Dom Corriveau

On subscriptions - 2023 edition

Posted on Nov 8, 2023

Update: Feb. 7, 2024 - Removed Amazon Prime.

Following Joel, who was inspired by others as well, I wanted to add to discussion around subscriptions and what I actually pay for in 2023. For better or worse, nearly everything is subscription based now. Try as I might, we still have several subscriptions. Yet it is much, much fewer than most I believe, especially for entertainment. Below is what subscriptions I do have and what they cost in USD.

Entertainment

Let’s start here. I’ve mentioned a few times I generally don’t watch TV. This is true for the entire house. We have a TV and it sits off 23 hours a day. In fact, we can go several days in a row without ever turning it on. We all enjoy our own favorites on our own devices. But, this is what we do have.

  • Peacock: $3.50/mo.
    • Starting in June of this year Comcast stopped giving us Peacock for free for being an Xfinity internet subscriber. We really didn’t want to give Comcast even more money, but ultimately subscribed when they offered a deal for people to stay.
    • My wife and kids are HUGE WWE fans. We throw a little party for every major event and it is frequently a topic of discussion at the dinner table. I love to watch it with them and its such a blast. My wife has been a wrestling fan since the 90’s and it has spread to our kids. Under $4 a month to get all of the WWE events is a no-brainer.
  • Jupiter Party membership: $8/mo.
    • I’ve been listening to Jupiter Broadcasting shows for about 15 years now and I’ve written about attending their live events.
    • I’m still a fan and like supporting them.
  • Spotify: $18.50/mo.
    • Married with 4 kids means I have some sort of music subscription service.
    • I hate Spotify and never use it. But, everyone else in the house likes to use it.
    • Lots of people talk about how important music is in their lives. I’m going to buck the trend. I don’t listen to music and its not important for me to listen to music. For real, I don’t listen to music, ever. This primarily has to do with being extremely hard of hearing. Music has too much going on and I can’t understand what is happening. Its just a jumbled mess in my ears.

Gaming

Having kids means there is no way I can get out of having subscriptions to something gaming related.

  • Xbox Game Pass: $18.50/mo.
    • This is for my son who is well into his teens. Paying for this is much easier than trying to buy games new all the time. He’s happy with the selection and pays for any new game he wants out of his own money.
  • Crayola mobile: $3.50/mo.
    • I have a big age gap between my kids. My two youngest like to play the Crayola mobile game and of course it has a subscription to unlock all the options in the game. At least it is cheap.

Services

Everything else kinda fits into this category.

  • Proton Unlimited: $13/mo.
    • I have been slowly migrating away from Google services and chose Proton Mail as my Gmail replacement. In addition to mail, this subscription gets me unlimted VPN and some cloud storage.

I’m going to throw one extra in that is food related, but it is not the traditional meal kit service.

  • Smith Brothers Farms: $16.50/wk.
    • This is for milk delivery. We live in a very small town in the foothills of Mt. Rainier and are so fortunate to have this option.
    • Every week we have about 3 gallons of milk delivered to us and we love it! It saves us time and money. Time since we don’t have to make runs to the store and money since every time we go to the store we end up getting more than just milk.

Total without milk delivery: $65.00

Grand total: $131.00/mo.

To be honest, this is much higher than I thought it was. Yet in exchange we get a lot of value. For about the price of cable TV we get a lot of other fun and everyone is happy. There aren’t any other subscription services I wish we had and now that I see we are paying nearly $100/mo. for what we do have, some things might start disappearing.

One thing that really stands out to me is the subscription cost creep. A lot of these services used to be significantly cheaper. Its just in the last year we’ve seen big price increases.