$5.99 is not a lot of money.
This is what makes $5.99 dangerous.
Nobody sits at the kitchen table with a calculator and says, I’m going to need some time to think about this $5.99 commitment.
You press Subscribe.
And why wouldn’t you? It’s $5.99.
The problem is that $5.99 has friends.
There’s the $8.99. The $11.99. The extremely reasonable $3.49. The $6.99 you signed up for because there was something you wanted to watch. The $2.99 for extra storage because your phone informed you, with some urgency, that you had apparently taken too many photographs since 2017.
Individually, none of these amounts seems particularly concerning.
Collectively, at some point, you appear to have acquired a small portfolio of monthly financial commitments.
And the strange thing is that most of them probably seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time.
We weren’t supposed to need this many
Streaming was going to make everything simpler.
Remember that?
Instead of paying for an enormous television package containing 147 channels you never watched, you could simply subscribe to the things you actually wanted.
Brilliant.
Except the things you actually wanted turned out to live in different places.
The series everyone is talking about is on one service. The film you want is on another. That programme you used to watch has moved somewhere else. Somebody recommends a documentary and, naturally, that requires an entirely new relationship with another company.
So you subscribe.
Then you finish the documentary.
The subscription, however, does not consider its work complete.
Deloitte’s 2026 US research found that subscribing households were spending an average of $69 a month on streaming video services. Nearly three-quarters of consumers surveyed said they were frustrated by streaming services continuing to put their prices up.
Which perhaps explains a modern viewing habit that would have sounded ridiculous twenty years ago: signing up to a service, watching the thing you want, cancelling it, waiting until something else worth watching appears, and signing up again.
I don’t watch television anymore.
I manage a small portfolio of television providers.
Then, of course, there are the free trials.
FREE FOR 30 DAYS.
Possibly the most confident sentence in modern commerce.
Thirty days from now you will be standing in a supermarket wondering whether you have milk. You will be replying to a message you forgot about yesterday. You will be trying to remember where you put the thing you were holding four minutes ago.
The free trial you started at 11.43pm because you wanted to watch one particular programme is unlikely to be occupying a great deal of your mental bandwidth.
So Day 31 arrives.
$8.99.
And congratulations. You are now a customer.
Free trials that automatically convert to paid subscriptions are common enough that consumer authorities explicitly advise people to note the cancellation deadline when they sign up.
Which is sensible.
There are people organised enough to sign up for a 30-day trial and immediately put CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION into their calendar for Day 29.
I admire those people.
They’re probably the same people who have their Christmas shopping finished in August.
The rest of us suddenly notice a $9.99 charge in October and think, Oh. That.
When did everything become monthly?
To be fair, some subscriptions are excellent. There are things we use constantly, things we’d happily continue paying for and things that are genuinely better or more convenient as subscriptions.
The trouble is that subscriptions haven’t politely remained inside the television.
They’re in our phones, our music, our software and our cloud storage. There are apps charging monthly fees, delivery memberships, news subscriptions, audiobook subscriptions and premium versions of things we already thought we’d paid for.
At some point, buying something quietly acquired a new option: don’t buy it at all. Just pay for it forever.
And that’s where subscription maths becomes peculiar.
A $120 purchase feels like $120.
You think about it. You compare prices. You might decide to wait.
$9.99 a month doesn’t feel like $119.88 a year.
It feels like $9.99.
The monthly price has a remarkable ability to remain psychologically monthly, even when you intend to pay it twelve times.
Some subscriptions eventually become so ordinary that you barely register them anymore. Others linger because you keep meaning to cancel them. And occasionally a small recurring payment appears on a bank statement bearing the name of a company you only vaguely recognise.
You stare at it for a while.
You search your email.
Eventually you discover that for the past eighteen months you’ve apparently been enjoying Premium access to something you have absolutely no recollection of accessing.
It’s only $4.99 a month.
Best not to calculate the eighteen-month total.
There is, naturally, a subscription for the subscription problem
Eventually, of course, you may decide to get organised and cancel some of them.
And because the subscription economy has now reached its logical conclusion, there are paid subscriptions that will help you manage and cancel your other subscriptions.
We’ve created a subscription for cancelling subscriptions.
I think we may be done here.
You could, of course, just cancel things yourself.
In theory.
Signing up takes approximately eleven seconds.
Cancelling can feel like ending a relationship.
We’re sorry to see you go.
Are you sure? What if we gave you 20% off? Would you like two months free? Before you leave, could you tell us why? Would you reconsider?
I only wanted to stop paying $6.99.
I didn’t realise there would be closure.
The problem isn’t really $5.99
None of this means subscriptions are inherently bad.
That’s probably why they’ve become so successful.
They can be convenient. They give us access to things we genuinely use. They can save us from buying something outright that we may only need temporarily. And automatic renewal is wonderful when it’s something you actually want automatically renewed.
The problem is simply that no individual subscription ever looks like the subscription problem.
It’s one small payment. Then another one appears. And perhaps another.
You don’t decide one afternoon that from now on a noticeable chunk of your income will leave your account every month in exchange for a collection of digital services.
It happens gradually.
You wanted to watch something. You needed more storage. An app was useful. You wanted the version without ads. You forgot about the free trial.
And somewhere along the way, $5.99 stopped being a purchase and became part of the background scenery of modern life.
That’s the clever thing about subscriptions. Individually, almost none of them feels expensive enough to worry about.
They just have an unfortunate habit of finding friends.
Sources / Further Reading
Deloitte Ireland — Digital Consumer Trends 2026.
Deloitte reports that 74% of Irish consumers access paid digital subscriptions.
Deloitte — Digital Media Trends 2026.
US subscribing households reported average spending of $69 per month on paid streaming video services, while 73% of surveyed consumers expressed frustration with continued streaming price increases.
US Federal Trade Commission — Free trials, auto-renewals and subscriptions.
Consumer guidance on trials that convert to paid subscriptions and recurring billing.
Rocket Money.
Its paid Premium membership includes assistance cancelling supported subscriptions, providing the real-world basis for the “subscription for cancelling subscriptions” observation.