“I Pick My Poison”: Agency and Addiction in the Age of Subscriptions

This paper illuminates key aspects of the subscription economy and offers a framework for understanding customer decision making and willingness to pay. Subscriptions are aimed at becoming embedded in our lives, habits, and behaviours, and our in‐depth research explored how people see themselves as agents in the subscription economy, how they value subscriptions, and how they navigate a complex market characterized by ever‐changing bundles of features and deals. We argue that a new kind of customer agency emerges from the complexities and uncertainties of the subscription economy—one that recognises dependencies and even addictions to subscriptions and navigates their activity and passivity to produce desired outcomes. The paper describes 4 key factors that play a role in people's evaluations of subscriptions. Building on the work of Michel Callon, we also describe subscriptions as attachments and reframe ‘willingness to pay’ to better reflect the complexity of subscriptions. The paper is based on self‐funded research (not commissioned by any client) conducted by Stripe Partners to improve our approach to willingness‐to‐pay studies.