Bills, bills, bills

My Nana Dee never let go of her grudge with America’s Drive-In. It started after my cousin and I finished a day of landscaping, and my Nana Dee thoughtfully offered to treat us to a sundae from our favorite fast food joint, Sonic. She didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but gifts were how she liked to say thank you, and she’d seen an ad on TV for dollar banana splits that made her salivate enough to humor the idea of splurging a bit.

Unfortunately, her good intentions were no match for the asterisks of catchy advertising. Sure, the sundaes were only a dollar, but no good deed goes unpunished under capitalism. Each dessert amounted to about two bites of banana and ice cream—maybe a bit of splotchy whipped cream if you were lucky. I expected my nana’s nostrils to flare in classic post-slight fashion, but I didn’t anticipate a car-ride’s worth of rants about misleading advertising at the hands of dingbats and apologies for feeling like she’d let us down. We didn’t mind, though, and by the time we’d pulled into their driveway we were all laughing about it.

Years later, she still told the story every time we reached for ice cream. With each telling, she’d drift further from resentment as her recollections focused more on our surprise and disappointment than on the slight itself. Still, the story got laughs for a reason: nobody likes being slighted, especially when it comes to our wallets.

That’s part of what makes the thought of paying for a pricey app so tricky. It’s hard to judge the value an app or service will bring to your life based solely on cleverly designed screenshots and exhaustive features lists. They certainly help, but neither make up for actually giving the app a shot in your day-to-day life. But with high price points and scam apps, plus the daunting task of sifting through the cruft of the App Store, finding the best app for the job is a chore itself. On top of that, there’s the rise in subscription apps, an often polarizing shift that tacks more monthly charges to our budget. There’s benefit to ensuring good developers have a steady source of income to keep working on the app, but subscription fatigue can set in quickly if you don’t maintain your list of recurring service charges. The best way to combat that is to chop away at your paid apps until you’re left with the ones you absolutely can’t live without, and being more critical of the apps you test out going forward. After years of spending too much money on apps I’ve spent too little time in, here’s how I’ve found that balance.

Put it on my tab

Most people I know don’t subscribe to that many apps, so a culling of your subscriptions probably won’t need to be too thorough. Still, if you haven’t checked in on your subscriptions tab lately , it may need a quick check-up to make sure you’re not spending too much. (On iOS: Settings > Your Name > Subscriptions and on Android: Settings > Google > Manage your Google Account > Payments and subscriptions). If you need some additional help in keeping track of all your subs, both App Store and elsewhere, consider Bobby, an app that lets you keep track of all your active subscriptions and their costs.

Once that’s done and you’ve whittled your list down, all you have to worry about is what to do going forward. When you decide to turn to apps to solve a problem in your life—like say not being able to keep track of your ideas—you should know how to find the best ones before diving into an App Store filled with misleading apps that may either miss the mark or use ratings scams to get an edge over the competition. Brendan Hesse at Lifehacker has a guide on how to avoid App Store scams, but there’s more to finding the apps worth subscribing to than assessing how trustworthy the developer is.

I like to see if there’s a one-time payment alternative, or if the developer offers a lifetime option. These are typically more costly upfront, but save you some cash if you’re certain you’re in it for the long haul. Before committing to something like that, though, you should try it out with a free trial (if the developer offers one) and maybe a month or two of month-to-month payments if you’re extra careful about big purchases. When you do go with a free trial, be sure to set a reminder to reassess whether you’d like to start paying for it before the subscription is set to renew. Otherwise you’ll have a charge that might not be refundable, and you might not catch it on your statements for a few months.

Top pick

Whenever I’m on the hunt for an app that solves a newfound problem in my workflow or daily stress management, I like to first lay out exactly how I’m hoping it will alleviate me of my woes. So rather than going to the App Store seeking out a good scanner app, I take some time to think about what sorts of things I’ll be scanning, and where I’d like them to end up. That way, I can go into my search with a checklist of things I need in an app, rather than trying to parse that all in real time. My needs and wants might change as I see what’s out there, but the starting point helps me from getting overwhelmed before the search really begins.

Once I’ve found a few apps that I like, I search Reddit and Twitter to see if people have said anything about any of them, and what sorts of things they note as praiseworthy or one-star-worthy. I also like to see how active the developer is, both in app update cycles and on social media; if you’re going to be paying for an app long-term, you should be confident the developer’s in it for the long haul, too.

Finally, before I smash that buy button, I like to ask myself how drastically my life would be impacted if the app, once ingrained in my daily flow, disappeared tomorrow and I had to use the next best option. That’s a pretty dramatic approach, but it keeps me from impulse-buying too many subscription-based apps in the hopes of making my life marginally better.

App subscriptions have a lot to offer: they make it easy to pick and choose when you use an app without having to stomach a hefty price tag, and they reward good developers for making great apps. The issues that arise from the model, though, such as subscription scams and an ever-growing pile of recurring fees, requires some management on our end. That may mean living the no-subscription lifestyle, or just being vigilant about what apps you spend money on and how you choose them; in either case, subscriptions aren’t going anywhere, so it helps to be ready before your next favorite app takes the plunge into the monthly model.

📚 Good Reads:

Virtual tips are helping content creators actually make money (Vox): It’s easier than ever for people to monetize their talents. Between tipping and subscriptions, fans have options to pay their favorite creators for their work and hopefully allow them to keep creating more. Terry Nguyen reports on how online tipping can help creators envision a life funded fully by their side-hustle. 

Paramount+ is mining for nostalgia. Will it work? (Vulture): Nostalgia is clearly the driving strategy behind ViacomCBS’s new streaming service, Paramount+. Maybe a new look at old favorites like Rugrats and Frasier is just what folks have been begging for, but is that enough to fight subscription fatigue? Josef Adalian makes the case for Vulture. 

Schools are abandoning invasive proctoring software after student backlash (Motherboard): Cheating in schools is nothing new, but that’s never stopped companies from looking for new ways to prevent it. As Motherboard reports, software companies such as Proctorio enable surveillance of students through the use of webcam and microphone monitoring, as well as AI processing, to keep students from cheating on exams. The issues go beyond invasions of privacy, though: surveillance software can perpetuate the same biases that have existed on campuses for decades, and causes unnecessary anxiety.

🌐 Just Browsing:

🧥 How pandemic fashion has changed us. 🏠 Naomi Klein on kids and climate change. 🐹 Would online meetups be more fun if you showed up as a cute animal? 💂🏼‍♂️Bobby Shmurda’s first day out of prison. 👾 Twitch banned Amazon’s union-busting ads. 💸 Anne Helen Petersen on the importance of debt forgiveness. 📺 What makes Wandavision the most pandemic TV show to date 🧠 Mental health is a political problem. 🚙 Postmates drivers are getting scammed. The company isn’t helping. 🐶 Pet a dog in one of these video games. 🔨 How to stop thinking a relationship can fix you. 🎤 Black doctors are being targeted for calling out anti-vaxxers on Clubhouse. 

💕 And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like:

Tides: A Fishing Game (iOS): By this point in lockdown, we’ve all found our particular flavor of escapism. If, like me, you find pleasure in doing mundane, boring tasks in a world unriddled by a pandemic and ongoing political crises, Tides provides a calming and easygoing way to drift along on your boat and maybe catch a few fish along the way. You can unlock new boats and features, but the real joy is in just coasting along for a while, enjoying the breeze as your woes whisk away, if only for a moment. 

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.