Abonelik ekonomisi her şeyi aylık fatura yapar

The subscription economy makes everything a monthly bill

Jackie Snow

Mon, August 24, 2026 at 12:00 PM GMT+3 4 min read

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz's members-only Weekend Brief newsletter. Quartz members get access to exclusive newsletters and more. Sign up here.

A laptop used to be something you bought once. Apple just made it something you can pay for every month.

Instead of buying a MacBook or an iPhone outright, customers can now lease one through Apple for a recurring monthly payment. It puts the device itself alongside services such as iCloud and Apple Music in the growing pile of bills that never quite go away.

That same logic has quietly spread almost everywhere else. Tesla charges $99 a month for its Full Self-Driving feature, with Elon Musk warning that the price will climb as the technology improves. HVAC contractors are pitching homeowners on "comfort plans" that bundle a furnace, a compressor, and a decade of maintenance into a single monthly bill, with no upfront cost required.

Car washes have turned an inherently one-off transaction into a membership business. Restaurants are experimenting with drink clubs and meal passes.

This isn't a new business model. Apple and these other industries are importing a business model perfected by software companies over the past two decades and applying it to everything.

Recurring revenue is worth more

With so many slight variations to the strategy, there is a plethora of names for this practice: subscriptions, memberships, "rundles," the recurring-revenue bundles term used by some retail analysts, maintenance plans, comfort plans.

The label changes by industry, but the pitch to investors that this revenue is safer than a one-time sale is the same. A dollar a company knows it will collect next month is worth more, in the eyes of an investor or acquirer, than a dollar it has to win back from scratch.

Private equity has been especially aggressive about this. Once a car-wash tunnel, restaurant kitchen, or maintenance crew is already operating, serving one more subscriber may cost relatively little. Selling "unlimited" access, while betting that most customers will not use very much of it, is a wager that works out more often than not.

Some of these plans customers like, or at least tolerate. There are others that don't go over as well. Subscriptions tend to provoke the most anger when companies begin charging repeatedly for something people used to buy once.

Adobe helped normalize that shift when it replaced perpetual licenses for Photoshop and its other creative software with Creative Cloud subscriptions in 2013. Customers who once bought a version and used it for years now have to keep paying to retain access.

BMW pushed the model further in 2023 when it tried charging customers a monthly fee to unlock heated seats already installed in cars they owned. The company abandoned the plan after widespread backlash.

The difference is what customers believe the money is buying. People may accept recurring payments for recurring value. They are less willing to pay forever for occasional value or to pay again for something they thought they had already bought.

The model it's copying is in trouble

The uncomfortable part of this story is that the software industry that made recurring revenue fashionable is now beginning to question its own version of the model.

The per-seat SaaS subscription assumes that a human has to sit at a keyboard using the tool every month to justify the bill. AI agents are starting to change that calculus. If a piece of software can complete the task itself, a company may need fewer employees operating it — and fewer seats to buy. Customers may also prefer to pay for the work an AI completes rather than for continuous access to the tool.

That is a potential threat to the industry that supplied everyone else with the blueprint. Warnings about an AI-driven reckoning for software valuations have grown louder through 2026, although it is far too early to know how much the model will change. Software companies are experimenting with usage-based pricing, AI credits, and fees tied to completed work, often while keeping traditional subscriptions underneath them.

None of that means HVAC comfort plans or car-wash memberships are about to collapse. A maintenance contract on a physical furnace is a different animal from a login to a project-management tool. But the uncertainty in software exposes a weakness in the broader subscription rush: A predictable monthly bill is not necessarily the same thing as predictable monthly value.

For businesses, turning an occasional purchase into recurring revenue can feel like an obvious improvement. For customers, it may look like paying every month for something they once bought once a year, if that. Or even like being nickel-and-dimed for products and features they thought the original price already covered.

The subscription model may keep spreading. But companies copying it are making a bet not only that investors will reward the dependable revenue, but that customers will tolerate another permanent charge. Software's current turmoil is a reminder that those are not always the same thing.