription costs emerge when you scroll back through bank statements with the dedication of a homicide detective looking for evidence. This is where it gets bad. This is where you realize you’ve been slowly bleeding money to things that might not even be real companies.
WineAccess Monthly, $67/month. Here’s the thing: I DO drink wine. A lot of wine. Probably too much wine if we’re being honest, which we’re not because this is a humor essay and not an intervention. But this subscription sends me “curated selections from boutique vineyards” that taste like someone dissolved a pencil eraser in grape juice. Last month I got a Slovenian orange wine that cost $43 a bottle and tasted like if a barn could ferment. I have seventeen bottles of wine I’ll never drink sitting in a closet while I go to the grocery store and buy the same $12 cabernet I always buy, like a functional alcoholic with brand loyalty. The subscription bottles just sit there, judging me, their fancy labels mocking my pedestrian tastes. (Hint: I DRINK NOT FOR THE TASTE BUT FOR THE ALCOHOL CONTENT. D’UH!)
CrystalBox Monthly, $34.99 for three rocks that a teenager in Nevada probably found behind a Denny’s parking lot. Every month, a box arrives with three new rocks and a card explaining their “healing properties.” Last month, I got one that allegedly “promotes clarity and focus.” I have thirty-seven of these things now. I cannot find my car keys or my wife.
Affirmation SMS, $6.99/month for a bot to text me “You matter, Jennifer!” at 6 AM. My name is not Jennifer. I don’t know who Jennifer is. I haven’t figured out how to unsubscribe since March 2021. Jennifer keeps mattering. I keep paying. Somewhere, Jennifer is thriving while I’m getting increasingly aggressive morning texts clearly meant for someone else’s mental health journey.
The Artisanal Ice Cube Collective, $29/month for designer ice. Ice. Frozen water. Shaped like little pyramids because apparently cubes are for peasants. I signed up drunk after a dinner party where someone said “craft cocktails,” and I wanted to seem sophisticated instead of like someone who drinks whiskey straight from the bottle while standing in front of the open refrigerator at midnight. (by the way, fuck you Negroni! Those big ice cubes mean less booze.)
PetFlix, $8.99/month for videos specifically designed for your cat to watch while you’re at work. Videos of birds. And squirrels. And more birds. The last video I caught her “watching” was an eight-minute one of pigeons eating garbage. The cat has never looked more bored, which, for a cat, is saying something.
That NFT Thing, $15/month for something I genuinely cannot explain. The transaction description just says “DIGITAL ASSET MAINT.” I’m maintaining a digital asset. What asset? Or maybe it is a baby ass that needs perpetual cleaning? No idea. Where is it? Unclear. According to my bank, they’re billing me from a server farm in Estonia. It’s the financial equivalent of a ghost story, except the ghost is real and taking money.
Coffee “Sourced From Monks”, $47/month for beans allegedly blessed by someone who may or may not be an actual monk. The coffee tastes identical to Folgers. I called the phone number on the website. It’s a Taco Bell in Riverside, California. I’m being scammed by either a monk or someone pretending to be a monk, and honestly I can’t decide which is worse.
BarkBox, $29/month for dog toys. I don’t have a dog. I’ve never had a dog. I have a pig named Trouble McFussbucket. The pig does not play with dog toys. The pig judges me silently every time the box arrives. The UPS guy makes eye contact when he hands me the box. We both know what’s happening here.
The Reckoning That Changes Nothing
So here I sit at 3 AM, surrounded by the evidence. I’m paying recurring fees for things humans have done for free since the invention of consciousness. Breathing. Meditation. Making ice. Positive self-talk during bathroom activities.
We’ve collectively forgotten how to exist without a billing cycle. Somewhere a caveman is laughing at us from beyond the grave. He made his own ice by putting water outside during winter. He didn’t need an app to remind him how his respiratory system works. He just breathed. And lived. And probably died from a minor infection at age thirty-four but at least he died debt-free.
The Ultimate Subscription Trap: Paying to Cancel Subscriptions
And here’s where we reach terminal velocity, the event horizon of capitalist innovation where irony collapses under its own weight: there are now subscription management services that will help you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions.
For a monthly fee.
Pause. Breathe. Really let that metastasize in your brain. You pay a company $9.99 a month to tell you what you’re already paying other companies every month, and then they’ll cancel those subscriptions for you, because apparently we’ve reached a point in human evolution where clicking “unsubscribe” requires outsourcing.
I signed up for one. Of COURSE, I did. It was called something like “SubscriptGuard” or “BillBlocker” or one of those names that sounds like it was generated by an AI that learned English from infomercials. The website promised “Take Back Control Of Your Financial Life” which is marketing speak for “you have utterly lost control of your financial life and we’re going to profit from your shame.”
The signup process was smooth. Too smooth, but with many screens of test questions and loading bars that said “Building your clean future.”. Red flags everywhere but I was exhausted from manually trying to cancel subscriptions and couldn’t face another round of “Are you SURE you want to cancel? What if we told you about our new bird videos?” So I gave SubscriptGuard access to my bank account, which in retrospect feels like hiring a fox to guard the henhouse but whatever, the henhouse was already on fire.
Three days later I got an email. Subject line: “We Found $347 in Hidden Subscriptions!”
They’d found them all. The crystals. The affirmations for Jennifer. The Estonian NFT ghost. The monk coffee scam. Everything. Seeing it all listed in one place was like looking at an itemized receipt for my descent into consumerist madness. Each line item a small monument to a moment when I thought “yes, this will fix me.”
“Click here to cancel all unwanted subscriptions!” the email said.
I clicked.
The next screen: “To cancel your subscriptions, upgrade to SubscriptGuard Premium for just $9.99/month.”
I sat there. Stared at the screen. Read it again. Then again. The beautiful, perfect circularity of it. The sheer audacity. They’d found my forgotten subscriptions. Showed me the financial bloodletting. Got me emotionally invested in the solution. And now they wanted me to… subscribe… to cancel my subscriptions.
I laughed. Then I cried a little. Then I entered my credit card information.
A Conclusion of Sorts?
Now, I’m too busy sitting on my porch watching Trouble McFussbucket root around in the mud, completely free of subscriptions, billing cycles, and capitalism. She doesn’t know what an app is. She’s never paid for anything in her life. She just exists, moment to moment, in a state of perfect financial zen.
She’s got it figured out. The rest of us are just paying monthly fees to pretend we do too.
Key Takeaways
- The article humorously explores the absurdity of hidden subscription costs that drain our finances unknowingly.
- It criticizes the overwhelming number of streaming services, which create decision paralysis instead of enjoyment.
- The author recounts personal experiences with forgotten subscriptions, exposing the convoluted cancellation processes.
- They reveal the irony of subscription management services that charge a fee to help consumers cancel unwanted subscriptions.
- In the end, the author invites readers to subscribe to a free newsletter, embracing the hypocrisy of participation in the subscription trap.
Related Links
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
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