From Dotcom to DotCon - Are We Living in a Subscription Bubble?
In the late 1990s, the world lost its collective mind over the internet. The dotcom bubble inflated fast, with venture capitalists throwing money at anything ending in “.com” — even companies without products, plans, or revenue. Pets.com had a sock puppet and a Super Bowl ad. Webvan promised groceries at your door before we had the bandwidth to load their homepage. It all came crashing down around 2000, burning trillions in market value.
Fast forward to now: we’ve matured, right?
Sort of.
We’ve swapped speculative IPOs for another kind of quiet inflation — subscriptions. And just like before, most people aren’t really tracking the total cost.
Death by a Thousand Monthly Charges
You pay monthly for:
- TV and movies (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and that one show only on Paramount+)
- Music (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Premium)
- Fitness apps (Peloton, Fitbod, Apple Fitness+)
- Gaming (Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Apple Arcade)
- Digital storage (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox)
- Software you used to buy once (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Notion, even your favorite to-do list)
And then there’s the box economy. You can subscribe to receive fresh vegetables from HelloFresh, premium cuts of meat from ButcherBox, hand-picked craft beers via Beer52 (yes, I’m guilty of having a subscription on Moersleutel The Guild), and even collectible toys with Loot Crate. It’s like Christmas morning — except you’re paying for the surprise… forever. There’s a subscription for everything, and if there isn’t yet, someone’s pitching it on Kickstarter right now.
The Paywall on Wheels
Now cars come with subscriptions. Heated seats? That’ll be €19.99/month. Want remote start? Monthly. BMW, Mercedes, and others are quietly rolling out these paywalls on wheels.
In 2020, car subscriptions made $4.1 billion. By 2030, they’re projected to hit $32 billion. That’s not a side hustle — that’s a business model. Your next oil change might come bundled with a cancellation link.
Even printers have gotten in on the game. HP offers ink subscriptions. Yes — subscriptions. For ink!
The Cloud: Not Always the Silver Lining
And what about us techies? Cloud providers pitch elasticity, scale, and cost savings. But for many companies, moving from on-prem to cloud doesn’t cut costs — it increases them. Especially if you just lift and shift. Then, if your app idles 90% of the time and you run it 24/7 in the cloud, guess what? You’re still paying 100% of the bill. I’ve met quite a few managers and developers who thought the cloud would cut costs this way.
Optimizing for ROI in the cloud requires engineering discipline, FinOps awareness, and frankly, time that many teams don’t have.
Cloud can be cheaper. But just like subscriptions, only if you actually manage it.
The Subscription Bubble
So here we are. Death by recurring charges. Individuals are bleeding €10 here, €15 there. Teams are spinning up services and forgetting to tear them down. Executives approve software with auto-renew turned on.
Nobody has a complete picture of what they’re paying for, or why.
Sound familiar?
We may not be inflating dotcom stocks anymore, but we’re certainly inflating value expectations. Subscriptions are sold as cheaper, more flexible, and lower-risk options. But left unchecked, they add up to the same unsustainable place: paying more for less and wondering where all the money went.
We’re all just frogs in a slowly boiling pot of recurring payments. Cancel something before it croaks you.
The Inevitable Pop?
How long can this go on? Just like the dotcom craze, the subscription surge feels unstoppable — until it isn’t. Sooner or later, people will start asking what they’re paying for, why, and if it’s worth it. When enough of us hit unsubscribe, we might see the subscription bubble burst—not with a bang, but with a thousand quiet cancellations.
