Consumer Subscriptions

It’s much easier to build a subscription business that draws on an existing recurring consumer behavior, instead of trying to create a new recurring behavior. As a result, some categories of consumer spend just lend themselves more naturally to a subscription business than others.

Whether it’s SaaS as the preferred delivery method for software products, monthly subscriptions for music / video streaming, newspapers, newsletters, podcasts, or physical products, subscriptions are infiltrating nearly every business model.

And, in another sense, hardware companies that shift to a subscription model are pricing according to reality. If you buy something and use it every day for years, it makes sense that you’d pay for it as you use it rather than buy an uncertain amount of usage at one upfront price. The gradual shift to subscription-based hardware is just the economi... See more