Item — HN Reader

I'm SO tired of subscription services that only offer the opportunity to buy more stuff.

  - Doordash wants you to subscribe
  - AMC movies want you to subscribe
  - Now Waymo wants you to subscribe

You can't buy anything now without being hassled for a subscription. I don't see any value here except for when they degrade the service for non-subscribers to make the priority pickups seem worth it.

7 comments

This type of subscription model is a little less annoying, most "normal" people will sign up for the non-subscription rate, and frequent users are already frequent users, so they will be more OK with a subscription.

Speaking personally, I don't see enough movies or do enough ride shares to want to subscribe to AMC or Waymo, but Doordash would make sense. Maybe it's OK for me to pay a higher price for the ~1 time per year I use those other services.

I was recently offered a sale price by a restaurant on Doordash, when I was logged out. I logged in as a subscriber and the sale deal went away, which meant that the delivery actually cost slightly more. I've noticed this pattern a lot: the subscription supposedly offers savings, but when you A/B test the same meal against a subscribed/logged in account and a non-subscribed account, the amounts are usually very similar.

My conclusion is that Doordash actually cares more about their non-subscribed users than their subscribers: that's where they see growth.

The problem is that they'll keep advertising it to you. I'm already giving them money, but they'll still push me to subscribe while I'm in the middle of trying to give them my money, because that's not enough for them.

> The problem is that they'll keep advertising it to you

If you don’t like it, then change providers.

If all providers do it, then you must pay to avoid advertisements.

Or, complain to your elected government representatives.

What’s that? Your Chase/Amex credit card gives you a monthly/annual credit? Ok. No more complaints then.

The existence of loyalty clubs are fine. If you use the service a lot, then it is a better deal, and the company gets the benefit that you are more likely to consolidate your spending with them rather than shop around. Win-win.

It is the fact that you can't do anything without them being pushed down your throat that is infuriating. Every interaction with a company these days is an attempt to up-sell. When a small number of retail stores started that, I stopped doing business with them. Now they all do it.

I wonder if these services would be instead be like micropayments (charged by $0.01 per minute) instead of a costly $20/mo subscription it would make more sense.

AMC one isn't bad if you actually like going to the theaters. Depending on if you have good imax or Dolby ones around you

For most things though totally agreed

AMC doesn't fit here, once you subscribe to a list there's basically no additional cost. And the lower tiers skip fees etc

What's worse... subscription hassle or a tip hassle?

If done right, this is more like a monthly bus pass

Well this is being done wrong because it doesn’t include any rides with the subscription

Why not just get a monthly bus pass?

> Why not just get a monthly bus pass?

It's less convenient, doesn't work nationally and isn't as fun?

If you're planning on taking a Waymo across country, it's going to cost more than 400 dollars.

> If you're planning on taking a Waymo across country

Nationally != cross country. A Waymo account would be useful to me in the Bay Area, LA, Phoenix and Miami. A bus pass is only useful in one place.

Same thing if you want to take a SF Muni bus to New York City. You're probably looking at buying one outright and hiring a driver

The other people on the bus.