The Sharing Economy and What It's Worth
An exhaustive list of subscriptions I use that I don’t pay for:
Spotify Premium (my friend pays for this and I’m on her family plan)
Netflix (my parents pay for this)
Amazon prime (I’m on my third student account, receiving six free months with each use of a new .edu email address.)
Headspace (my friend gets this service free from work and gives me her login which she does not use. I use it almost every day.)
Disney + app subscription (my sister’s boyfriend’s gets his account for free and I use his login)
My cousin, Nick, used to create a new email every month to take advantage of Netflix’s first month free for new users. My friends and I are constantly communicating in our group chat on ways to take advantage of deals and how to get the most with the least amount of money spent. Ideally, we would spend nothing.
I have taken advantage of countless first customer deals when I am, in fact, a very old customer. I deactivate and reactivate my accounts to capitalize on deals meant for lapsed customers who have fallen off when I’ve been consistently using the service at a discounted rate since my last reactivation campaign. I struggle with paying full price for services I love. I feel even worse about spending on something I don’t really care for at all.
Review culture is sick (so is calling it “Review culture” but here we are) but it seems to have come about at least partly because of everyone’s mistrust of new products and services. It’s not enough to describe your product in vivid detail on your website, we need to see someone opening it and using it in a video for two months.
I’m constantly trying to save myself from paying companies that I think are doing fine, not in some Robin Hood-like attempt to steal from the rich but more in a Robin Hood-like attempt to give to the needy. I’m broke. Or rather, I can afford my living expenses, have a ton of financial support from my friends and family (in the form of them giving me their logins) and I’m having a hard time keeping up with the cost of living in the city where I’m just trying to exist and work in. I debate whether moving is right for me but imagine that most largely populated cities are going through the same growing pains and becoming overwrought, industrialized shadows of what they once were. Wherever I go, there capitalism is. It seems futile to fight it at this point and my efforts are so tired and lazy that I consider going to the library to get my books to be revolutionary road.
Since many of the services I need to live (Netflix, Spotify) are now in subscription format as opposed to a pay-as-you-go for what you use deal, I’ve become resistant towards paying for these rates and losing track of my spending over time. I understand that I’d be paying for cable and CDs otherwise, which doesn’t make much financial sense either (I remember new CDs costing like 20$ and having to babysit for at least a few hours to be able to afford one.) I also understand that we’ve come a long way since then and our progress is not bad. I am, however, opposed to multiple people in the same friend groups paying for the same shit when you can all just share one login.
Netflix has cracked down on this by limiting the number of devices that can use the service at once. I think they even spent the start of the subscription service period tracking people’s IP addresses and their uses of the app to best know how to charge their subscribers and for how many devices. Spotify has a limited number of people who can be on the family plan but also allows each member to have their own private accounts and logins. I’ve never seen a bill for either of these services and I’m happy.
The helpful trick is to have wealthy friends and family. And to shamelessly take advantage of these relationships and their riches. If you don’t have any rich friends, then you are very likely the rich friend and should be giving up your passwords to those less fortunate than you. In a similar vein, if one of your friends works somewhere and gets a staff discount, that’s your staff discount. You work there now.
It also helps to openly communicate with your networks about what you’re buying and when. I listened to a podcast that said that a great way to take part in referral bonuses on services that your friends are already using is by posting on social media about how you plan on signing up for a service for the first time. And asking if anyone had a discount code they could give you which would also give them credit off their future purchases. While I agree with this practice in theory, you’re still spending money. If it’s a product or something you can’t share with others then this works. But I would go so far as to suggest that we use this practice for mining for free logins.
This year, I have purchased a yearly subscription to Aura (a second meditation app that I use to sleep) and am paying for an online Pilates studio membership. None of my friends want my login to Aura because they don’t care and haven’t heard of it. A couple of my friends have been using the Pilates membership, though, since I signed up last summer and haven’t stopped talking about it since. I force them to let me login to the website on their computers whenever I visit them. Some ignore me and we never speak about it again. Others have really taken to it so far and we send each other quick notes about how much we like it. As for Prime, basically every person in my family and a few of my friends use my prime login.
This economy of sharing is a byproduct of our capitalist culture that I actually agree with and can get behind. I’m saddened by how we got here but enlightened and hopeful by what we’ve made of our circumstances. We buy what we like and use and we share it with those we love. Sharing my passwords is how I make my friends feel my love. I’d even share them with people I don’t love.
When you and your friends share your logins, your wealth doubles in value. You’ve invited them in to save some money and take advantage of a service you’d be paying for anyway. It’s like the modern equivalent of lending your neighbours your working lawn mower every day forever and it feels great. More people should do this. If more people aren’t doing it then why not? Why hoard your resources? You’re NOT sharing your passwords for your paid services with your friends and family? In this economy? Please.