craigmcn

I’ve made my peace with most of this. The streaming services, the cloud storage tiers, the app that used to be a one-time $4.99 purchase and is now $2.99 a month forever. That’s modern software and I’ve stopped fighting it. What I haven’t made peace with is the version of this where the thing you’re being asked to keep paying for is something you already bought, sitting in your house or your driveway, fully paid off.

The clearest example is BMW’s heated seat subscription, which the company rolled out in 2020 and then killed in 2023 after customers revolted. The heating element was already bolted into the seat at the factory, an $18-a-month fee just switched it on, and BMW hasn’t actually abandoned the model, it’s just relabelled it: the 2026 iX3 offers a 360-degree camera as a monthly add-on through ConnectedDrive. Mercedes sells a subscription that unlocks extra horsepower your engine already has. Toyota charges $15 a month for Remote Connect on the 2026 RAV4 just to use features through its own app, and Lincoln has floated $15 a month for heated seats and $100 a month for a horsepower bump on a vehicle that already cost tens of thousands of dollars. Volvo’s chief commercial officer called the whole trend out directly, saying luxury brands shouldn’t nickel-and-dime people who’ve already paid full price for the car.

It’s not confined to cars, either. Ring sells video doorbells and security cameras that you buy outright, install on your own house, and pay to power. The camera records when someone’s at your door. But without a Ring Protect subscription, you can only watch that footage live, as it happens. Miss the moment, walk away from your phone, or want to check who rang the bell an hour ago, and the recording your own camera captured is locked behind a monthly fee. You own the camera. You don’t own the ability to look at what it already saw.

I did this to myself once already, with music. I had a CD collection I’d bought one disc at a time, owned outright, could hand down or sell or leave in a box in the basement for twenty years and it would still play. I traded all of that for a streaming subscription because it was more convenient, and it is, right up until the month I stop paying and the music stops existing for me. I didn’t upgrade from ownership to access. I downgraded, and called it progress because the app was nicer.

That’s really the whole argument. A subscription for a cloud server or a database that Netflix has to keep running makes sense to me, the ongoing cost is real. A subscription for a heating coil already sitting under my car’s upholstery, or for a camera that already recorded the footage, or for a song I already own the rights to hear, is not a service, it’s a toll booth on something I own. Manufacturers build the hardware in because it’s cheaper to standardize, then decide the software lock is where the profit lives. I understand the business logic. I still think it’s a scam.