Subscription fatigue and the case for model diversification

The subscription model is the most successful pricing innovation in the history of software. It is also, increasingly, the thing users resent most about the software they use.

That is not a contradiction. It is a consequence.

For two decades, subscriptions solved genuine problems. They replaced large upfront costs with manageable monthly payments. They gave vendors predictable revenue. They gave buyers lower barriers to entry. Everyone won, for a while. But the model that made individual products accessible made the collective cost of modern digital life quietly unbearable. One subscription is a convenience. Fifteen subscriptions is a tax.

The subscription model works until the customer starts counting.

The stacking problem

I notice it in my own life first. Every quarter, I sit down and look at the recurring charges on my accounts. Design tools, writing tools, cloud storage, music, project management, analytics, email marketing, two different video platforms, a notes app I barely open. Each one felt reasonable when I signed up. Together, they feel like a second rent.

But here is the thing: I am also someone who has built products that charge subscriptions. I understand the economics. I know why recurring revenue matters for forecasting, for fundraising, for building a team you can actually pay next month. I have sat in the rooms where the revenue model was decided, and "subscription" was always the answer because it was always the safest answer.

The problem is not that any single subscription is wrong. The problem is that every product arrived at the same answer independently, and the user is the one who has to carry the total.

I call this the subscription ceiling. It is the point at which adding another subscription to a user's stack triggers active resistance rather than passive acceptance. And we are past it. Not approaching it. Past it.

What Grab taught me about pricing assumptions

The subscription ceiling is not just a Western, high-income market phenomenon. When I was working with Grab in Southeast Asia, the resistance was even more pronounced, and it taught me something I had not expected.

In markets like Indonesia, the Philippines, and parts of Malaysia, many users operate on prepaid financial models. They add credit to their phones when they can afford it. They pay for things as they use them. The idea of committing to a fixed monthly payment for something they might not use every day felt alien. Not difficult. Alien.

We had features that users loved when they used them. But wrapping those features inside a subscription created friction that had nothing to do with the product's quality. It had everything to do with the model's assumptions about how people relate to money.

The team explored pay-per-use options for specific features. Not as a downgrade from the subscription. As an alternative that matched how people actually spent. The results were striking. Usage went up. Revenue per transaction went down, but total revenue grew because the addressable base expanded. More people were willing to pay something than were willing to pay monthly.

That experience broke something in my thinking. I had assumed subscriptions were universally optimal because every SaaS playbook said they were. But a playbook written for San Francisco does not transfer cleanly to Jakarta. The model has to fit the user's relationship with money, not just the vendor's relationship with Wall Street.

The buffet problem

There is a useful analogy in restaurants. The all-you-can-eat buffet works for customers who want volume and variety. The prix fixe works for customers who want a curated experience at a known price. And ordering a la carte works for customers who want to pay only for what they choose.

No serious restaurant operator believes one model fits all diners. But for a decade, software acted as if the buffet was the only option.

The buffet model (unlimited access, flat monthly fee) is brilliant when users consume heavily and feel they are getting more than they pay for. But when usage drops, or when the user only needs one specific dish, the buffet starts to feel wasteful. The customer looks at their plate, looks at the price, and starts doing maths. That is the moment the subscription stops feeling like a bargain and starts feeling like a trap.

Products are hitting that moment more frequently now. Users who signed up for a full-featured platform but only use two features are asking a fair question: why am I paying for the rest?

Model sprawl is not a strategy

The tempting response is to offer everything. A free tier. A monthly subscription. A usage-based option. An annual plan with a discount. An enterprise tier with custom pricing. A one-time purchase for specific outputs.

I have watched teams do this, and the result is almost always confusion. For the user, the pricing page becomes a puzzle. For the team, billing complexity eats into the operational simplicity that subscriptions were supposed to provide. Support tickets about pricing go up. Conversion rates go down. The finance team starts building spreadsheets that nobody fully trusts.

Model sprawl is not a strategy. It is the absence of one.

The teams getting this right are not offering every model simultaneously. They are choosing deliberately. They are asking which model matches how their specific users experience value from the product, and they are building around that answer.

A project management tool where users log in daily and rely on it as infrastructure? Subscription makes sense. The value is continuous, and the model reflects that. But a design asset marketplace where a user needs a specific template once a quarter? A per-purchase or credit-based model respects how value is actually consumed.

The question is not "subscription or not." The question is "when does the user feel they received value, and does the payment model match that moment?"

The honest recalibration

I do not think subscriptions are dying. That framing is as overblown as the framing that subscriptions were going to replace every other model. What is dying is the assumption that subscriptions are the default. The assumption that recurring revenue is always the right revenue. The assumption that the model that works for the vendor also works for the user.

The best product teams I have spoken to recently are treating their revenue model the way they treat their product design: as something that deserves research, testing, and iteration. They are running pricing experiments the same way they run feature experiments. They are talking to churned users not just about what features they missed but about whether the payment structure itself was part of the reason they left.

This is harder than it sounds. Building billing infrastructure for multiple models is expensive. Forecasting revenue across mixed models is messy. Explaining a hybrid model to investors who want a clean ARR number is awkward. But the alternative is watching a growing segment of your users silently resent the way you charge them, which is a slow-moving retention problem that no feature improvement will fix.

The subscription was never the product. It was always just the container. When the container stops fitting what is inside it, the smart move is not to keep stuffing. It is to find a better container, or to offer more than one.

Some users want the buffet. Some want a la carte. The product that insists everyone sit at the same table eventually finds itself eating alone.