You are right, of course, that there are many sorts of transactions that "subscriptions" make sense for. However, subscriptions (particularly relatively inexpensive subscriptions) are dangerous and people get into trouble with them all the time.
The current fashion in our industry is to make everything a subscription even when it doesn't make sense for the product (a large portion of SaaS is exactly this). They do that because people don't tend to do well with them, and so it helps to maximize the company's revenue. Combine that with making it hard to cancel subscriptions and there's a real reason to be cautious about them.
Fixed recurring expenses are famously dangerous things, and should be avoided when at all possible.
I kind of agree. I think subscriptions are working for businesses because people don't like payment. And so in case of one time payment, they don't like it every single time. That's a lot of friction, and a lot of effort on the business part to convince people to come over that friction. Subscription is however, also a one-time friction, but the payment is then recurrent. That's not bad in itself, even though it's much easier for the business.
What I'd like to fix about subscriptions is exactly the same part you emphasized as being dangerous. People for example can't enlist all of their subscriptions. And also cannot really do anything about them from their own side, they have to go through the business entity. These both tilt the field to the businesses, quite a lot. Payment processors (and regulations) however could stop this. I really liked Paypal's solution, where they offer a page where they list all of the entities the user has enabled subscriptions for. So that is immediately a list of all the subscriptions. And on the same page, the user can cancel any of them in an instant. After which, if the business tries to take money from the account, Paypal denies it, because there's no active allowance anymore. Easy as pie and puts back the control in the hands of the money's rightful owner, the user.
Although then it raises the problem of the payment processor (such as PayPal) having more information about you, I do like that solution. And, of course, your payment processor already knows what you're paying to who anyway, so perhaps there's no additional leakage of data with it.
I was completely unaware that PayPal did this. I have a PayPal account. I think I'll investigate.
The current fashion in our industry is to make everything a subscription even when it doesn't make sense for the product (a large portion of SaaS is exactly this). They do that because people don't tend to do well with them, and so it helps to maximize the company's revenue. Combine that with making it hard to cancel subscriptions and there's a real reason to be cautious about them.
Fixed recurring expenses are famously dangerous things, and should be avoided when at all possible.