The topic of subscription fatigue and subscriptions in general have been on my mind recently. I recently talked about it on an episode of Shades of Brown and I recently also read a blog post by TJ Luomo about tracking subscriptions.
Making resolutions for the new years is not something I usually do but at the start of 2020 I decided I would try to minimize recurring costs (aka subscriptions) as much as possible. So I decided to give the app TJ mentioned a try and just inputting all the subscriptions in my life was fatiguing in itself.
Domain names are subscriptions too fam
What I should do next is tally up the cost of my domain names. But… I really don’t wanna. A few years ago I had a terrible habit of collecting domain names, and they’re overly hard to let go. As I write that, I realize how stupid it is, but it’s true, and I suspect others can easily relate.
TJ Luomo
Thankfully for me I have been cutting down on my domain name habit over the years, I’ve turned off auto-renewals on domains that have no use whatsoever (no DNS records or other reason to keep it registered). Looking at my registrar’s list of domains, I have 21 at the moment, two of those are set to expire before 2020 is over. That said, I still wish my domain registrar (Gandi) had a way for me to calculate the yearly cost of my domains easily so I have an idea of how much I’m spending there.
Check your intervals
Subscription intervals are another thing I’ve been keeping an eye on. Wherever it makes sense and is feasible and possible I’ve been moving subscriptions to annual or even biennial cycles. For example, my e-mail provider Fastmail is on a biennial cycle because I’m very happy with them and I have no need or desire to move my e-mail elsewhere. Many services offer discounts on longer billing cycle intervals for subscriptions so if you are using some service long term, look into if you can subscribe yearly or biennially instead of monthly to get a discount.
Now I’m thinking of some other optimizations that I can make to my subscriptions but let’s end this blog post here before this becomes a post where I start outlining my personal finances.