There was a time when you bought a gadget with a laundry list of features and capabilities, and they were available for the lifespan of that product. Today, you buy a tech gadget with the potential to do many things, but sometimes only if you pay an additional recurring fee on top of the original price.
Welcome to Technology Subscription Culture.
In this new world, we pay annuties for services that are usually tied to our favorite devices. The best iPhones, for instance, are made more useful through access to a growing number of Apple Services, including Music, Fitness+, News, and Apple TV+. While the prices for these services are on the rise, I can more or less get behind this strategy because the iPhone is perfectly fine without access to any of them. You can, for instance, always pay someone else (hey, Spotify) for access to their music library, or a different media company for access to its streaming content.
Many of our wearables, like my Oura ring will only provide so much information without a subscription. At least Oura does a decent job of delivering a lot of health and fitness tracking for free, but the personalization and analysis you may want are hidden behind a $5.99 a month fee.
There is, however, another class of subscriptions where you only get the full benefit of the product if you pay for another related but not necessarily desired service.
I have a very recent example.
During Amazon’s huge devices event on September 30, 2025, the company introduced roughly a dozen new products across multiple brands. Included among them was Blink, which sells affordable smart home security cameras and services. It also introduced one of the day’s most interesting and coolest products.
Blink Arc is a home security camera mount that takes two $49 Blink Mini 2K wired cameras and, working in concert with Blink’s app, delivers a high-resolution, seamless, 180-degree panorama view of, say, your backyard. The entire rig – two cameras and the mount– costs just $99.
A true bargain.
The frustrating caveat is that the cameras will not deliver that panorama view unless you are paying $11.99 a month for Blink’s Subscription Plus Plan.
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Without that plan, you just get the two separately stored video feeds, and I guess you can cross your eyes a bit to blend them into one.
In all fairness to Blink, the subscription strategy is one shared by most other home security cam companies, including its Amazon cousin, Ring.
I have some Ring cameras at home and, while I get the regular Ring neighborhood alerts about things like lost dogs and suspicious characters, I have zero cloud storage for my porch camera video because I’m not paying $19.99 a month for video recording.
Want smarter? Pay more
Still, it irks me that the Blink Arc feature Amazon touted during this big product event is nothing but a come-on to sell more subscriptions. I mean, what’s the point of buying the Arc if it doesn’t, by default, deliver that combined panoramic video?
My frustration with subscription culture extends beyond Blink and other security cam recording plans.
These days, every tech company has its hands in my pockets long after I’ve paid for their hardware. I have cloud storage accounts with Microsoft, Apple, and Google. In the case of Apple, I long ago had to upgrade to a 2TB drive and the costs associated with it. In the case of Google, the 200GB plan I have is fitting me like a very tight pair of pants. The account fills up almost daily, and Google reaches out, offering the $19.99 monthly 2TB plan.
In the world of AI, the best intelligent features are almost invariably hidden behind subscription plans.
Google recently announced that Gemini will be in virtually all of its new home devices, and while you will get the conversational aspects for free, you won’t get things like video event descriptions and daily summaries unless you pay for a premium Gemini plan.
Amazon used to sell Echos to non-Prime members and still give them access to Alexa. Alexa+ is far more powerful and intelligent. It will require a Prime Membership or a seperate plan just for Alexa+. This means that if you covet, for example, one of these new Amazon Echo Dot Max speakers, be prepared to also adopt an additional monthly Prime access fee.
Subscription culture sometimes means that what you paid for and were receiving before might not remain in the future.
The streaming mess
I’m an Amazon Prime member, and I used to enjoy ad-free Prime Video content. Then Amazon changed the rules and added commercials. Now my The Boys viewing is far less enjoyable – not to mention that it takes a lot longer to get through an episode.
Virtually all streaming subscription-based services are doing the same thing, taking the basic plan and adding in ads, even if that wasn’t part of the service people originally selected.
The reasons for these changes are obvious: hardware is a one-time purchase. Even with planned obsolescence, these products can last for years. Services promise monthly revenue and leave open the possibility of future rate hikes.
In such circumstances, companies often raise prices with little notice and, seemingly, no remorse. They know they have you. Look at Netflix. Look at Apple TV+. Look at Disney+. Each has consistently raised prices and, as far as I can tell, none are suffering significant subscriber losses. Our desire to enjoy their admittedly excellent content is too strong.
So subscription culture prevails.
However, in the case of Blink Arc, we see, perhaps, the start of a more worrisome trend, one where an awesome new feature is teased and then it’s quietly revealed that there’s an admission fee to board that particular ride, and it might be one they ask you to pay almost every time the ride starts spinning.
Yep, subscription culture makes my head spin.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
