Marketing Fix #26 | Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions, A.K.A. order a puppy for 5 hours

Hi fellow marketer,

This issue of the bi-weekly Marketing Fix newsletter will explore our growing dependence – and expenditure – on subscription-based services.

If you find the idea compelling, please forward this email to a friend or colleague to extend the discussion.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions

In the early 2020s, most of us had a manageable number of subscription-based articles embellishing our lives: B2B software and gym memberships.

In 2025, most of us are paying for 20+ subscriptions every month.

“No way, the number can’t be that high,” you say?

I’ll tell you what, Sherlock... Count your mobile apps, newsletters, video and streaming platforms, news and magazines, podcasts, groceries, coffee, Amazon Prime, health & beauty products, gym, online classes.

The Greatest Evil award goes to Apple’s iCloud Storage: designed to get more expensive YoY because it's impossible to turn off.

Name one thing that can’t be found in subscription format.

Um...

Animals?

Nope.

How did we end up in a world where even toothpaste is subscriptionised?

Over the past 5 years, the subscription economy has been fuelled by many things, among them Covid-induced laziness of the Western urban population and laws allowing marketplaces to elude social taxes of precarious workers.

No small role was also played by the tech investors dreaming of hockey-stick growth charts of ARR.

The best way to procure the ARR as a brand with a physical consumer product? Introduce monthly subscriptions.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions.

Annual subscription fee: €7,429

Having recently adopted many new productivity and marketing tools (free + paid), I was curious to see how much the invoices in my inbox and bank account add up to.

I found a sleek (and free) Subscription Manager template on Notion Marketplace and entered all my expenses under 7 categories.

Work & Marketing software:

Ideation, copywriting, and visuals
Social media and email marketing
Web design, optimisation, and SEO
Courses, workshops, and videos
Productivity and time tracking

Lifestyle & intellectual interests:

Productivity & task management
Lifestyle, health, and arts

Monthly spend: €618

My initial reaction was a big "Ughhh!"

I knew there were a few expensive marketing tools there, but I wasn’t expecting the total sum to be this much.

Alright, it's not that bad, I thought, when looking at the per-month aggregate.

But then I switched the chart input to calculate the yearly budget…

Annual spend: €7,429

The resulting sum is, frankly, horrifying.

How on earth!?

And I don’t even subscribe to food delivery or streaming services...!

You'll find the full list of my subscription expenses below.

But first, a bit of life philosophy.

How much is too much?

After overcoming the initial mini-shock, I went deeper and considered what value each tool adds to my work and life:

Enabling work projects
Increasing productivity
Improving daily life

And so on…

If you’re planning to do the same exercise, here are 3 POWs that might be helpful.

1) Pragmatic: cost / value

Am I making more money thanks to a tool than I spend on it?

2) Productive: cost / time

Saving money feels great, but isn’t your saved time even more valuable?

3) Emotional: cost / happiness

Is the subscription making a significant improvement to your quality of life?

Travel light or stay home?

For the longest time, I used to subscribe to the “Travel light” philosophy.

↳ Never pay for the 20kg extra suitcase when booking a flight.

↳ Cancel 95% of app and software subscriptions before the free trial runs out.

↳ Buy the grocery articles currently at a discount. (I still do, yet only for specific things with little differentiation other than the brand name.)

The adverb “Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your soul” describes well my decision to go freelance and safeguard 30% of each year for my creative projects & travelling.

And yet…

As time passes (read: as I get older and/or brainwashed by subscription marketers), I increasingly see value in quality and convenience.

Moreover, the “cheap is expensive” lessons keep piling up.

Cheap = expensive

These days, ever more distractions compete for our 16 hours of daily waking time.

There also seems to be more worthwhile projects these days, compared to 10 years ago.

In personal life, this means more friends to catch up with, events to socialise at, articles and books to read, recipes to try, cities to (re)visit, exhibitions to see, barre classes to attend, cafes to linger at, and moments to capture and share.

On the work side, I’m a freelance marketing consultant who also maintains a blog, newsletter, and creates marketing courses.

I wince at the thought of all the hours I’ve spent on LinkedIn to build new connections, write and design posts, and keep in touch with colleagues and clients.

Don’t even mention Instagram…

Saving money feels great until you realise your time is even more valuable.

When selecting the tools for my work, I’d rather spend a bit more to get the industry’s best.

Going with a cheaper option might save you €/$/£100 here and there.

But product limitations (fewer features, low-quality design) + the extra time spent are simply not worth it.

As to productivity and lifestyle subscriptions, some save you time while others, in fact, waste it.

Ask yourself whether that Netflix subscription is actually making you happier – or smarter...

Ok, let’s return the focus on marketing tools.

Investing in growth

Over the past 6 months, I’ve spent ca €2,500 on:

Marketing and productivity software
Substack newsletters
Marketing & design templates

The sum seems rather exuberant in retrospect.

And yet, there’s no other way I could have delivered all my projects without this investment.

Perhaps, I could have chosen a cheaper blog theme than Blocksy Pro (€289/lifetime). Or a cheaper course platform than Kajabi (€209/month). Or used Mac’s free screenshot tool instead of Cleanshot ($29/lifetime).

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I would have saved ca €500.

Certainly, I would have paid in tens (if not 100+) of extra hours, lower-quality branding, and the resulting lost opportunities.

Do I regret spending a little fortune on software & tools in 6 months?

No, the investment has well paid off.

I’m even considering getting two extra tools: 🐒

Notion Pro for better LinkedIn giveaways & course resource management
Superhuman to declutter (and de-stress) my inbox experience, flooded with too many newsletters

In order to make money, you need to spend money

I was reminded of this point of view last weekend, while weeding my garden.

I was listening to a recent Delivering Value podcast episode with Maja Voje.

She said that it took her years to realise: “In order to make money, you need to spend money.”

The logic rings more true than ever.

Over the past 6 months, I have…

Worked on two long-term marketing consulting projects
Wrote a 360-degree marketing audit for three companies
Rebranded my newsletter to a new strategic focus and design
Switched my blog theme and redesigned most of it
Created and launched my first-ever marketing course
Grew my LinkedIn account to 13k+ followers with 2-3 posts/week

The list is not a complaint. Nor is it a boast.

We all have to work, and many of us enjoy the process.

I love learning new skills; I thrive when (self-)challenged.

The list is the key reason why I looked up and tested tens of new marketing tools and began paying for several of them.

I also made several one-off purchases of other marketing experts’ resources (like Maja’s GTM Checklist) to improve my skill set faster. (These are not included in the Notion doc.)

Below, you can see the full list of the paid and free tools that I use in my marketing projects and personal life – my Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools.

My Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools

First, an important clarification…

The Mary Poppins “purse” is a model of the '60s carpet bag.

Among other paraphernalia, it contained a hat stand, a mirror, a houseplant, and a floor lamp.

Thx God the marketing tools are virtual. The only thing they weigh down is one’s bank account balance.

All the marketing and productivity tools mentioned are ones that I currently use or have used for some client projects.

I hands-down recommend them all.

Without further ado, here they are.

Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals

Figma PRO: Design for website, ad creatives, social media posts, newsletter, etc.

Canva: Design tool for marketers who haven’t yet learned to use Figma

Adobe Firefly: AI-generated images, e.g the featured images in this blog

Adobe Express: Editing images, e.g. removing background and changing size

Grammarly: Checking spelling mistakes in my Google Docs, newsletter, social posts

CleanShot: Taking high-quality screenshots and adding special edits + recording GIFs

ChatGPT: Researching ideas and topics, getting copywriting angles (never the full text)

Miro: Workshops and brainstorming for consulting projects

Social media and email marketing

KIT: My go-to newsletter marketing tool for Marketing Fix

Sparkloop: Newsletter referrals for Marketing Fix

Taplio: The very best LinkedIn tool for analytics and content generation

Texts: Mac desktop app that consolidates all your messages, e.g. from LinkedIn and Instagram

Octopus CRM: My go-to tool for growing LinkedIn follower base with automated invitations and welcome messages

Instantly: The best sender domain warmup tool to ensure your emails land in the Inbox

Web design, optimisation, and SEO

Blocksy PRO: Super flexible & high-quality WordPress theme used for this blog

Wisepops: Hands down the most flexible and good-looking pop-up tool

Lasso: Website add-on for beautiful product offer layouts

Wappalyzer: Browser extension that shows all the tools and pixels on any website

Moz: Top SEO tool, I use their free browser extension for optimisation & research

SemRush: Top SEO & PPC tool, I use the free version extension for research

SimilarWeb: Web and SEO analysis tool, I use it for site traffic analysis

Courses, workshops, videos

Kajabi: All-in-one course management platform, best in the industry

Tally: Typeform-style tool for collecting user feedback and doing website surveys

Senja: The very best tool for collecting and showcasing testimonials

Typeform: Top website form tool with lots of features and layouts

Productivity and time tracking

Calendly: Meeting scheduling

Teamweek: Now Toggl Plan, I’ve used it for task management for 5+ years

Toggl: Time tracking for freelance projects and every other work-related task

Notion PRO: Project management and documentation + content management

Slack: Better turn your phone notifications off

Evernote: Desktop app that I use for note-taking and drafting texts

Et voilà, this was my list of marketing tools and software that I use daily.

The awful – or good – thing is that looking at this list, there's nothing I'd willingly give up.

And yet, I'm going to play Easter Egg hunt this weekend and hide some of those from my bank account for good.

This time, too much is too much.

P.S. Tell me about your favourite subscriptions and thoughts on the subject in LinkedIn DMs or email replies.

🪡 Needles in a haystack

Officially my favourite section of Marketing Fix.

Things that cut through the internet noise + what I've been reading, listening, watching, liking, thinking.

Shorter this week due to the long essay.

🪡 The Wolf of Wall Street… but then it's B2B marketing. Talk about B2B marketing in 2025... The guys at Dapper published on LinkedIn a prank video that copies the iconic humming scene with Matthew McConaughey and Leonardo DiCaprio. It made me laugh out loud.

🪡 Why following every AI trend is NOT COOL. This week, the social media strategist and author of the popular Link In Bio newsletter, Rachel Karten, wrote a long essay titled Why the AI Action Figure Trend Is Doing Your Brand a Disservice. Here's Rachel: "Over the past five or so years we’ve witnessed a flattening of brand social. The rise in easy-to-replicate trends on TikTok—and the algorithmic benefits of participating— encouraged brands to all speak the same, narrow language."

🪡 Notion Creator Program. Notion just launched their Creator Program, which gives you 6-12 months of free Notion PRO when accepted.