the cloud Archives - Antony Simpson is an Author, Blogger, Nurse & Witch.

The Subscription Trap

Tuesday 4 August 2026 / Antony Simpson / Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The subscription business model has been around for centuries. According to the Cambridge Dictionary (last accessed: 03/08/26), a subscription is:

an amount of money that you pay regularly to receive a product or service.

In recent years, the subscription business model has become popular for music, TV/online streaming shows, films, podcasts, games, software, computer files storage/back ups, AI use, reading of books and for adult content.

People can even sign up to subscriptions for particular physical products, or physical products by a particular brand. There are many companies offering monthly subscription boxes, which contain products around a particular theme or interest.

It feels as though there has been an explosion in companies using the subscription model; often without providing customers with any alternative way to permanently purchase their goods or services. Companies that have decided to move from a purchase business model, to a subscription business model, seem to have done so without any consultation with their customers.

The companies’ message seems clear: If you want to have and use our products/services, you must subscribe. You must pay every month/year.

The Benefits of the Subscription Model for Customers

The subscription model does have benefits for both customers and companies. For the customers, it’s convenient, instant access for digital content, no waiting for deliveries of physical items. Customers get the content that they actually want and streaming services save the customer’s limited hard drive space on their computers/other devices. Streaming can also save customer’s physical space at home, as no DVDs, CDs, players, etc are required.

In recent years, I have noticed laptops and PCs for sale with increasingly smaller hard drives. I have also noticed how difficult it is to get a laptop or a PC with a DVD/CD reader/writer. Making the process of watching a DVD or listening to a CD at home more inconvenient.

Could this be deliberate, to get people away from owning content and instead subscribing to access it?

The Benefits of the Subscription Model for Companies

Using the subscription model has a number of benefits for companies. The value of their product/services changes from a one time sale, to a recurring vale, which increases profits (dramatically in some cases). Subscriptions allow companies to better estimate their future income and in some cases can lead to a better allocation of financial resources for business growth, research and for development of current/future products/services.

When it comes to subscriptions, companies also benefit from vague legal contracts with customers. Companies can be vague, rather than specific about what they offer to their customers and change their offer at any time. Currently, in the UK, I am aware of no legislation aimed at protecting customers who are mis-sold subscriptions, or that provides customers who receive poor quality or even broken products/services with consumer rights or protections when customers have subscribed.

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Subscription Model Problems

As more and more people are signing up to subscriptions, increasing numbers of customers are discovering problems with the business model. The most obvious is the companies expectation that you will pay forever. Some customers report feelings of resentment towards the companies and feel that they are being greedy.

Some customers can feel exploited, knowing that if you stop paying you loose your access to the products/services, your data and possibly settings/customisation. This is the subscription trap, where customers feel trapped by these companies.

Imagine if some customers have become reliant on these subscription services, then experience a sudden and unexpected change in financial circumstances (like loosing their job, pregnancy, illness or saving for a marriage/house/holiday). It could mean these subscriptions suddenly become unaffordable for these customers.

Companies can increase their prices at any time, or even change the subscription model all together, without customers having any say. A recent example of this was Netflix raising their prices in 2022 (not for the first time either), changing their pricing model and introducing advertising.

Many customers have also expressed dissatisfaction at the changes to and restriction of available products/services. There are numerous specific examples of this, but one that springs to mind is when the TV series Willow. It was wiped off the Disney+ platform, after it didn’t perform as well as expected. The series was removed from the platform, not renewed for a second series, without any comment from Disney+. See this reddit discussion thread for more details.

Another example is the removal of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager & Deep Space 9 from Netflix with no explanation. The companies are able to do this due to vague legal contracts that don’t specifically specify what customers get access to and for how long under their subscription contracts.

All companies are collecting more data about their customers than ever before, keeping it forever and using it to make a detailed profile of each of their customers. This creates genuine concerns for customers around the misuse of the data they collect, the security of the data companies hold and some concerns around companies that may choose to share this data with partners, or others, without the knowledge, consent or permission of the customers.

I think a debate is long overdue around data ownership. I feel that any data that is collected about me, especially highly sensitive or specific identifiable data, should be owned by me and not these companies. That they should have to be very transparent with about what they are collecting and why, along with limits for how long they can keep historic data.

Alternatives to the Subscription Model for Customers

There are alternatives to the subscription model for customers. For music, TV/streaming shows, films and games, software, customers should demand production the of physical copies by the companies. Customers should buy physical copies of products whenever possible and maintain a way to use these physical copies.

Sony recently announced that they will stop releasing PlayStation games on physical disc from 2028. If other companies follow suit, this might make avoiding subscriptions impossible for some customers. However, there has already been reports of a significant number of customers unhappy about this decision.

In terms of online file storage customers could avoid this subscription by having a laptop or a PC with enough hard drive storage for their files and use an external hard drive to back up their files.

In terms of free, non-subscription software, I would recommend AVG Antivirus, VLC Media Player, Libre Office, GIMP and the I Love PDF website.

Currently, AI services providers are leaning heavily on the subscription model for tokens for AI use. They are trying to convince both corporate and personal customers, that they can only have access to use AI through their services. But this is not true.

In China they have developed an AI that can operate on a regular laptop or PC. It has all the functions of the cloud-based AI but without the expensive monthly subscription and doesn’t require vast data centres that will cause severe damage to the environment.

In the past decade, big tech companies have sold the masses the idea of the cloud. Being able to access your data any where and at any time. They even called it the cloud, which almost makes it sound like part of nature.

In reality your data is being stored in massive data centres, that require energy 24/7 and can have a significant impact on the environment. The real image of the cloud would be rows of rows of servers, computers always on, always consuming energy and requiring cooling with water due to the massive amount of heat that they generate.

If you liked this post, you might like my All Societal Commentary Content page.

Write soon,

Antony

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Creative Writing: Middle

Sunday 21 February 2016 / Antony Simpson / Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 5 minutes

writing-quill-ink-well-large — Inkwell & Quill. (Image Copyright: Sye Watts/Antony Simpson.)

This is the second part in a blog post series, where I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve learned about creative writing over the last few years. The first blog post in the series was Creative Writing: Beginning.

1. Remember Your Aim

You should be writing something that entertains and is enjoyable to you and others. That’s all your creative work needs to do. It doesn’t need to be a work of literacy genius.

2. Your Writers Voice

Your writers voice is part of the art of creative writing. It will be influenced by Perspective, which I have wrote about here. It may change dramatically in different works.

Some writers try to emulate the voice of writers that they admire. This can be an interesting exercise and way to explore how those writers show their distinctive voice. To get the most out of this exercise, rather than passively read, you need to analyse how they crafted their voice.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert whom has written of many books, developed her writers voice by writing each of her books to friend or family member. Her writers voice in Big Magic, a book about living creatively, is warm, caring, passionate, engaging and captivating throughout.

Your unique writers voice will generally develop over time, with regular writing practice. The key point here is: practice.

Simple Writing – Writer’s Voice: What it is and how to develop yours is a good article to read, where the author writes about phrasing, tone, attitude and gives some tips on how to develop your writers voice. But nothing really beats writing lots.

3. Keep Going

Don’t let fear hold you back from starting, continuing or finishing a piece of creative writing. Even if, as your writing, you think it’s the worst thing ever written, keep going.

As author Anne Rice says in this video, ‘Just kick out the pages:’

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So keep writing, everyday if possible. Don’t be hard on yourself if you can’t manage everyday. Just write when you can. Whatever time you are managing to write, it’s better than not writing at all. Remember that if you keep going, eventually you’re going to finish. You’ll be bringing a new story into the world, which is wonderful.

4. Dialogue

Some rules generally apply:

Less is more.
Most people don’t talk to themselves. So don’t have characters do it.
It should be a conversation, not a monologue or full of large longwinded statements.
Don’t have a character explain to another character what happened in the last scene you wrote. It feels repetitive and tedious to the reader. One character can summarise to another character if absolutely necessary. But if the other character needs to know the details, then maybe he/she should have been in the last scene as a witness to events.
Only on rare occasions should you cut the end of dialogue, like this: –. If you do it all the time, the dialogue isn’t moving the story along and the reader will get frustrated that no character ever finishes a sentence. Plus regularly cutting the end of sentences will lose its value and significance.
Dialogue tags such as he said and she replied are useful to identify who is talking and how they are saying what they are saying. But the overall tone of the conversation should be clear from the words in the dialogue.

To improve your dialogue listen to the conversations of strangers in every public place that you visit. The dialogue you write should sound like that. It should have hooks. During the editing process, which I will write about in the next blog post in the series, it is useful to read it aloud to yourself or someone else.

5. Tense

Generally past or present tense is used. Future tense is rarely used. Once you’ve decided which tense to use, be consistent and use it throughout your creative work. Here’s an article that explains tense simply: Creative Writing – Tense.

6. Description

General fiction set in the real world needs less description than creative works set in other worlds. If your creative work is set in the past, future or another world consider: societal structures, culture, religion/belief systems, etc. Only tell the reader what they need to know.

Avoid writing cliché opportunities to describe a character or settings. One such example of a cliché opportunity is the main character standing in front of a mirror observing and describing themselves to the reader. It’s been done so many times, that it has become a cliché.

A good tip, when it comes to description is to make references. So for example, rather than writing: Jean drove off in her red car. Write: Jean drove off in her red Nissan Micra. Be aware that over time these descriptive references might date your creative work. Some descriptive references are so embedded into society that they could never date your creative work.

In my short story A Few Amazing Moments I deliberately used descriptive references to set the time in recent history that the various scenes were set in.

Perspective alters how you describe things. You can read more about perspective here. Pacing alters the amount of description a scene has. You can read more about pacing here. But the rule is: in slower scenes more description is allowed. In action or fast-paced scenes there should be less description. To much description or to little can significantly impact on your overall pacing.

7. Back-up Your Creative Work – Regularly

We’ve all heard nightmare stories about writers whom have lots their entire work because of a computer crash or computer dying on them. They either didn’t hit the save button or didn’t back-up their computer or both. I’ve lost large chunks of scenes in the past because I didn’t hit the save button often enough. I’ve also lost entire creative projects because a computer decided to die on me. So here’s the advice:

Hit the save button at the end of every paragraph.
Back-Up your work regularly. Some people use the cloud. I personally use Time Machine and then do a manual copy/paste back-up on an external hard drive once a week.

8. Done Is Better Than Good

This advice comes from Author Elizabeth Gilbert. In her book Big Magic, which have reviewed here, she writes about the danger of perfectionism.

If you aim for your creative work to be perfect you will drive yourself insane. No matter how much time, energy, effort and work you put into a creative work it will never be perfect. So rather than striving for perfection, aim for completing your creative work to the best of your current ability.

So many creative people, leave work in their desk draws, unfinished, because they don’t feel it’s good enough. Because they are aiming for perfection. Just take a second to imagine the number of superb stories that never see the light of day, let alone get read, because the writer is aiming for perfection.

9. First Draft

Congratulations on completion of the first draft of your creative work. But for a good writer, it’s not even half finished yet. The manuscript now needs to be edited, which may include some re-writing.

In my next blog post of the series, I’ll be writing about editing (including an editing checklist), feedback and publishing options.

Write soon,

Antony