If so, what was your final straw and how is it going?
What did you move to?
What do you miss?
What services are you considering quitting?
I'm still ordering from Amazon but I'm waiting until my cart is over $25.00 so I can take advantage of the free shipping. It's not as convenient but I can live with it. I probably won't ever return to prime.
I also cancel my Netflix account after 10yrs. I wasn't using it much. Netflix has lots of content but the quality was not there for me. I've switched to HBO. I'm using it and I like the content so I'm staying for a bit.
For many of the services, I never sought out a real replacement. Instead of named social media, I use pseudonymous accounts on reddit and HN. I stay in contact with family/friends/colleagues using mail and chat. Instead of Costco I go to the local supermarket.
I would love to quit streaming services (Netflix, Disney+) and Amazon Prime but my wife/kids still use them regularly. Also sometimes fantasize about making the leap from the Apple ecosystem to Linux, but am still waiting for some decisive nudge to push me over the edge. Inertia, the sense of captivity and anxiety about learning curves and possible regrets are real factors, but in my experience for most products it is easy to learn the basics and I have never felt any real regret at leaving services I didn't enjoy or feel were compatible with my principles/priorities.
I'm also about to drop my Sam's Club membership. I only use it to buy gas, because I'm a single guy and I simply can't use stuff fast enough when I buy from Sam's. I can go across the street and pay 3 cents a gallon more (worst case, they are often the same price), which I often have to do anyway because Sam's closes their gas pumps at 8pm.
I'm not going to renew my BestBuy TotalTech membership. It doesn't save me enough $$$ because I can't buy enough to make it worthwhile.
I dropped Office 365, and have convinced family members to do the same. They just don't use it any more. LibreOffice and Google Docs fill the void.
Things that I have refused to buy because they are rediculously expensive: anything from Adobe (gimp, inkscape, kdenlive instead).
At work, we just passed on using Anaconda, b/c the business license that we would need was $2k per dev, per year. We came up with our own solution for CVE tracking and license auditing.
I quit Netflix because I never watch it but immediately resubscribed because my wife was deep into Virgin River and The Great British Bake Off. woops.
Netflix is coasting, once stranger things final season comes out i think thats unsubscribed for good. They no longer do prestige tv, its reality tv nonsense or good shows cancelled on a cliffhanger.
My prime just renewed but i set an alert for next year because i will probably cancel then. Other than "the boys" its mostly a wasteland. And the free shipping is of dubious use when things that used to be 1-2 day are now all 5-10 days anyway.
Hbo max is through a grandfathered cell plan, but theyve been trying to destroy themselves too, so if that goes away i wont sub.
I admire the people that rotate their streaming one month on at one a switch frequently but thats more planning than i can do.
We don’t order from Amazon enough to warrant paying a subscription for 7+ day delivery timeframes, so instead we pay for Walmarts service. There are Walmarts everywhere, so I can just order something on their app and go pick it up, or get it delivered in two days if it’s not in the store. It’s a much better value for rural living.
- Dropbox: Keep the free account for basic file sharing, moved to iCloud for everything.
- Netflix: Not really good shows coming out. I rather pick and choose TV shows I get from somewhere else.
I quit everything but iCloud for file storage and Apple Music because I like to have a changing workout playlist I can’t find anywhere else.
Also, the hugely increased amount of competition has somehow made everything worse for the customer. Everything is more expensive, and it's more difficult to find things. Is that a first?
In he last few years shipping has gotten better from other retailers, I get packages from Japan faster that I get them from AMZN.
I just can’t get paying for a ‘premium’ service which is worse than average.
Same with Netflix. I just borrow a friend's login or pirate it.
Spotify is a must have for me that I haven't quit. I have a dream of finally setting up my home cloud instance and ripping all my old CDs and just buying a couple albums a month DRM free but there's always something else that takes priority for time and money.
I miss nothing from the services I don't subscribe to. I can always sub for a month to Netflix if it's "in the moment" and I am feeling lazy.
I quit Facebook a decade ago, Twitter recently. Tried CoHost but no one is there and now dislike Tumblr's lack of multiple feeds, so I suppose I do miss a bit of "endless scrolling and seeing what cool people are up too", but honestly Discord + reading/mindfulness is starting to replace it. Slowly, anyway.
Reddit sometimes gives me a dope rush, but I need to knock that off, too. I try to read news headlines once a week to not get emotionally bogged down. It's all just noise in the end.
Still pay for Dropbox, still pay for Amazon Prime. Occasionally have CrunchyRoll/Disney+/HBO turned on for a few months before we cancel it after we mine the well dry or a show finishes up.
I used the free Dropbox account for a long time and never needed much storage, but cancelled it when they limited it to 3 devices. I understand it costs money, but I just used it for a small shared storage space, and while I would have been happy to pay them $10-20/year or something like that, they didn't really have a small plan that appealed. I moved to pCloud, but it started getting pushy with the ads and stuff, so now I'm on a self-hosted Nextcloud which I like a lot and has lots more storage than I would have got before. It's running on Oracle's free tier cloud which is pretty impressive (and I'm far from an Oracle fan), so technically it's still free I suppose.
I'm glad to say I cancelled Lastpass for a few reasons, but mostly it was the principle of the thing when they tripled the price over 2 years or so and didn't add any functionality that I could tell. I made a point to delete my data from them several years ago, so I hope it was actually purged in time for me to avoid their recent shenanigans. I moved to Bitwarden at the suggestion from some colleagues and so far, so good on that.
I'll be canceling a decade old Prime membership when it expires in July for the obvious reasons - the cost has increased but the shipping has slowed down quite a bit to where 2 days doesn't seem to mean anything anymore. I also don't use the additional services that they've added (and I'm not looking to tie myself into Amazon if at all possible), so they don't bring me any value. But the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak was when they unwittingly signed me up for a paid subscription music service when I completed a recent order. I assume I left some box checked or something, but I'm not clear how it happened and I don't care - this is one dark pattern too many and makes me fear what they might try next.
Google Voice -> Twilio forwarding to FastMail (doesn’t support receiving SMS from short codes, but I see that as a feature)
No final straw, just made the time because it was important to me to get off Google.
If there was no such plan for students, I would not pay for either.
Paramount+ was just because I had it on my prime account, and haven't used it in months.
But, I've been thinking about buying an album directly, without relying on subscription service, and definitely without DRM. I just can't figure out where to buy it. I haven't seen any music CD shop in almost a decade in my country.
"delivered to reception" apparently
Shipping is still free over a minimum spend and when you're buying diapers and wipes. You'll hit it.
Amazon Prime was ultimately costing me money, not saving it.
I canceled Netflix, Disney Plus, Spotify, and Dropbox forever ago but I do subscribe to iCloud, Apple Music, and HEY.com for email. I don't own a TV, but I'll buy or rent movies on AppleTV from time to time and we'll stream those on the laptop before bed. I haven't had social media accounts since high school—no LinkedIn, no Twitter, no Facebook, no personal website. It's better this way.
I did buy good speakers for the living room, and these days I try to treat music listening as an "event" of sorts, instead of mindlessly putting in ear buds and compulsively skipping songs, bouncing between playlists, or listening to podcasts that I immediately forget.
There was no "final straw" for me, these services just weren't needed. There are so many ways to consume and create that don't require a subscription.