In some ways, I agree. In others, I don't. I mean, the problem is largely in the difficulty of unsubscribing. If that were easier to manage (and virtual cards are one way to deal with that) I think it's not such a problem, and even has some advantages. But you could easily argue that this difficulty of unsubscribing is built into the business model; people who sell subscription based services know that the harder it is to unsubscribe, the more money they will make, so... incentives are not, as it were, aligned, and that tends to lead to suboptimal outcomes.
I think there are valid arguments for the subscription model; I know before buying a car, I rent all of the models I'm considering, for a week or more. This is often harder with things like software, which don't have as strong of ownership protections as physical goods, meaning I usually can't rent software to try it out, if it's not sold on a subscription plan. I'd consider renting a car permanently, (except that it's either massively expensive or massively inflexible; getting out of a lease, as far as I can tell, is way harder than selling a car, and renting cars outside of a lease is uneconomical. I feel the same way about commercial real-estate; usually the penalties for breaking a lease seem a lot worse than just selling the goddamn building a year into ownership. And this is possibly your objection; if you have perfect knowledge of your future needs, buying software up front is probably a lot cheaper. But, without the ability to sell the software when you are done, it's not really comparable.)
>If you're wealthy enough to put money for couple years worth of service into a virtual CC for every service you can use, you're probably wealthy enough to manage all this stuff for you anyway.
I think wealthy people would be willing to pay for an easier solution to this. I would. the virtual credit card solution is clumsy because the software is bad (I haven't actually gotten the capital one solution suggested earlier setup, it might be great, but the citi solutions and the now defunct bank of America solutions require flash and are... clumsy) - the problem isn't the money; for all the virtual credit card solutions I've tried, the payment goes to your regular credit card, so you don't need to sink any capital, it's just work
(but, of course, this is mostly about how difficult it is to cancel subscription services. If it were easy, this wouldn't be a problem. - I think this is our major point of disagreement.)
I was readying a long comment addressing your individual points, but I realized I can compress it all to this:
The overall reason why I prefer ownership of durable goods over subscriptions (and the planned obsolescence economy) is reduction of variance in opportunities and quality of life. At the time when I have the means, I can buy something. If I have less means or that something is very expensive (e.g. a new car, a house), I can convert it into a "subscription" myself using my bank, via various forms of loans and installment payments. And then when I go broke, I can still use the thing I own, perhaps to help myself get out of the predicament. Subscriptions bundle this all together, making the utility directly dependent on my cash flow, prevent me from optimizing the value I derive from them (through ToS that limit a lot of non-standard use cases), and deprive me from the ability to use a good in the time of crisis.
