Little more context? Physical goods? Digital goods?
Not a whole lot you can't pay a recurring subscription for now a days. Vitamins, music, movies, cloud hosting, coffee - hell, I'd consider my mortgage and car lease to be recurring subscriptions - I pay a monthly fee; I get somewhere to live / car to drive.
Well, you can't just cancel your mortgage or lease and go on with your life :). You're under a contractual obligation. Maybe leases you can break, but with a high fee / penalty attached.
I would pay a recurring subscription for something that was worth more (to me) than I paid for it.
Edit: After your edit: I would pay a recurring subscription for something that sent me seeds for my garden each season, with some basic instructions and a chart for when to plant & harvest, what to plant together, etc.
Presumably I would have some minor say-so in what kind of plants I was getting, (Root crops, fruits, veggies, sprawling, herbs, etc), but generally I want you to decide what I'm getting and when I should be ready to plant it.
A family member bought me a gift subscription to Raw Spice Bar. My wife and I very much enjoy cooking, so this was a nice gift. We get a new set of spices every month.
But at the lowest price, it's $84 a year, only a few dollars less than Amazon Prime. There is no way I would buy that for myself. At $12 for an entire year of spices, I might do it.
I would buy a subscription to a service that lets me watch movies in my home on the same day as their theatrical release.
Since you are specifically looking at services that can be provided by a small team or 1 person, I'm going to answer with services that I pay for that are managed by one person/small team than adding some things that I would like. Hopefully, this will help you get a subscription business idea you want to offer.
Personal training - I pay a monthly fee to my coach. I would certainly pay a monthly fee for other services such as cleaning, laundry, cooking if I could afford it.
Headspace app - Mindfulness course that costs between €6 and €10. I am just trying it out for a few days as I am curious about the field of mindfulness. I could see other types of courses delivered in the same way. I am not sure of the size of the team, but I imagine it is small.
City Bike scheme - I pay about €30 euro a year to use my local city bikes. It is a public bike sharing system. They have 1000s of bike that you can take between different bike stops.
Grammarly - Excellent app that corrects everything I write in my browser and my blog posts.
Lastpass - a service that has all my passwords.
GoCar Car Sharing service - Like Zipcar. It's why I have not bought a car.
GoRails - Tutorials on different aspect of Rails
Egghead - Not paying at the moment but will probably start again soon.
Distrokid - I am urging my friend, who is creating an album, to give this a shot (https://news.distrokid.com/what-ive-been-up-to-for-the-past-...). I would use this service if I were making an album. I have been thinking of writing a book, and something that would distribute my book across all the different digital channels would be perfect for indie authors.
Some other subscriptions that I would pay for include,
Supplements such as Creatine, Protein, etc. . . Based on my macros or sport
Coffee but that is done to death already.
If I had a child, I would pay a subscription for different educational toys each month geared towards a certain topic (such as reading)
I would pay for a monthly subscription for any teenager's monthly mailed "box" service. I currently subscribe to over 3 dozen such services. It's sort of an addiction...
Anyway, if you are a young entrepreneur building a site that offers a monthly subscription for something, I will almost certainly be interested.
Please PM me when you product is done. I would love to be your first subscriber!
A collection of decently written sci-fi short stories every three or four months as a pdf/epub file. Think something like what Humble[0] puts out every couple of weeks.
Not sure if this fits, but for a while I've been wanting there to be a site for written excerpts and their annotations, if any.
It would be for interesting non-fiction articles, books and for research papers, but not a TL;DR service, rather it'd pull out excerpts that the crowd has marked (including the reader's annotations) as thought-provoking or key to understanding a certain concept.
HNers sometimes do something similar when they copy/paste a key line in an article posted here and share it in the comments. I want it as a service.
___
News repository
Another thing I was thinking about today is how so many articles on so many different subjects get published per day yet they seem to just disappear into the ether after a few days. For example, where are the interesting articles about _____ from the first half of 2007? Again, I'm not sure if this could be a subscription service, but it'd be nice to be able to access 10 such articles per month and have them sent to my Kindle.
By the way, I checked Google News and did a search for a random topic from 10 years ago and it gave me a fair number of results from one major newspaper and one of its affiliates, plus one or other two random sources here and there. I'd bet that if I were sent back 10 years and took note of everything that came out about said subject, I'd come away with a lot more content, and from way more sources.
I would pay a recurring subscription for a service that translates designs into html/css.
doesn't matter to me how you do it. doesn't have to be cheap. it just has to be able to do 15-30 pages a month. with a turnaround time of about a day or less.
there are multiple ways to do this. you can either write good software or you could hire a bunch of filipinos.
id much rather pay for this than manage the employees myself.
you can easily deliver that as one person. you start out doing it yourself and as you generate more business, you hire people to do it for you. and then you scale up whichever way you feel like.
It should be possible to convert a design into html/css completely hands-off. you dont need me to tell you that its pixel perfect. my eyes arent better than yours. its either pixel perfect or its not.
theres no point in using these services because they generate massive unnecessary overhead. its easier to find someone on upwork than it is to work with these services, because they are obnoxiously subservient and try to "overdeliver" by sucking away my time.
such a service should work like this:
1. i have a design
2. i upload the design
3. i get a link to the finished assets
no talking, no meetings, no schedules. just do the work. send confirmation emails if you have to. but dont ask me to hold your hand while doing something this simple.
I would pay a recurring subscription for an only audio Youtube app. This app should:
- Let me create playlists.
- Keep track of the audio progress.
- Work offline.
There is so much valuable content in Youtube that I would like to consume but that I don't make the time to actually sit down and watch the video. The video component of this content is irrelevant to me and being able to listen to the audio on the go would be really neat.
27 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadNot a whole lot you can't pay a recurring subscription for now a days. Vitamins, music, movies, cloud hosting, coffee - hell, I'd consider my mortgage and car lease to be recurring subscriptions - I pay a monthly fee; I get somewhere to live / car to drive.
Edit: After your edit: I would pay a recurring subscription for something that sent me seeds for my garden each season, with some basic instructions and a chart for when to plant & harvest, what to plant together, etc.
Presumably I would have some minor say-so in what kind of plants I was getting, (Root crops, fruits, veggies, sprawling, herbs, etc), but generally I want you to decide what I'm getting and when I should be ready to plant it.
get a variety of seeds monthly at https://www.growjourney.com/
ps: i'm not affiliated with them in any way shape or form.
But at the lowest price, it's $84 a year, only a few dollars less than Amazon Prime. There is no way I would buy that for myself. At $12 for an entire year of spices, I might do it.
I would buy a subscription to a service that lets me watch movies in my home on the same day as their theatrical release.
Personal training - I pay a monthly fee to my coach. I would certainly pay a monthly fee for other services such as cleaning, laundry, cooking if I could afford it.
Headspace app - Mindfulness course that costs between €6 and €10. I am just trying it out for a few days as I am curious about the field of mindfulness. I could see other types of courses delivered in the same way. I am not sure of the size of the team, but I imagine it is small.
City Bike scheme - I pay about €30 euro a year to use my local city bikes. It is a public bike sharing system. They have 1000s of bike that you can take between different bike stops.
Grammarly - Excellent app that corrects everything I write in my browser and my blog posts.
Lastpass - a service that has all my passwords.
GoCar Car Sharing service - Like Zipcar. It's why I have not bought a car.
GoRails - Tutorials on different aspect of Rails
Egghead - Not paying at the moment but will probably start again soon.
Sidekiq - A ruby gem I have used on many projects. Great business model. Run by one man (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)
Some I don't pay for but consider valuable.
Distrokid - I am urging my friend, who is creating an album, to give this a shot (https://news.distrokid.com/what-ive-been-up-to-for-the-past-...). I would use this service if I were making an album. I have been thinking of writing a book, and something that would distribute my book across all the different digital channels would be perfect for indie authors.
Some other subscriptions that I would pay for include,
Supplements such as Creatine, Protein, etc. . . Based on my macros or sport
Coffee but that is done to death already.
If I had a child, I would pay a subscription for different educational toys each month geared towards a certain topic (such as reading)
* Exterior vehicle wash / detail
* Residential linen service that gives you new sheets, duvets, drapes within a catalog of styles for variety and also keeping things clean/dust-free
Will update as I think of more
Anyway, if you are a young entrepreneur building a site that offers a monthly subscription for something, I will almost certainly be interested.
Please PM me when you product is done. I would love to be your first subscriber!
[0]https://www.humblebundle.com/books
Not sure if this fits, but for a while I've been wanting there to be a site for written excerpts and their annotations, if any.
It would be for interesting non-fiction articles, books and for research papers, but not a TL;DR service, rather it'd pull out excerpts that the crowd has marked (including the reader's annotations) as thought-provoking or key to understanding a certain concept.
HNers sometimes do something similar when they copy/paste a key line in an article posted here and share it in the comments. I want it as a service.
___
News repository
Another thing I was thinking about today is how so many articles on so many different subjects get published per day yet they seem to just disappear into the ether after a few days. For example, where are the interesting articles about _____ from the first half of 2007? Again, I'm not sure if this could be a subscription service, but it'd be nice to be able to access 10 such articles per month and have them sent to my Kindle.
By the way, I checked Google News and did a search for a random topic from 10 years ago and it gave me a fair number of results from one major newspaper and one of its affiliates, plus one or other two random sources here and there. I'd bet that if I were sent back 10 years and took note of everything that came out about said subject, I'd come away with a lot more content, and from way more sources.
doesn't matter to me how you do it. doesn't have to be cheap. it just has to be able to do 15-30 pages a month. with a turnaround time of about a day or less.
there are multiple ways to do this. you can either write good software or you could hire a bunch of filipinos.
id much rather pay for this than manage the employees myself.
you can easily deliver that as one person. you start out doing it yourself and as you generate more business, you hire people to do it for you. and then you scale up whichever way you feel like.
It should be possible to convert a design into html/css completely hands-off. you dont need me to tell you that its pixel perfect. my eyes arent better than yours. its either pixel perfect or its not.
theres no point in using these services because they generate massive unnecessary overhead. its easier to find someone on upwork than it is to work with these services, because they are obnoxiously subservient and try to "overdeliver" by sucking away my time.
such a service should work like this: 1. i have a design 2. i upload the design 3. i get a link to the finished assets
no talking, no meetings, no schedules. just do the work. send confirmation emails if you have to. but dont ask me to hold your hand while doing something this simple.
How do the finished html+css files fit into your workflow?
- just courious ;)
- Let me create playlists.
- Keep track of the audio progress.
- Work offline.
There is so much valuable content in Youtube that I would like to consume but that I don't make the time to actually sit down and watch the video. The video component of this content is irrelevant to me and being able to listen to the audio on the go would be really neat.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
(Apparently it is free to use, thought it required a YouTube Red subscription)