> Their average response was $62. When they were given more time to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were still way off. The correct answer was $273.
I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked.
People are terrible at estimating or keeping track of their subscriptions, myself included. A couple years ago I painstakingly audited all my recurring subscriptions. Painstaking because I had to go through all my bank and credit account statements for a year looking for the services that billed yearly or semi-yearly rather than monthly. I had also drastically underestimated what they cost me, by about a factor of two in my case. I think of myself as being very frugal about this kind of thing, so it was a surprise.
But then I was able to save myself almost $1000 a year just by eliminating some unused subscriptions I had sort of forgotten. Not forgotten entirely, but services I sort of failed to think about as costs, because the monthly spend for them individually was so low. But once I thought about them as a yearly cost, and then about the total yearly cost for all these little services, that successfully (and more accurately) reframed the situation.
I didn't find unsubscribing or cancelling to be particular onerous. I do use Privacy.com now, which would make it both easier to track and theoretically easier to cancel. Ironically, Privacy.com is a monthly subscription (at the tier I use) but it is definitely worth it.
I told people about the $1000 a year "raise" I got by just trimming dead weight. I told them they should do the same exercise—make a spreadsheet, have a column that multiplies the monthly fee by 12, and think about it as a yearly cost instead—and they were all, uniformly, without exception certain that they already knew what they spent, and it wasn't really very much.
My advice: do the exercise anyway, it is worth it.
I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked.
People are terrible at estimating or keeping track of their subscriptions, myself included. A couple years ago I painstakingly audited all my recurring subscriptions. Painstaking because I had to go through all my bank and credit account statements for a year looking for the services that billed yearly or semi-yearly rather than monthly. I had also drastically underestimated what they cost me, by about a factor of two in my case. I think of myself as being very frugal about this kind of thing, so it was a surprise.
But then I was able to save myself almost $1000 a year just by eliminating some unused subscriptions I had sort of forgotten. Not forgotten entirely, but services I sort of failed to think about as costs, because the monthly spend for them individually was so low. But once I thought about them as a yearly cost, and then about the total yearly cost for all these little services, that successfully (and more accurately) reframed the situation.
I didn't find unsubscribing or cancelling to be particular onerous. I do use Privacy.com now, which would make it both easier to track and theoretically easier to cancel. Ironically, Privacy.com is a monthly subscription (at the tier I use) but it is definitely worth it.
I told people about the $1000 a year "raise" I got by just trimming dead weight. I told them they should do the same exercise—make a spreadsheet, have a column that multiplies the monthly fee by 12, and think about it as a yearly cost instead—and they were all, uniformly, without exception certain that they already knew what they spent, and it wasn't really very much.
My advice: do the exercise anyway, it is worth it.