It’s hard to find a person who is not subscribed to some sort of service — subscriptions have become a fundamental part of our lives. According to Made in Canada, nearly 90 per cent of Canadian adults rely on some form of online streaming and, on average, spend around 10 hours per week watching streamed content.
But take a moment and ask yourself, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? There’s a chance it’s more than you think. In 2024, Hardbacon conducted a survey asking respondents how many subscriptions they thought they were paying for. The average answer was four — when it came to actually looking through their subscriptions, that number doubled to eight.
Over the years the financial toll these streaming services have on customers has only risen. CNET’s yearly subscription report showed that the average adult from the United States spends over $1,000 USD per year on subscriptions, and an additional $200 USD on unused subscriptions.
Even with all the investment into the entertainment you watch, you might not even be getting your money’s worth. More and more, these services are blocking titles and features behind a paywall, or removing them entirely. We’ve seen this with recent examples like Netflix removing over 100 of their original titles from their platform in 2026 alone. On Sept. 1, Sony removed all movies and TV shows by Studio Canal from PlayStation owners’ accounts, despite the fact that this content was individually purchased, not streamed.
This phenomenon is referred to as “enshittification” — a term coined by Canadian writer and activist Cory Doctorow. He argues that this process is how platforms die, with consumers being unable to keep up with the ever-rising prices and dropping the service entirely.
It’s not just streaming services that are being slowly strangled by corporate greed. A growing number of companies are cashing in on paid subscription models, and it might not just be digital goods and services that are blocked behind a paywall — now it can be basic household products.
In 2013, HP launched its Instant Ink subscription service — the price changing based on the number of pages the customer prints. The service also replenishes ink cartridges when the printer detects the cartridges are low. This comes with a myriad of problems, one being HP’s agency to completely block users’ ability to print completely if the subscription isn’t paid. In Oct. 2024, More Perfect Union reported that HP was enrolling customers into the Instant Ink program automatically. If the subscription wasn’t paid or cancelled, the company would remotely block access to printing, even if the cartridges were still full of ink.
According to Driving, Tesla is another company trying to profit from the subscription model — removing their self-driving feature from the Model 3 and charging customers $99 USD per month in order to access the feature.
So, on top of an already expensive product that only gets more more costly with inflation, we have to pay a monthly fee just to use the product we supposedly own? I don’t think it will take much convincing on my part for people to see how ridiculous this is. In fact, it appears that people’s tolerance for the subscription model is having the opposite effect that these major corporations intended.
A report by MUSO recorded 216.3 billion visits to piracy websites — a drastic increase from the 130.5 billion that they reported in 2020. And this doesn’t appear to be coming from malicious intent. YouGov, a global research and analytic group, conducted a 2024 survey questioning people who have illegally acquired media online. They found that the major reasons behind pirating were a lack of access, and prices simply being too high for people to keep up.
To be very clear, this is not my public endorsement of piracy. Rather, I wish to point out how corporate greed drives people to piracy in the first place. We are at the point where almost everything we consume is made harder to access unless you pay a small fortune in subscriptions on top of the original cost of purchase. And the prices of these services are only increasing.
With this in mind, how could I possibly judge those who do end up turning to theft?
Should we be seeking to punish those who try to find some semblance of joy and entertainment in our current socio-economic climate? Or, perhaps, should we be looking at the companies who are increasingly driving up prices while continually removing more and more of their services? While I understand that companies need to make a profit, I worry that constantly applying a subscription model to anything and everything seems to only be driving customers away and it’s coming at the price of our entertainment.
