Marketers love subscriptions.

We love knowing that, whether you use our product twice a day or twice a year, we’ll collect our monthly rent.

We love knowing that you’ll probably forget you’re even paying it.

And we love knowing that when one day you do remember… well, is figuring out how to cancel even worth the bother?

We’re sure you’d understand — we really have no choice. We need to keep raising that customer lifetime value because, you see, customer acquisition cost keeps going up. So believe us when we say: This is what you want.

We invited you over for a couple drinks a few decades ago — a newspaper subscription, maybe a magazine or two. But the drinks turned into a bit of a party, and we kept handing you solo cups. Xbox Live, Netflix by mail, Office Online. Now it’s well past midnight, and your liver is being assaulted by Hulu, Prime, Washington Post, Birchbox, BarkBox (really?), sixteen shots of SaaS, Hinge, The New York Times, Bumble, the HBO you split with your friend, Spotify, Quip, Blue Apron or whatever meal kit is still in business today, Huel, Harry’s, plus four hardware devices that will stop functioning if you stop paying their makers every single month. Yeah, you don’t look too great, you keep mumbling that you should probably stop — and maybe we think twice about putting another beer in your hand. But then we look around and see that, hey, everyone else at this party is still drinking more. And who cares, anyway? …