But what if I want a faster horse?

> Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future.

Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

> Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).

That's pretty much Rocket Money

https://www.rocketmoney.com/

We immediately cancel our subscription as soon as we subscribe for services like Netflix, Disney+ etc, where you keep the service for the month. It's thankfully really easy to susbcribe and unsubscribe these days, so doing it this way means we never unknowingly renew. Must have saved us hundreds of pounds by now.

Does it actually work?

In a limited sense, yes.

But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.

Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)

Same here. I never subscribed to Netflix or Disney+ for the intended purpose of continually paying for it in perpetuity - it was always to watch the one show I want (in <1mo) and then immediately kill it.

This doesn't really mesh with SaaS economics, or in this case how Netflix spends billions on producing their own content. A set of subscribers that don't use the service is locally maximized but has a lower lifetime total value. It is much easier to model & optimize your LTV with given costs (ex: assume the user watches 24/7) and then figure out "how do I make a user watch Netflix 24 hours a day?" than it is to solve "how do I grow my constantly churning user base?". Keeping customers is much less expensive than winning new ones.

Netflix is big and surely not monolithic so there may indeed be some people or even departments that think that way, but the content production is not thinking that way. They genuinely want to create amazing content that is compelling. There is also the very real need to have their own content as well now that the networks are selling streaming services themselves and damn near everything is now exclusive to whatever streaming service

The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that to convince people that the future (which is only available by continuing your subscription) is worth waiting for. It's also more attractive because it has smaller up-front costs for the consumer.

It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.

Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.

Similar to if you engaged a realtor on a monthly subscription instead of a (roughly) fixed commission based on % of sales price - incentivizes them to spin things out.

Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).

EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.

I only use it for keeping an eye on my budget, I don't really trust automated systems to cancel things for me. But it does let me know what to cancel manually.