Journal · September 29, 2026
Why Subscriptions Are Hard for Consumers
Subscriptions can pay for real, ongoing costs. They become harder to defend when the price rises, the value shrinks, and customers lose control of something they already paid for.
I was an Evernote fan long before I started questioning its business model. In 2013, I was selected for its Ambassador program. I recommended the product because I believed in it.
Then the plans kept changing. The tiers divided something as personal as note-taking into arbitrary limits, including a cap on how much you could add. How is a customer supposed to know whether 100 megabytes of notes is enough? The changes felt like less for more. I spoke up, as did many other users. Around that period, Evernote’s CEO stepped down. I eventually hit the product’s limits as a paying customer and could no longer add notes. There was no option to buy more capacity. I felt abandoned, stopped using Evernote, and advised others to do the same.
That experience left me asking a basic question: what should a software purchase entitle you to?
For years, we bought software, games, and books once. You paid, got the thing you needed, and could keep using it. New versions came on discs. If a new version was useful, you could decide whether to buy it. Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2003 were separate purchases. The choice was visible.
Then distribution changed. Developers could deliver bug fixes and new features over the internet, and cloud services made it possible to keep improving a product without shipping a new box. That was good for users. But it also changed the business problem: a customer who had already bought the software might keep receiving updates without buying another copy.
Subscriptions became one answer. Developers will say that ongoing improvements require ongoing revenue, or that a service has monthly hosting bills. Sometimes those are real costs. I don’t think every subscription is wrong. I think the cost should be clear and connected to something the customer actually receives.
Cloud storage and syncing are good examples. Hosting someone’s data costs money. If a product needs to keep that data on a company’s servers and sync it across devices, say what that costs. A customer can understand: “Cloud backups cost us this much to provide, so this feature costs this much per month.”
But the cloud is not required for every useful app. Devices have ample storage, internet connections are fast, and tools such as Obsidian show that notes can live in local files. You can keep those files on your device, sync them yourself, or choose a separate syncing service. At Dressler Tech, we want to start with the device and use cloud services only when the product needs them. When possible, we’ll let people use tools they already have, such as iCloud, Google Drive, or OneDrive.
There is another important distinction: bug fixes and new features are not the same thing. If a product is still in service, fixing defects should be part of maintaining the product people bought. If support is ending, users deserve a clear end-of-life date and a proper deprecation period. They should have time to understand what will stop working and make a plan.
New features can be handled differently. A one-time paid expansion—downloadable content, or DLC—is fair when the original product remains useful. A new version can also be sold separately, as games and major software releases have done for years. In both cases, the customer can choose whether the new work is worth paying for.
The monthly charge is easiest to justify when it covers something that really keeps happening: cloud backups, hosted collaboration, or another service with real ongoing costs. It is harder to justify when the pitch is simply that the company might make features you may not want someday.
Evernote’s changes hurt because the product had become part of how I worked, and the rules changed after I had trusted it with years of notes. A fair price matters. So does a fair relationship: be honest about the costs, keep the product useful, and give people a way to leave with what belongs to them.
That’s the standard I want Dressler Tech to work toward. Charge for ongoing services when they have ongoing costs. Keep bug fixes part of maintaining the product. Let people decide whether new features are worth a separate purchase. And never make a customer’s trust feel like a trap.