In just over ten years, heSubscriptions have gained a spectacular presence in our lives. This is something that has come a long way in the business world (you can ask any economist the difference between CapEx and OpEx (and make yourself comfortable because things are going to take a long time). So for some mantras that have never finished but that surely have their reason, we can boil it down to the fact that in most cases it is better to pay for a product or service monthly than to simply buy it.

This model, which, as I said, has been present in the professional world for decades (Monty Python already included it in The Meaning of Life, specifically in the part of the film devoted to childbirth, which many remember as “the machine that pings”) began to make the leap into the end-consumer market sometime between the end of the first and the beginning of the second decade of this century, and has been steadily gaining strength ever since, in some cases making very interesting improvements over what existed before, but in others just to hurt other users.

Positive cases are those that actually provide us with something. Whether it’s services like Xbox Game Pass, which give us unlimited access to a wide catalog of games, various music streaming services and audiovisual content, etc., to proposals as curious as those proposed by services like Wetaca, which offers a subscription for your daily food (they send you, weekly, a menu for seven days), browse online storage services and more, in all these cases we get something along the lines of a subscription format.

This is very different if we are talking about software developers who choose to sell it exclusively through a subscription model, despite the fact that This format adds absolutely nothing compared to the traditional single payment format, but of course it generates much more revenue for those users who want to use said applications continuously. I already talked about this more than a year ago, after the unfortunate milestone in the App Store, and so far the situation only has the prospect of getting worse.

The subscription model is a barrier in these cases, which can be even worse for the user (but much better of course for the service provider) if we’re not careful. And a recently published study confirmed this forgetting to unsubscribe increases business revenue by 200%. Money that obviously comes out of the user’s pocket, and since we’re talking about forget and forget, it makes sense to relate it directly to those who use less.

To conduct the study, the researchers obtained access to a large set of data from a payment system provider (for obvious reasons, they did not identify which one). In them, after identifying 10 common subscription services, they checked how often they renew during normal times and when the subscriber changed their card, and forced them to update their payment information for each service. Recovery after these card changes dropped dramaticallyalthough other shopping behavior continued as usual

The conclusions are… well, judge for yourself:

«We then use the model to perform counterfactual exercises that test how much faster (on average) subscribers would unsubscribe if they were fully attentive (λ = 1).
We find that reseller revenue (or average subscription duration) is significantly higher due to a lack of subscriber attention, with considerable heterogeneity among services.
We estimate that lack of attention increases companies’ revenue by between 14% and more than 200%, depending on the service.«