When did $20 start to get treated like it is "merely a handful of change?"

What makes me pose this question is that I was looking at some software and subscription apps I used to use, and I know that when I started using them 10 to 12 years ago they were either free or based on a freemium model where you maybe paid $1.99 a month for them if you decided you like them at the end of a 60-day free trial period.

There was no "you don't get the free version unless you give us your credit card, bank account and firstborn, and agree to be charged for a full year, one second after your free period expires... at 3:30 in the morning, a day early." Instead, you'd get some emails, and if you hadn't taken action at the end of those 60 days, all the good stuff just went away. And a lot of people did subscribe... because they "got used to" having all those nifty features.

So we fast forward 12 years to today, and I'm looking at the same apps, happy to see you that they're actually still in business, but now I see that their most basic plan now costs $24.99 a month. And that's the price if you prepay for a year... if you go month-to-month you actually pay $30 a month.

I'm by no means a math genius, but looking at that tells me that it is approximately twelve times more expensive to use the same thing, 12 years later. Sure, there are more "shiny" features... but seriously?

I also know for damn sure that inflation has not been that high since 2011!

I also am adept enough with numbers to be able to calculate that if I were "an average schmoe" who made $15 an hour for my work in 2011, I sure as shyte I'm not making $180 an hour for my work in 2023! If I'm lucky, I might be making $20.

I guess the thing that most gets to me about these particular developments is that the websites or the apps claim that $24.99 is "inexpensive and a great deal."

No. No it's not.

More than anything, when I look at this it seems very much like the corporate power brokers of the world are trying to adjust our reality in such a way that what we used to think of as a handful of change (which $1.99 a month for an app could pass as) are now trying to convince us that $24.99 is also just "a handful of change."

Sorry — and you can call me a "bad consumer" if you will — but that's just so much moosepuckey. $24.99 is definitely not a handful of change in a world where so many people are struggling just to make ends meet. I was fully prepared to have to pay maybe $2.99/month or even $3.99/month for the thing I used to get for $1.99... but $24.99?

Needless to say, this particular customer (or potential customer) has just walked out the door.

In case you're wondering, what I was looking at was social media helper and management software that can help me manage/schedule content for multiple accounts across multiple platforms. I used to have a couple of good ones that I used and then I kind of dropped off the map for a while and didn't have a need to keep them active, and now I wake up only to discover that the price has gone up by 12 times.

A little poking around suggests that several competitors dropped out of the market, so I guess that justifies a "no competition premium," which is just highly usary.

Regardless, it leaves me with the somewhat annoying situation of having to do everything manually — which is very time consuming — which ultimately makes it very likely that I won't be doing anything at all, which serves as a unrelated reminder that we continue to live in a world where the few at the top distance themselves further and further from the vast majority who reside in the middle and the bottom.

However, I'm not going to put any more energy into getting more annoyed about it! I guess I will just have to cross my fingers that Hive or Leo goes 12x so I am relatively speaking in the same position as I was before!

Hopefully the whole Binance/CZ show yesterday isn't going to immediately deflate the tenuous bullish trend that's trying to get started.

=^..^=

Curator Cat 22 November, 2023