I am on my second month of minimalist approach to subscribed streaming services. As you might recall, I’m down to being subscribed to only two streaming services at any given time.
About a month ago, I cancelled everything except for Amazon Prime and then, because I wanted to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I subscribed to Paramount+ (on a monthly basis). Over the course of four weeks, I watched enough SNW to get to the end of season 2. It’s an excellent show by the way, and if you’re curious about it at all, please give it a watch. Anyways, since season 3 isn’t coming anytime soon, I decided to cancel my Paramount+ subscription once the month was over. I did hesitate slightly before cancelling because the service also has Picard which I am not caught up on, the Twisted Metal series based on the PlayStation video game series, and also Top Gun: Maverick which I have yet to see. Another month of that would have been fine with me.
In the end, I decided to cancel because I wanted to watch Ahsoka on Disney+. Now interestingly, when I went through the cancellation flow on Paramount+, they tried to stop me by offering me a discounted price for the next three months. This is interesting because this means that even if you want to continue your subscription, you should try to cancel because there’s a chance you might be offered a discount to prevent you from leaving. If the algorithm decides to not give you a last chance discount, you can just back out of the cancellation flow. So yeah, the next time you’re near the end of month for your subscription, at least for Paramount+, just trying cancelling to see what happens.
I decided to push through and cancelled entirely because I wanted to have access to Disney+ for the next month. Now I’m not sure if this was just random luck but just today, I saw a Disney+ ad on Twitter that was offering $1.99 per month deals for three months to new subscribers and returning subscribers. The normal price is $14.99 a month, so this is a great deal. I signed up immediately, so I’m all set for the next three months. The odds that I’ll continue to be subscribed to Disney+ beyond the three months is very low. I will have most likely consumed all the content I want by then and I don’t want to pay $14.99.
The lesson to be learned from all of this is that if I had been subscribed to Disney+ and Paramount+ this entire time and was just content to be continually subscribed, those services would be happy to take my money and exert no effort in giving me discounts.
The act of cancelling or being a lapsed subscriber forces these services to entice you to continue or come back to them. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t changed my spending habits as a consumer. Cancel the services that you don’t have time for or aren’t giving you the content you want to consume. Make them work to get your money and only jump back in if they can give you a deal. Don’t just blindly give them your money every month or every year (if you go annually).