There are so many subscription products these days that it makes sense to assess the value of each carefully before committing.

If you're like me you tend to forget you're paying for something, and have to do a yearly purge.

It's very easy to slowly but surely rack up hundreds of dollars a month in subscription services.

My habit is to cancel right away when I start a subscription. You can still use the service for the month you paid for, and it's easy to restart it if you do still find yourself attempting to use it a month later.

Substack disappointed me because you can't do this. They remove content access if you do not have an "active" subscription. You don't have to pay again to "reactivate", but the paid content is locked until you do. This is obviously intended dark behavior because when I went to fully unsub later in the month they gave me a special dialog and a free month hoping for me to forget again this month. Very lame.

Oh, you haven't seen darker behavior of many Japan based services:

- Payment cycle closes always on the 1st of the month (which means, if you sign up on the last day of the month, you get 1 day of service for full month of payment. No proration, or anything.)

- If you cancel the service, you'll immediately lose access, doesn't matter if it's 1st day of the month, or very end of the month, it's gone. To reenroll, you often have to pay again.

I had a boss I didn't like a while ago, but one of the things he did that I did like was set a calendar reminder to unsubscribe. Too bad; it would've been easier on me mentally and emotionally if he were completely irredeemable, but I admit to using this trick myself now.

I've been using Privacy.com cards for years to avoid this. Set a limit of 1 month on the card, and if I'm actually using the sub I'll fix/update it when the sub runs out.

I don't think it's cheap to pay for a service, test it out for a month, find that in the beginning you used it everyday, and by the end of the month you forgot it existed. Then decide to not keep paying for it.

Probably for the next proposal I write, I'll pay for it again. It's super useful to take care of all the bullshit things you have to write for science to not plaigerize yourself.

I also tried using it as a dungeon master like that blog post from a couple weeks ago. But gpt4 didn't seem to remember things with regularity enough to actually work. Basically there was an uncanny valley because gpt4 doesn't have a pad of paper to write things down on like any person would have.