When did life become “aaS” (as a Service)?

There was a time when you bought something and that was the end of the transaction. You paid, you took it home, it was yours. Now joining takes one click, and leaving takes a customer-service marathon. So when did life become “as a Service”?

It started with software, as it usually does. Then products became services, and services became subscriptions. Adobe, Microsoft 365, Netflix, Apple Music, Spotify: I pay every month, so I have access, and I own nothing. Even printers joined in. With HP's Instant Ink you pay per page, and the cartridges stay HP's property: HP's own support community says they stop working when you cancel, ink left or not. Money Legends has a good breakdown on YouTube.

Cars are where it gets absurd. BMW offered heated seats as a monthly subscription in markets such as the UK, Germany and South Korea. The heater was already in the seat. The wiring was already in the car. You were renting the permission to be warm. After the backlash, BMW dropped the seat-heating subscription in 2023, though it still charges for other software features. Tesla goes further: in Europe, Full Self-Driving (Supervised) could be bought outright for 7,500 euros, and since May 2026 it has reportedly become subscription-only, at 99 euros a month. You own the car. You rent what it can do.

Things used to be different. I used to own Adobe software. I used to own vinyl, CDs and audio cassettes, being an audiophile. And I used to own Microsoft licences. Remember Windows 95? The Start button was born there, with a startup jingle by Brian Eno. Then came 98, 2000 and, in 2001, XP: the green hill, the green Start button, the golden age. You bought it once, installed it, and it ran for as long as you liked.

Then came Windows 10. There's no single date for when life became “as a Service”, but 2015 is as good a marker as any: Microsoft started talking about Windows as a service, with constant updates instead of new versions, and one of its own evangelists called Windows 10 the last version of Windows. Windows 11 proved otherwise. I pay for several licences of it, and it still arrived with ads, a mandatory Microsoft account, Copilot looking over your shoulder and a TPM 2.0 requirement that left many perfectly good PCs behind.

Ownership didn't disappear. It evolved, the way fashion did: from something you kept for years to something you rent by the season.

Let's put years on it. The Canadian Conservation Institute rates a factory-pressed CD at 50 to 100 years. The US National Archives says LPs can last “possibly for generations” with careful storage. Even tape, the weak link, gets 10 to 30 years by the usual guidance. Every one of these formats can fail, but slowly, in your hands, where you can copy it, clean it or store it better.

A stream has no such lifespan. It lasts exactly as long as your next payment: a month. You swap a record that can outlive you for 30 days of access, and what you get back is convenience: no shelf, no storage, no cleaning. Fifty years, a hundred years, generations, for a month at a time. Convenience has never been this expensive.

And there's a twist. See the “Remastered” tag on classic albums? A remaster is a new master made from the original recording, with the equalisation, levels and dynamics adjusted, often for streaming. It can sound better. It can sound worse. It's never the original. A video from PlayGround (in Romanian) made me run the test: I played a vinyl pressed from the original master next to the streamed version of the same song (no names, I'm not starting that fight) and heard the difference for myself. Not on every track, and not always for the worse, but it was there. I dare you to try it. You're paying for access to someone else's version of the song, and unless you kept the original, you can't even compare.

Then come the ads. You pay for streaming and you still get ads, and removing them costs extra. Paying to be advertised to: what a business model. Prime Video does it. HBO Max has a plan with ads, and even its ad-free plans still show them on live sports and live channels, with sponsored content and product placement on every plan. ChatGPT does it too: ads appear on the Free and Go tiers, and Go is a paid one.

AI took this model and turned it up. Paying for Claude doesn't mean unlimited: there's a session limit that resets every five hours, a weekly limit, and going past them costs extra. Claude has no ads, and Anthropic has promised to keep it that way, funded by subscriptions and enterprise contracts, which I respect.

But its text carries an invisible statistical watermark, there to meet EU AI Act rules. Anthropic says it doesn't change the quality, and I understand the reason. Still, nobody asked for the watermark, and nobody asked for the assumptions the model sometimes makes without asking. I'm not the only one who noticed: a Claude Code issue on GitHub shows Claude stating a reason as fact, then admitting it had only guessed.

And that's before we leave the screen. Abby_in_progress ranted about corporate life in a YouTube Short, and I nodded so hard I strained my neck. Somewhere, a boardroom is running an experiment: how much nonsense can we get away with before they notice? Spoiler: a lot.

I buy a pair of socks. The shop wants my email. We're not dating. My toaster wants an app. My air fryer wants an app. They're appliances, not influencers. Hotel check-in keeps sliding later and check-out keeps sliding earlier, so at this rate I'll be billed for the elevator ride. Gift cards expire, and it's money. Money was the one thing never meant to go off like milk.

Then there are subscriptions: 14 seconds to join, one eternity to leave. Cancelling is a quest with side missions, a chatbot boss fight and, if you're lucky, a phone call. I joined with one click, so I want to leave with one click. A special shout-out to Adobe: its own community has a thread called “Why can't I just cancel!”, where a user describes a fee of about 91 dollars for leaving early. The replies suggest an annual plan paid monthly, but the title is the whole mood.

And airlines. I pay for the seat. I pay for the bag. I'm waiting for the line item “air”. So what did my ticket actually buy, a couple of years ago? Apparently it was a coupon for the shop with wings.

So where does that leave us? In Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault keeps backup copies of the world's seeds, just in case. Should we become preppers too, and demand an ownership title for every sock we buy? Or do we stay in our comfort zone, stop asking where our money goes, accept the status quo and take whatever is delivered, preferably with an app?

People noticed. Tired of bugs, recurring fees and the limited “AI support bot” on the other end of the chat, a lot of users started looking at open source. Krita is a free painting program under the GNU GPL, made by contributors around the world and funded by donations. ArtCraft, a young open source project, offers free desktop apps for images, video, documents, spreadsheets and slides; WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are still in development. From what I saw online, the reaction says a lot: someone took matters into their own hands and challenged the big players. Yes, they use AI to do it. It's still an answer to a real need.

Do we need both? Yes. Subscriptions pay for servers, support and steady updates. Open source gives you freedom and a way out, but it lives on volunteers and donations. Each keeps the other honest.

I've built and rolled out SaaS, so let me say this from the other side of the screen. Software is supposed to make life easier. That was the pitch. Somewhere along the way, your life turned into a set of KPIs, tracked, supposedly, for your comfort. Yes, Facebook, we know: “Senator, we run ads.”

Everybody needs to eat. Servers cost money, cloud usage costs money, access costs money, and I'm happy to pay for all of it. But some companies decided to go overboard. Recurring revenue stopped being a way to run a service and became the whole point of the company.

My bet is that the 80/20 rule applies here too: most of us need about 20% of any big piece of software, and some of that 20% may already exist as open source. The other 80% gets sold to us with hype. And hey, look at Linux: it runs a big share of the world's servers, it's free, and in thirty-odd years it has never once asked for my email.

So here's what I'd like to see next: developers and manufacturers who listen to the collective voice of their customers, and who innovate instead of charging extra for yesterday's features.

My rule of thumb until then: before you subscribe, ask what you keep on the day you stop paying. If the answer is “nothing”, at least make it a choice.