A theme that’s dominated 2025 for me (and for many) has been price rises across many subscription-based platforms and services. My correspondence with companies has made clear that loyalty stands for very little. In fact, rather than being rewarded, longevity is increasingly exploited and monetised.
In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I share a year-in-review through the lens of price rises. The tipping point was an email from my podcast hosting company, Libsyn, announcing a 71 percent increase effective from January. It was the straw that broke this camel’s back after a year of similar moves elsewhere. In the episode, I share exchanges with three companies that reveal how loyalty is no longer valued in itself, but engineered to extract profit from those of us who’ve become reliant on these platforms.
A Symptom of Enshittification
Cory Doctorow describes the underlying trend as “Enshittification”, a form of platform decay visible in companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Adobe. It’s not a glitch, but a feature. Doctorow traces a familiar arc: platforms start by serving users well in order to grow. Once established, they pivot toward business customers, monetisation, and scale. Eventually, when users and businesses are sufficiently locked in, services are degraded for everyone so maximum value can be pulled out as quickly as possible.
Disproportionate price rises are one symptom of this process, particularly in how companies treat long-standing customers. Lock-in is maintained through network effects (it’s hard to leave when everyone else is still there), non-transferable data (your work can’t easily be exported), and digital restrictions where purchases only function inside a single ecosystem. Music, books, films, and software are “owned” only as long as the platform allows it.
In the name of convenience, we give ourselves over to these systems and become dependent on them. As the digital and physical worlds converge, this logic extends beyond apps and websites into cars, home devices, utilities, and infrastructure. At that point, this stops being a simple matter of consumer choice. Extraction is baked into the products themselves.
We are quietly acclimatising to this new normal. It has crept in through corporate consolidation, weak enforcement of anti-trust legislation, and business models that no longer need to meaningfully consider customer relationships once a certain scale is reached.
Abusing Trust, Need, and Loyalty
Charlie Brooker has cited Enshittification as an influence on Common People, the opening episode of Black Mirror series seven. A couple sign up to a subscription-based medical intervention that escalates in cost, complexity, and dependency. Features are removed. Adverts are inserted. The stakes become existential. One particularly chilling moment sees Mike literally mutilating his own body for money via an OnlyFans-style platform, a stark symbolic image of how value is extracted from people once dependency is established.
Price Rises for a “Valued Customer”
Libsyn informed me they were raising the price of hosting A Quiet Night Inside No 9 by 71 percent. The justification was a familiar list of added features and growth opportunities, none of which were relevant to how we use the service. We don’t want adverts or growth tools. We want reliable hosting and delivery.
This exchange highlighted how much podcasting has changed since I joined Libsyn in 2009. Hosting platforms have increasingly positioned themselves as intermediaries between advertisers and podcasters. That relationship now takes precedence. Advertising is framed as a benefit to creators, while enabling hosts to raise prices and skim revenue from both usage fees and ad sales. Listeners, meanwhile, absorb longer ad breaks as the new normal. Is this stage two of Enshittification in the podcasting world?
Note, I pledge never to put adverts on my audio podcasts. YouTube is the only exception, because Google inserts them regardless.
ConvertKit and Paying for Features I Don’t Want
A similar logic played out with Kit, formerly ConvertKit. I chose it in 2016 because it was simple and reliable and have been a loyal user ever since. A price increase from $49 to $59 a month was justified by new automations and tools I didn’t ask for or use. There is no way to opt out and pay less. The only concession offered was annual billing, which I pointed out mirrors poverty-tax logic: those without upfront capital pay more.
Symptoms of a Failing Service
Vimeo was the clearest example of platform decay from the inside. Storage rules changed midstream. Long-held assumptions were invalidated. Downgrading meant losing access to years of work. Retention efforts amounted to one-off discounts rather than meaningful alternatives. What stood out wasn’t hostility, but indifference. Once a service reaches a certain size, individual relationships no longer seem to matter.
Their response felt so extreme that I suspected deeper problems, which seemed to be confirmed when Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo in November. I’m glad I left when I did, though it’s still inconvenient clearing up broken links and legacy embeds after fifteen years of use.
WishList Member and a Different Choice
Not all companies operate this way. WishList Member has honoured the price and feature set I signed up for over a decade ago. While new tiers exist, functionality hasn’t been removed to force upgrades. This appears to be a deliberate choice, and it communicates something simple: long-term trust and loyalty matters more than short-term extraction.
I’ll let you know if this situation changes…
Growth Logic and the Limits of Choice
It’s tempting to frame all this as a moral failure, but it’s structural. Growth-at-all-costs logic makes price rises, feature bloat, and lock-in almost inevitable. These companies aren’t malfunctioning; they’re functioning exactly as the system encourages them to.
This also makes it risky to romanticise alternatives. Newer companies may simply be at an earlier stage of the same cycle. Google once promised “don’t be evil”. Facebook positioned itself as a less invasive alternative to MySpace. Scale changes incentives.
Meaningful change won’t come from individual consumer choices alone. Competition has been hollowed out, and escape routes are increasingly narrow. Doctorow provides a section of existing and potential solutions that can give us reasons for active hope.
Have you felt the pinch of price hikes this year? Feel free to get in touch and share your experiences.
