Beyond Netflix and Spotify, what subscriptions are worth keeping in quarantine?

Enlarge / Would not recommend this keyboard setup given our impulse control. (credit: Stock / Getty Images Plus / aniliakkus)

Two seismic forces combined in the spring of 2020 and caused us all to reevaluate our choices: the COVID-19 pandemic... and the last decade's slow, inevitable march toward the disappearance of ownership. We no longer own records; we subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music. We don't purchase DVDs; we pay Netflix, Disney, or Amazon a monthly fee and save some shelf space. Google Stadia would like you to stream games in exchange for a recurring payment. Apple will let you take the same approach to your phone, and it's not hard to imagine a future where you skip having a car in the garage and instead pay regularly for access to an autonomous chariot that only shows up when you need it. (We can all agree to blame Adobe, which shifted from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud seven years ago this month.)

While there's never a bad time to assess your monthly subscriptions and trim the fat (read: that magazine your parents once gifted you but... wait, I pay how much annually for Sports Illustrated now?!), entering the third month of sheltering at home feels like an apt moment to potentially save a few bucks. At the same time, comfort of any kind now comes at a premium, and maybe watching your dog rip into a Bark Box will genuinely make you feel better.

There's a service for almost everything these days (like martial arts films? Try Hi-Yah!), and some feel almost mandatory (a TV/film service like Netflix or Disney+, music streaming from Spotify or Apple). So beyond the obvious, what services remain worth clinging to at the moment?

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