The Subscription Trap

0:00This message comes from Bonterra. Your nonprofit's mission is big, but your team is small. With fundraising software from Bonterra's Network for Good, you can focus on changing lives. Big impact, less stress. Learn more at BonterraTech.com slash NFG. This is Planet Money from NPR. A couple weeks ago, I got an email telling me I just paid 30 bucks for a subscription to Fortune magazine that I didn't even know I had. Yeah, that is a classic problem. I think I'm subscribed to like two workout apps that I never actually use. Yeah, happens all the time. I realized I'd signed up for this$1 introductory trial to read a single article about crypto bankruptcies.

0:46And then I had totally forgotten about it for six months. But instead of canceling this particular subscription and moving on with my life, I decided to call up someone who's thought a lot about this vexingly common annoyance. An entrepreneur named Harun Mukhtarzada. All of the companies I've started start from just a problem that annoys me. It's like the Larry David approach to business. Sure, that's the way to put it. About a decade ago, Haroon and his three brothers, who are all business partners, were trying to come up with a new idea for a startup. They gathered a few times a week to brainstorm in one of their basements, which they'd given this kind of fun nickname.

1:26We called it the floundry because we said, like, we don't know what we want to do, So what we're going to do is we're going to flounder on ideas. And then when something hits, that's when we'll know it's a good idea. And we just started kind of tossing around mostly terrible ideas. There was the virtual reality headset that customers could wear on their stationary bicycles to feel like they were on a real ride. They decided that idea was just a bit too sweaty. We had one that was a box that would send you goods from like your home country. So for like an immigrant, it would be like an assortment of different kind of like foods from there or other items from there.

2:03That one actually, my brother Yaya had decided to sort of run with a little bit. And I think he might have started with Turkish products. My mother's Turkish. My father's Afghan. And he started getting orders and stuff. And like, then you realize like, oh, my God, like I don't like I need like a room to put all of these things in. And there's like inventory. And he's like, this is too complicated. And he shut it down. Finally, one day in late 2015, Haroon was in the floundry with his brothers when he started talking about this problem that was on his mind. While back, he'd come across an article about how more than a million AOL customers were still paying subscription fees to AOL, even though the era of dial-up internet was long gone.

2:43Haroon thought a lot of those people might not even know they were still being charged. In the age of automatic credit card payments and paperless bank statements, it could just be incredibly hard to know what subscriptions you were on at any given moment. Now, Haroon knew there had to be some simple, elegant solution here. If he could get access to a customer's monthly financial transactions, there should be a way to isolate and identify their recurring payments. The only problem was that he didn't know how to get that information. And then my younger brother, Dries, is like, oh, I've been playing around with this company called Plaid that does the whole bank linking thing for you.

3:21And I was like, you're kidding me. And so we basically like jumped on this and we all go and I put in my bank passwords and stuff like that and it downloads all the transactions. Then we dump them in this giant Excel file. So I've got like years and years of transactions in this giant Excel file. and then I like grab my older brother Zeki and I'm like Zeki look we need an algorithm that's going to pick out from this large transaction list you know subscriptions recurring stuff they need to be like maybe the same amount of money the name needs to be like similar they need to be like on some kind of regular occurrence and he's a math major so he's like I got this and like he starts like writing this algorithm and a little while later boom like a list pops out a list pops out All of a sudden, this chaotic jumble of obscurely labeled transactions going back years appears as this orderly list showing all the recurring payments that are getting taken out of Haroon's account on a regular cadence.

4:19And it was like, wow, this is like a new view that I've never seen on my finances. And as Haroon starts to survey this newly revealed financial landscape, almost right away he finds a troubling series of line items. And there's a$40 subscription for a security system on a home that I had moved out of like over a year prior. I had paid at least a year to two years. So somewhere between$500 and$1 ,000 went out the door. So you were paying for the home security of whoever lived in your old home? I don't even know if they were using it, though. I think I was just paying for it. It was just free money for the company.

4:56Yeah, exactly. Haroon's brothers then throw their bank statements into the algorithm. them, and each of them starts to find their own forgotten subscriptions. It was like four out of four. Like, all four Mukhtar Zadda brothers were not properly tracking their money. And you're like, OK, if this affects the four of us, it might actually be a bigger thing. Yeah, and if not, we clearly need it. So let's build it.

5:22A little bit of a spoiler alert. It was not just the Mukhtar Zadda brothers who were experiencing this problem. And in the years since that fateful day in the floundry, the number of people caught in this web of subscriptions has gone up and up. What's happened to the subscription economy since you started this company? The subscription economy definitely exploded. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. And I'm Jeff Kuo. So over the past two decades, there's been a sort of tectonic shift happening under our feet as more and more companies have switched from selling goods one by one to services available as a subscription from razor blades to meal kits to car washes.

6:07But all that convenience has come with a dark side. Today on the show, how we all fell into the subscription trap. Who is winning and who is losing in this brave new subscription based world? and what the government and the free market are doing to try and fix it.

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7:48Get time back to focus on your high-impact work. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. Okay, so the problem that Harun Mukhtar Zada and his brothers were setting out to try and solve with their new app about a decade ago, that had not just appeared out of nowhere. It was the result of this major economic shift decades in the making. A shift from selling individual goods to one where almost everything feels like it could be repackaged as a subscription-style service. To understand how that happened, we called up a guy named Teen Zwo. Teen's had a front-row seat to the rise of what he calls the subscription economy, as the founder and CEO of a company called Zwora.

8:32So you guys are like the infrastructural backbone to some of the biggest subscription services in the world? That's right. So we're a little bit invisible, right, to you. You might not know that we exist, but we're powering the money transactions behind anything from Zoom to the New York Times to General Motors to power all sorts of subscription services. The basic outline of the subscription model, Teen explains, is at least as old as the magazines and newspapers and milk delivery services of the 19th century. Why own a cow when you just want the milk, right? That's really the idea. Teens says you can trace the birth of our modern, subscription-obsessed economy to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.

9:09And even more specifically, to one particular company where he was an early employee. Well, I think the company that people would point to is Salesforce. Salesforce is a company that makes database software for other companies to keep track of sales and marketing and customer service. And up until that point in the late 90s, Teens says, the software industry was still organized around selling individual goods. CDs with programs like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Despite the fact that software was a digital product, it was very much sold on a unit basis. Customers would buy individual programs on a disk to install on their computers.

9:46For big pieces of corporate software, companies might have to install more servers and hire larger IT departments. In this model, software was like a tool, like buying a typewriter that you could use as long as you wanted. When you decided it was time to upgrade to the latest version, you had to go buy a new copy at full price. The thing that Teen and his colleagues at Salesforce realized was that in the age of the internet, this traditional model was no longer necessary. So they posited a new model. Let's create software that people don't have to buy. Let's create software that we run, that we operate, and you simply point your browser at our servers.

10:22And we'll just take care of it for you. So you can have the milk, if you will, without having to buy the cow. Salesforce started offering their software as a service. Now, instead of buying your own copy of some program for a hefty sticker price, you could essentially rent it and spread the cost into smaller recurring payments every month. More companies could now afford a Salesforce, and everyone could get access to customer service and new software updates in real time. As for Salesforce, the subscription service model was appealing for a few big reasons. It made software development less risky.

10:58Instead of making their money in lumpy fits and starts every time they released a new version of their software, subscriptions meant that Salesforce would have a dependable stream of income month after month. They could cover the costs of maintaining the software, fund the development of new updates and products, and build on top of an existing customer base. They could more reliably plan their revenue and costs, and that would make them more attractive to outside investors. Within a few years, Salesforce proved that this subscription model could be a billion-dollar business. And other companies around Silicon Valley started to follow in their footsteps.

11:36Venture capitalists, or VCs, started investing more of their money into startups that offered software-as-a-service, or as the acronym goes, SAS. So I think when Salesforce went public in 2004 and really did well, the VCs understood that this is a viable model. And you really started seeing the shift. All startups, really, all software startups, enterprise software startups, became software-as-a-service companies. Within a decade, Netflix was offering streaming movies and shows as a service. Spotify figured out a new way to offer music as a service. Both under the premise that it might be cheaper and more convenient for consumers to essentially rent access to these massive content libraries instead of individually buying songs or movies.

12:21Even Planet Money has gotten into the subscription game. We see you, Planet Money Plus. And as subscriptions transformed the digital world, the enthusiasm for this model started to ripple out to more and more other parts of the economy. Pretty soon, you could get subscriptions to help you restock your household staples. So you'd never have to worry about running out of razors or morning coffee or toilet paper. Yeah, subscriptions are everywhere you look these days. A lot of the basic infrastructure of the internet runs on subscriptions. Things like Amazon Web Services. Even tractor manufacturers are now selling subscriptions to unlock all the features of the tractor they just sold you.

12:59At this point, does it feel like there's a kind of pressure on almost any type of company if they're trying to convince investors to back them to use a subscription model? I think what's really telling is if you look at the early stage venture market, and this definitely skews towards technology companies, certainly, but I'd be hard-pressed to see a venture capitalist fund a company that does not have a strong recurring subscription model. Which brings us back to our consciously floundering businessman Harun Mukhtarzada and his three brothers. By 2015, when they figured out a way to clearly identify recurring payments in their own financial statements, Haroon says it was clear that helping people keep track of their ballooning subscriptions was only going to get more useful.

13:45So they make a basic free website where people can link their bank accounts and find out what subscriptions they're paying for and might want to cancel. They send it around to some family and friends. And over the next few months, it gets popular. But then came the requests from users that said, OK, that's great, but like, why can't I just hit a button and you guys cancel this thing? And we're like, huh, that would be nice. That would be nice indeed. And so we started doing that. We said, all right, we're going to do that. Haroon and his brothers install a cancel button onto the website. And when a user pressed it, the request would arrive at the brothers' San Francisco office, where one of them, usually Yaya, would take it upon himself to brave the customer service gauntlet of whatever subscription their client wanted to escape.

14:32Yaya was in the corner of this very tiny office, just like making phone calls like, hi, yes, I want to cancel this subscription, please. No, I don't use it anymore. No, thanks. I'm not interested. Please cancel it. So it's the very familiar dance of trying to convince a company to let you go. Yes, although with like slightly increasing frustration as like Yaya's on his hundredth call or whatever. Eventually, the brothers were able to get enough users and raise enough venture capital to create an app and outsource this laborious process to a call center in the Philippines. But they were still having trouble figuring out how to actually make any money.

15:08They considered charging a one-time fee for the app, but decided that would exclude too many would-be users. They talked about collecting and selling their users' financial data, but Haroon says that option just felt like it would be a betrayal of their customers' trust. They did try affiliate marketing. Basically, they earned a commission when their customers signed up for other company services through their app. We made a little bit. We were making maybe$15 ,000 a month or something like that, but our expenses were in the hundreds of thousands at that point. All of which meant that, after just a few years, the company found itself in a dire financial situation.

15:43And so we basically are like, guys, you know, there's something here, but it's not a sustainable company. It can't we can't keep paying for the staff that we had hired and the engineers. It's like, what are we going to do? And we had this meeting. I was just like, all right, we basically have enough money for one other try, like one bet. What is the one thing we could do? The brothers talk through their options. The affiliate marketing strategy had not worked. They still don't want to sell customer data. And finally, Yaya asks the question they've all been kind of avoiding for years. What if we charged a subscription for this service?

16:22And I mean, the sheer irony of that is why I personally was adamantly opposed to it. I just said, this is crazy, guys. Like, we can't have a subscription cancellation service that charges people a subscription for it. It just seemed so ridiculous. But when you're on death's doorstep, basically you're willing to kind of do whatever. So that is how after several years doing battle with big subscription, Haroon and his brothers finally succumb to the siren song of the subscription model. And within a matter of months, Haroon says they started to see the number of premium subscribers grow and grow.

17:03And as soon as I saw that number, I was like, guys, there's something here. It was$3 a month, too. Like, we weren't charging a lot or anything. But when we saw that, we were like, OK, we actually have a revenue model now. So the subscription model came to the rescue. Subscription model came to the rescue. That's right. Over the next few years, the brothers were able to raise tens of millions of dollars in investment. Turns out, venture capital really does like a subscription model. And in the winter of 2021, Haroon and his brothers announced that they would be selling their app, which they had named Truebill, to the company behind Rocket Mortgage.

17:37And how much did you end up selling the company for? It was$1.3 billion. With a B. A billion with a B, yeah. It's a hard number to walk away from. So in the six years since Haroon first complained to his brothers about his subscription problem in the floundry, the subscription model had exploded across the economy. And yes, it brought untold convenience to consumers and consistent revenue to businesses. But it's also meant that we've been juggling with more subscriptions than we can keep track of. And this, you know, Cambrian explosion of subscription offerings has also exposed some of the deliberate and deceptive ways that companies have been trying to lure in and lock in as many customers as possible.

18:19After the break, the subscription model breaks bad. And the government strikes back.

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19:50Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. In order to understand why many of us are drowning in more subscriptions than we know what to do with, it's useful to step back and think about how the subscription model has incentivized businesses to behave. Right. So if you're a business that just sells goods, like TVs or whatever, all that matters is how many TVs you sell. But subscription businesses are built around not only how many customers you can bring in, but also how many customers cancel every month. That number, the percentage of customers who cancel, is called the churn rate.

20:26And subscription businesses obsess over it. it's the key to their long-term profitability. And in a sort of ideal world, when the subscription model is working well, a company's incentives should be aligned with its customers. To keep the churn rate low and convince customers to stay subscribed, the company might improve their offerings or keep prices low. But there has always been a sketchy side to subscriptions. There's famously, you know, a subscription mail order record company called Columbia House. They used to try to get customers to sign up by offering them 12 CDs for a penny, but then they would charge them full price for new records every month in perpetuity unless they opted out.

21:05And you can still see the temptation for companies to try to gain subscribers or reduce the churn rate by making little tweaks that have nothing to do with improving their services. Like maybe they'll just make it a little less clear how much the monthly fees will be after an introductory offer. Or they'll make it just a teeny bit harder to cancel by adding an extra step. There's a temptation to take advantage of the fact that we might not have time to go through all the hoops to cancel. Now, if you want to get a sense of how much of the subscription economy is based on sheer customer inertia, you'll want to talk to Stanford economist Neil Mahoney.

21:44Last year, he and his colleagues released a working paper about this very question. He says usually when he talks about his work, people's eyes start to glaze over. This was one of the examples where people were sort of chomping at the bit to tell me their example of this phenomenon. So the ANIC data was showing that a lot of people seem to be struggling with the same problem. Yeah, for sure. A couple years ago, Neil and his colleagues got access to this massive data set with the credit and debit card transactions of hundreds of thousands of people. And they designed a neat way to look at whether people were paying for subscriptions they didn't want.

22:17Basically, when people's cards were lost or stolen or expired, they were forced to actively choose whether or not to renew whatever subscriptions they were signed up for. And what you see, you see this remarkably crisp pattern. On average, 2 % of people cancel every month. And then in the month where their credit card switches over and they have to make an active decision, 8 % of people cancel. So they're four times more likely to cancel when they're forced to pay attention, decide, do I really want this product? In other words, tens of thousands of subscribers in this study seem to have been paying for a service that they no longer actually wanted, which, Neil calculated, meant that some of these companies were making anywhere from 20 to over 200 percent more revenue than they otherwise might have.

23:12They were benefiting from a sort of inertia premium. I mean, it sounds like a pretty good deal for some of these companies. Yeah, and I think that speaks to the issue, right? That there is a bunch of business models out there which might not be viable if markets were working the way they should, which is if you're not getting good value for money, you leave the product. Neil explains subscription services that rely heavily on forgetful or trapped customers are benefiting from a kind of monopoly power. The fact that part of their customer bases are locked in means these firms aren't guided by normal market forces that would lead them to improve their services or lower costs.

23:51It's a barrier to competition. Markets work when firms compete. And when you're not canceling a product you no longer want because you forget about it or it's impossibly difficult to cancel, those forces of consumers taking their business to another product are blunted. Which is why the federal government has now entered the chat. Subscription traps are a market failure. Sam Levine is the head of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, which is like the main federal agency in charge of dealing with this subscription mess. I don't know anyone who's not fed up with some of these subscriptions.

24:31And I know a lot of people who are now more reluctant to sign up for subscriptions because they just don't trust that they're going to be able to cancel it easily. People are busy. I helped recently my partner's 75-year-old mother try to cancel her cable subscription. It was hellish. She had to convince them that this is what she wanted to do. She has other things to do. I had other things to do. The fact that she needed the director of the Consumer Protection Bureau at the FTC to help her cancel an outrageously expensive cable subscription is a sign of how bad this problem has gotten. Sam explains that the FTC has had rules going back to the 1970s governing what is and isn't allowed when it comes to subscription model businesses.

25:21But over the last few years, the agency has received tens of thousands of new consumer complaints about deceptive practices on the part of these companies. techniques that are way more deliberate and dastardly than just benefiting from the forgetfulness of some of your customers. Yeah, they use so-called dark patterns or deceptive design practices to obfuscate the terms of service or to deliberately make the process of canceling a subscription nearly impossible. Over the past few years, the FTC has brought several high-profile lawsuits against companies that they see as the most egregious offenders.