Please offer a ridiculously expensive pay-as-you-go plan (not just subscriptions)

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of having to subscribe to everything. Whenever a product or service asks me to subscribe, I can already picture myself forgetting to cancel.

The reason many companies ask you to subscribe is, of course, precisely this. They can keep squeezing dollars out of people who no longer use the service. What these companies do not seem to anticipate is that there are people like me who themselves anticipate forgetting to cancel in the future, and therefore refuse to subscribe to anything, ever.

Another reason that I refuse to subscribe to things is that cancelling a subscription simply makes me feel bad. The monthly debit creates a nice, warm, and indeed fuzzy connection to the service provider (which I am sure the provider feels as well). Cancelling is therefore like breaking up with somebody. It’s just not good. This is another reason to refuse any and all subscriptions in anticipation of this heartbreak. (One could make the same argument for relationships.)

It is an empirical question whether people like me outweigh people who don’t care about such things. The evidence seems to suggest that subscriptions are highly successful on the market. Yet I would like to make a moderate proposal to all companies that are listening:

Please offer a ridiculously expensive pay-as-you-go option that does not involve any subscriptions.

This seems to solve all problems. Occasional users like me can use the pay-as-you-go plan, companies earn a per-unit price far above marginal cost that compensates for me potentially not sticking around for long, and those who like subscriptions can in fact keep subscribing. The ridiculous price is the whole point: it ensures that no sane subscriber would ever switch, so the company loses nothing and gains me.

Moreover, I would like to emphasize that the pay-as-you-go plan need not, and probably should not, be free. Once again I feel bad: I cannot justify using someone else’s services without paying. Any free service is also somewhat suspicious: who is the product here? How are companies able to do this? Is this just a long-term ploy to get me to subscribe after all? Will the API shut down at any second? Do I legally “own” the service or product I get for free or are there unexpected restrictions on usage?

While I have many reservations about DeepL.com, it is clear that their translation engine still produces high-quality output that is, in general, better than what LLMs can cook up in 2026. Yet their API pricing truly combines the worst of all worlds: not only is it subscriptions-only, but the free “Developer” plan has such a generous limit that I would predict that the vast majority of its users will never pay anything. On the other hand, the “Growth” plan currently offers extra usage at US$0.0000275 per character. This means that translating this blog post would cost about US$0.10. But for an occasional user, why not skip the monthlies and just make me pay US$1? Please make customers pay—and make them pay a lot, as long as you don’t force subscriptions on them.

Fortunately, most AI companies and wholesalers have understood this lesson. Turn on pay-as-you-go API usage in Claude Code or Codex and see just how expensive it gets. Too expensive for me, that’s for sure! So I subscribe.

I also highly recommend Replicate, but I rarely use it, so I am grateful that I can pay as I go. When I am done, I simply stop paying. I just walk away, wallet lighter and conscience clean.