Th3 Core
Why We Are Here => Marketing => Topic started by: rcjordan on December 16, 2021, 06:54:18 PM
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Toyota owners have to pay $8/mo to keep using their key fob for remote start | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/12/toyota-owners-have-to-pay-8-mo-to-keep-using-their-key-fob-for-remote-start/
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Shareholders love those sweet automatic monthly debits.
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What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-offer-subscriptions-for-autonomous-driving-extra-ev-range/
The German automaker is considering charging an hourly fee for access to autonomous driving features once those features are ready. The company is also exploring a range of subscription features for its electric vehicles, including “range or performance” increases... Tesla once offered Model S cars with a 75 kWh battery that was software-restricted to output only 60 or 70 kWh, depending on when the car was purchased. In the case of the 70 kWh models, customers could pay $3,250 to unlock the last 9.33 percent.
Charging for a feature that is already built in and requires no intervention from the automaker (like remote start or using the full battery capacity) feels less like a service charge and more like ransom.
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New Cars Will Nickel-and-Dime You – It’s Automotive As A Service | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/30/new-cars-will-nickle-and-dime-you-its-automotive-as-a-service/
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Taco Bell is selling a $10 monthly taco subscription
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/06/business/taco-bell-subscription/index.html
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Panera has $8.99/month unlimited coffee and tea:
https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/mypanera/mypanera-coffee-subscription.html
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We’ve Upgraded Your Toilet to a Subscription-Based Model - McSweeney’s
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/weve-upgraded-your-toilet-to-a-subscription-based-model
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>>toilet
Nicely done :-)
Do you think as we see more and more of that, we will see companies backing off from subscriptions in ridiculous and egregious cases or is the profit incentive just way too high? That is, is this a "moment" or a new normal?
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> is the profit incentive just way too high?
On the whole, 'everything subscription by everyone' seems ludicrous. But Debbie thinks that businesses will go for the profit ---particularly since subscriptions tend to bind the customer to the brand. AND millennials & genX didn't want to own, so this is what we get. In spades.
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iPhone subscription service coming soon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-24/apple-is-working-on-a-hardware-subscription-service-for-iphones
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BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month. BMW owners already have all the necessary components, but BMW has simply placed a software block on their functionality that buyers then have to pay to remove.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature
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A car friend and former BMW owner told me they floated this before and there was so much pushback they had to backtrack. I guess they're trying again.
To be fair, they have an "unlimited plan" (what we used to call "heated seats") for $415. So if you keep the car for two years, you come out ahead an then it's yours for life (but what about the next owner?)
So this feels less like a forced subscription than a hidden payment plan to reduce sticker shock.
I see that sort of like the airlines. Everyone complains about how they pack you in like sardines, but very few of those people bump up to first class where you get a lot more room.
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"GM has approximately 16 million vehicles on the road in the US, about a quarter of which include features for which customers are paying subscriptions. “Our research indicates that with the right mix of compelling offerings, customers are willing to spend $135 per month on average for products and services,” Alan Wexler, SVP of innovation and growth at GM, said during a presentation at the company’s investor event in December 2021."
The future of cars is a subscription nightmare - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/13/23206999/car-subscription-nightmare-heated-seats-remote-start
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GM Makes $1,500 OnStar Subscription Mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cadillac Models
https://www.thedrive.com/news/gm-makes-1500-onstar-subscription-mandatory-on-gmc-buick-cadillac-models
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It's the new "resort fee" model which is just a way to hide sticker price.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that as long as it's all disclosed. But it's a little like having a base price and a mandatory "wheel charge" to cover the cost of the wheels.
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Software to contribute 10% of John Deere revenues by 2030 • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/12/deere_software_revenues/
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You Have to Pay a Subscription to Use Pantone Colors in Photoshop Now | PetaPixel
https://petapixel.com/2022/10/28/you-have-to-pay-a-subscription-to-use-pantone-colors-in-photoshop-now/
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https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price
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>Mercedes intentionally limited performance to later sell as an optional extra
I hope this model fails miserably.
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A similar model has worked for cameras. Often the basic electronics in the cheaper cameras are the same as in the next level up, but features are turned off in firmware.
The response has been that people reverse engineer it and have custom firmware you can flash your camera with. I wonder if the car companies will be able to prevent that.
And this is much worse than the BMW seat thing. BMW has two options - one-time charge for heated seats or subscription. If you like to turn your car over every 3 years, subscription might be the way to go. This is ridiculous as there is no version of the car that does not have the capability that you are subscribing for.
Note also, the link that RC posted a few days ago about brand reliability showed Mercedes has the worst reliability of any brand. I don't know anything about the auto industry. Are they circling the drain?
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Note also, the link that RC posted a few days ago about brand reliability showed Mercedes has the worst reliability of any brand. I don't know anything about the auto industry. Are they circling the drain?
For the price of a Mercedes I would expect it to be a lot more reliable and I would not expect them to be playing Yugo games with performance and subscriptions.
IMHO, Mercedes has not come out with an iconic looking car in decades. You used to know when a Mercedes drove past. They have succeeded in looking like Toyota's for three times the price and less reliability.
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>reverse engineer
Not for long....
New cybersecurity measures are locking aftermarket tuners out of car systems | TechSpot
https://www.techspot.com/news/96780-new-cybersecurity-measures-locking-aftermarket-tuners-out-oem.html
>Mercedes has the worst reliability
There was an article posted here a few months ago that said the entertainment systems and other electronic convenience items were the top reasons vehicles were being hauled to the dealers for servicing. Debbie suspects that is a large part of Mercedes' reliability complaints as they are bristling with do-dads. That, and their self-pampering customer base may be more prone to complaining.
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Polestar 2 gets an over-the-air performance boost ‘without the hassle of a subscription’ - The Verge
(SCREW THAT: The EV company is offering a 68 horsepower upgrade to customers for a one-time fee of $1,195)
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23495253/polestar-2-performance-ota-upgrade-software-subscription
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Your Wallet Is Being Drained by Subscriptions. Wall Street Thanks You.
But even as investors have become wary of companies stuck on similar marketing treadmills, burning through investors’ cash to create the illusion of popularity, subscription spending has become stickier since the pandemic arrived.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spending-on-subscriptions-average-11670529385
(Paywall, but if you search on the title and come in from search, you get a freebie)
What are you all doing?
We informally have an “add one, drop one” approach.
I just dropped the Economist who make it really hard. You have to chat with someone and if you keep repeating “I don’t want to discuss this, I just want to cancel,” they feed you offers for 3-4 iterations until they finally cancel you, then they spam you with “satisfaction surveys” until you unsubscribe. It’s enough that I vowed to put them in the blacklist.
It also makes me think that I should have four credit cards with rotating expiration dates and only subscribe with cards that expire within the year. Then I don’t have to worry about auto-renew.
Realistically, I find most companies honorable with renewals. Economist is an exception. I haven’t experienced such heavy-handed tactics in several years. I didn’t realize BAD companies were still doing it.
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>makes it hard
Didn't I post this?
This Apple trick lets you delete online accounts, finally
https://www.fastcompany.com/90824355/apple-simple-trick-delete-online-accounts
Then I remembered Apple—or a little-known directive that Apple mandated upon iOS developers this past June.
The Apple directive decreed that starting on June 30, 2022, any iPhone or iPad app that allowed a user to create an account inside of it must also allow the user to easily delete their account and all associated data. This mandate applied even if the app user did not use the app to create their account and instead created their account on the web.
And—voilŕ—I suddenly had an easy way to delete those stubborn accounts. I downloaded the iOS app of any website or web account I could find that hadn’t provided an easy or clear way for me to request account deletion online. And when I opened the apps on my iPhone and navigated to the settings of my account in the app—there before me was the glorious “Delete Account” button. And just like that, I was able to erase the accounts and all associated data from nearly 90% of the sites that hadn’t offer an easy way to do this on the web.
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>What are you all doing?
IIRC, I don't have any subscriptions other than Prime and Prime pays for itself in gift shipping to kids & grandkids. Louise has a half-dozen or so (NYT, Pandora, NFL, grandkid sports tracking, word games, tv streams) but she's mindful of the accumulating price. All-in-all, she tries to keep it in the price range of the old cable package --but there is some $-creep. I write it off as entertainment for post-retirement and pandemic cabin fever.
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>>I don't have any subscriptions
If I really, really start to look at it, we have a lot. For example...
- Theresa's TSA Pre subscription is ending. It's "only" $70 for five years, but there it is.
- domains
- VPS
- fundamentally, my utilities are subscription services.
- so is car insurance and homeowner's insurance
- for "media" we "only" have Audible (which we are about to cancel), Netflix (which I actually keep partly for my dad who is on our subscription), and NYT (which we cancelled then restarted under Theresa's name for the $2/week deal).
- Starlink and Hughesnet and the Speedify service that makes them work together as a bonded connection
- Zoom for Theresa's business
- Google Workspace for Theresa's business and for our rental because I genuinely like GMail better than anything else I've used.
I even have my toilet paper on subscription from Who Gives a Crap (50% of profits go to building toilets in places that don't have them).
Admittedly, the toilet paper is fundamentally different. I actually *own* the toilet paper. But in the other cases, these are all payments for ephemeral services that I lose 100% as soon as I stop paying, which to me is the distinction between a subscription and owning something.
Utilities might strike you as odd, but actually maybe half the people I know *own* their water and sewer infrastructure. They have a well and a septic. Yes, there are ongoing costs and I don't necessarily want to own those things, but it is basically a subscription as far as I'm concerned.
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Whether you use it or not....
GM makes OnStar add-on mandatory, including $1,500 fee • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/11/gm_makes_onstar_addon_mandatory/
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You Have to Pay a Subscription to Use Pantone Colors in Photoshop Now | PetaPixel
https://petapixel.com/2022/10/28/you-have-to-pay-a-subscription-to-use-pantone-colors-in-photoshop-now/
Trying to make this computer with a legacy lifetime Adobe subscription last as long as I do, though rolling the dice sometimes by putting it in the luggage when I travel. :D
One big thing with subscriptions is the friction upfront is much higher than it is given credit for unless people think they can dip in and out of it easily. It is easier to sell something for say $80 than it is to sell a $7 a month recurring subscription. This also has implications for affiliates.
Some merchants who provided lifetime recurring splits on affiliate driven sales eventually see the affiliate channel slow down as the core brand rise, which in turn has them go through with opening up a second affiliate channel on a different platform as pretext for needing to simplify the affiliate channel by nixing the legacy one so they can scrub out those recurring affiliate payments.
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Restaurants experiment with subscription models to keep revenue flowing | PBS NewsHour
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/restaurants-experiment-with-subscription-models-to-keep-revenue-flowing
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>Restaurants
I got an email from a local restaurant offering a subscription to their "club" Can't remember any of the details but it was a limited number of members and you got food for about 15% of what it would normally cost.
Makes sense from a restaurants perspective as they could more easily plan their food ordering, staffing, etc. knowing they had X amount of money coming in via subscriptions every month.
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>>15%
This is basically the modern model of a ski area.
The original model was to sell day passes and make money that way, much like a restaurant today. In the 1970s, overpriced food in the cafeteria started to help with margins, but still it was the same model.
In the 1980s, it started shifting to a real estate play: have all these services, lose some money, but build a ton of condos owned by the same company that ran the mountain, and then sell them off. But eventually, all the desirable or allowable land was sold off.
The new model is to own a suite of resorts and get everyone to buy a subscription, which in the ski industry is called what it has always been called, a season pass. But what has changed is that season pass prices have plummeted and the cost of a single-day ticket has skyrocketed.
So a season pass for an adult with no special deal (not a senior or a junior) used be priced so that the breakeven was about 20 days of skiing. Typically passes today break even at as little as 4 days if you buy the pass early, accept a few blackout dates and compare that to the cost of a day on a holiday weekend.
Some people say it has saved skiing. Some people say it is killing skiing. It has saved skiing because it means that for diehard skiers who have a place to stay within driving distance of a resort, it has never been cheaper and it has never been better (many top-shelf resorts for one third of what you would have paid for a season pass to a single resort 20 years ago).
It is killing skiing because this only works by making day passes, mostly bought now by new skiers, extremely expensive and by creating incentives for a small number of companies (chiefly Vail and the company that owns Aspen and Mammoth), to buy up all the resorts in America and homogenize the experience.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/ski-pass-epic-ikon
I'm not sure how that all relates to subscription restaurants, but it seems like a similar model. You make it very cheap to get an annual pass, but you just count on people not actually going all that often. But then you make it very expensive to people who just walk in the door. And I would imagine the same impetus to expand your portfolio of restaurants would eventually take hold. Nobody wants to eat the same place twice a week, but if I had a pass to 15 restaurants, I might go out to eat more.
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>if I had a pass to 15 restaurants, I might go out to eat more
The place that was offering it is owned by a group that has probably 8 or 10 restaurants in the area. I could definitely see that being more attractive than just one restaurant.
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“ Take control of your subscriptions”
https://www.rocketmoney.com/feature/manage-subscriptions
I’m seeing mentions of them a lot more often. Maybe they just discovered my demo
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Nine Circles of Subscription Hell
https://annejanzer.com/nine-circles-subscription-hell/
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Ring Alarm will require a subscription for most basic features later this month - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623523/ring-alarm-camera-features-subscription
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"With an expected starting price of about $30,000, it should be noted that VinFast sells its cars with a separate monthly subscription charge for the batteries. "
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/evs-keep-getting-cheaper-and-this-all-new-solar-powered-suv-is-proof-of-it/ar-AA17oc8s
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Hyundai Launches New Evolve+ Subscription Program For Kona EV And Ioniq 5 | Carscoops
https://www.carscoops.com/2023/02/hyundai-tries-its-hand-at-the-vehicle-subscription-model-with-evolve-ev-program/
Evolve+ looks like a lease plan, but scroll down to the BlueLink+ comparison chart. (IIRC, Hyundai's BlueLink+ is complimentary for 3 years.)
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Ford has been bucking the trend since 2019, when they made FordPass free for life.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/10/14/fordpass-connect-goes-fee-free-for-life/
Which led Hot Cars top naively predict regarding Hyundai Bluelink
"Although the future of these features is almost indisputably free, after the recent unlocking of FordPass Connect (a similar app by Ford) for free,"
https://www.hotcars.com/hyundai-blue-link-app-everything-should-know/
I do think there is a difference between Hyundai Bluelink, which does require Hyundai to maintain some infrastructure and presumably cut deals with cell carriers so the car can talk to Hyundai and your phone, and things like the BMW heated seat subscription, which requires BMW to add all sort of unnecessary tech to your seat to connect it to a cell network for the sole purpose of allowing them to remotely disable the seat heating button (or touch icon) that you already have in your car that needs no cell service or infrastructure except for that fact that BMW wants to charge you a subscription fee. Same for whichever manufacturer lets you access more power if you pay up.
It's a bit the difference between Adobe moving to a subscription model for software that they upgrade (annoying, but comprehensible) and Lenovo making you pay a subscription for your laptop or lose your keyboard backlighting or find 20% of your RAM inaccessible. I think Lenovo would quickly go out of business if they tried that.
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What is the difference between Bluelink and Bluelink+?
Bluelink and Bluelink+ both offer the same services, such as being able to remotely start your Hyundai, lock or unlock the doors, schedule EV battery charging and more. The difference is in how you pay for them.
Bluelink, which is available on most 2023 and older Hyundai models (except IONIQ 6), is complimentary for the first 3 years with a new vehicle purchase. After that, you’ll pay a low monthly fee to continue your subscription.
For 2023 IONIQ 6 and all 2024 and newer Hyundai models, Bluelink+ is at no charge for all IONIQ 6 original owners.
https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/blue-link
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Ah... okay. I just scanned and thought the "Complimentary" was marketing mumbo-jumbo for "complimentary addition with your Bluelink subscription."
I wonder if why they are not rolling out complimentary Bluelink across the lineup now, with 2024 models getting Bluelink+. Because the cost is not built into the price of the vehicle when sold?
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The US subscription economy is overstretched and may snap | Mint
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/the-us-subscription-economy-is-overstretched-and-may-snap-11679847150963.html
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Consumers Aren’t Buying Automaker Plans To Make Everything A Subscription | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/28/consumers-arent-buying-automaker-plans-to-make-everything-a-subscription/
I'm currently watching Volvo & Hyundai Ioniq 6 specifically because they have excluded or made complimentary their subscription plans.
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David Hannemeier Hansson on why enterprise SAAS is due for or correction.
Interesting perspective from someone who is both an SAAS provider and customer.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/it-s-not-just-cloud-costs-that-are-out-of-control-efcd098c
Spoiler alert, they just cancelled their $88,000 annual subscription with Datadog.