Grave Error
“Grave Error”– a cartoon that illustrates how subscription-based business models might be gaining in popularity, but they are not without their issues.
A poll by Sticky.io found that the average consumer has five different retail subscriptions, while IDC reckons 53% of all software revenue will be generated from a subscription model by the end of 2022.
Companies love the subscription model because it generates predictable revenue, enhances the return on customer acquisition cost, and encourages more up-selling and cross-selling.
However, consumers and business customers are tiring of the model as it has become abused – having to manage multiple subscriptions and finding companies becoming increasingly sneaky in how they hide the ‘cancel subscription’ option.
Also, not all use cases are set-up for ongoing monthly subscriptions. For example, Amazon Web Services uses the subscription model to allow users to fluctuate storage capacity.
While this works really well for short-term hyper-scaling needs, it is not a useful model for archival storage – such as museums storing digital art, banks storing transaction data or musicians storing their catalogs for eternity.
In these instances, where timeframes are 10+ years, relying on someone to keep paying the monthly storage cost and that a centralized cloud storage solution will be still in existence is a risky bet.
