I recently had a minor “digital crisis” that many of you will find familiar. I was trying to record a quick video on my phone, only to be met with the dreaded: “Storage almost full.”
I didn’t delete photos. I didn’t transfer files to a hard drive. I simply tapped a button to upgrade my iCloud storage for a few hundred rupees a month.
Later that evening at the office, I was chatting with a few younger team members about random expenses. At some point, we started listing the things they pay for every month: Netflix, Prime, Disney+ Hotstar, Swiggy One, Zomato Gold, Spotify, iCloud, ChatGPT Plus, YouTube Premium, a meditation app, a fitness tracker subscription. One of them counted eleven. Another said he’d stopped counting.
And it hit me — the average urban Indian professional now juggles between 7 and 15 subscriptions. Most of them can’t even list all of them without checking their bank statements.
We’ve quietly crossed a threshold. We no longer buy products. We buy access. And access, by definition, is a lease that never ends. For a wealth creator, the real cost isn’t just the monthly outgo — it’s the systematic erosion of ownership, equity, and terminal value from your personal balance sheet.
In this edition, we’ll cover:
- From ownership to access — How we went from owning everything to subscribing to our own car’s features
- What a ₹8,000/month subscription stack really looks like — A line-by-line breakdown of what the average wealth creator is actually paying for
- The $4.2 billion to $21.5 billion playbook — How Adobe and Apple engineered the most profitable business model shift in corporate history
- The cloud storage trap you can’t escape — Why your phone’s camera is quietly building someone else’s recurring revenue
- The math that should make you uncomfortable — Why your subscriptions are a ₹50 lakh hole in your terminal wealth
- The countermovement — Why recurring-revenue businesses are the best compounders — and how to be on the right side of the equation
- 🔗 Your personal Subscription Audit tool — We’ve built a Google Sheet calculator that tells you exactly what your subscriptions are costing you over 1, 3, and 10 years — and what the same money would grow to as an SIP. Link at the end.
Let’s get into it.
From Ownership to Access
For most of us, wealth always meant something you could point to. The apartment in your name. The car in the driveway. The software licence is in a shrink-wrapped box on your desk. A Patek on your wrist that would outlast you. Ownership was the finish line — it signalled permanence, control, arrival.
That world eroded quietly — one subscription at a time, each one feeling like a fair trade. A little convenience for a little money.
But here’s where the story takes a turn nobody expected. Subscriptions have now moved from digital services into the physical world — into things you’ve already paid for and supposedly own.
Mercedes-Benz now offers “Digital Extras” through the Mercedes me Store. Want to actually use the full horsepower your car’s motor is already capable of producing? That’ll be $60 a month — or $1,950 for a lifetime unlock. The hardware is physically installed in your car. The performance is software-locked behind a paywall. Last year alone, Mercedes made $1 billion in subscription revenue.
This is the logical endpoint of the subscription economy. It’s not just about content anymore. It’s about paywalling ownership itself.
And in India, this shift is playing out at warp speed. OTT platforms have 600 million-plus viewers. Zomato Gold has crossed 3 million subscribers. Zepto Pass has over 4 million. Digital payment infrastructure — particularly UPI auto-mandates — has made recurring payments nearly invisible. You don’t even feel the money leaving.
India’s subscription economy is projected to reach ₹3.2 Lakh Cr ($374B) by 2033. The Subscription Economy Index — which tracks these businesses — has grown 435% over the last decade, outpacing S&P 500 revenue growth by 5x.
And here’s the part that doesn’t get enough attention: during the worst quarter of the pandemic (Q1 2020), S&P 500 company sales declined 1.9%. Subscription businesses? They grew 9.5%. Netflix revenues climbed 16% year-on-year. Apple’s services revenue jumped 36%. Spotify grew 26%.
The subscription model isn’t a trend. It’s the most resilient business architecture of the last two decades. And that resilience comes directly from your wallet.
What a ₹8,000/Month Subscription Stack Actually Looks Like
Before we go further, let’s get specific. I asked around the office and across our network: what does a typical urban wealth creator’s subscription stack look like?
Here’s what came back — and I suspect this will look uncomfortably familiar:
And this is a conservative estimate. It doesn’t include your car’s connected services subscription, your home security monitoring, any premium LinkedIn or professional memberships, or the annual software licences you’ve probably forgotten about.
McKinsey’s research on subscription consumers found something revealing: the single biggest reason people cancel subscriptions is a price increase — 49% for video services, 38% for music. But the single biggest reason people don’t cancel is pure inertia. Auto-renewal is designed to exploit the gap between intention and action. Freemium models achieve 95-100% customer retention over five years. Not because 95% of users are deeply satisfied — but because cancelling requires active effort, and staying requires none.
We’ll come back to what to do about this. But first, let’s look at the other side of this equation — because the same model that’s quietly draining your bank account is also the single most powerful engine of shareholder value creation in the last decade.
The $4.2 Billion to $21.5 Billion Playbook
In 2011, Adobe was a well-respected but plateauing software company. Revenue: $4.2 billion. The business model was simple: sell Creative Suite for $2,599, wait 18 months, release the next version, hope people upgraded. The problem? Customers were skipping upgrades. Piracy was rampant, and revenue was lumpy.
In 2013, leadership made a suicidal pivot: they killed perpetual licenses and moved entirely to Creative Cloud subscriptions ($49.99/month). The backlash was immediate — 50,000 customers signed a protest petition and the stock tumbled. Adobe braced for a $200 million revenue gap they called the “valley of death.”
Fast forward to 2024: Adobe generated $21.5 billion in annual revenue. That’s a 5x increase. The stock went from roughly $30 in 2012 to over $600. Creative Cloud now has 37 million paid subscribers and 94% of total sales comes from subscriptions.
By shifting from ownership to access, Adobe transformed from a $16 billion software firm into a $300 billion tech titan.
Apple tells a similar story. In 2015, Services revenue (iCloud, Music, App Store) was $20 billion; by 2024, it crossed $96 billion. It is now Apple’s second-largest and highest-margin segment.
This reveals a duality every wealth creator must grasp: the same subscription model that acts as a “silent expense” in your personal budget is the most powerful engine of shareholder value today. You’re funding their wealth creation at the expense of your own — unless you’re also investing in the companies that benefit from this shift.
So the real intelligence isn’t in rejecting subscriptions; it’s in recognizing the duality of the model. While it extracts value from consumers, it creates extraordinary wealth for shareholders. The “subscription flywheel” is why Adobe went 20x, Microsoft 10x, and Salesforce 8x.
As an investor, focus on three characteristics of a structural compounder:
- Genuine Pricing Power: Can they hike rates without losing users?
- High Switching Costs: Is your data or workflow “locked in”?
- Expanding Wallet Share: Are they growing revenue per user, not just user count?
The strategy is simple: Cut the subscriptions that drain your capital, and invest in the companies that benefit from everyone else’s inertia.
The Cloud Storage Trap You Can’t Escape
I’ve started calling cloud storage the “Emotional Tax.” We are now the most documented generation in history. Ericsson reports that India leads the world in data consumption at 32 GB per smartphone per month. We shoot 4K videos of our kids and high-res portraits of our meals, and almost none of us ever hit “Delete.”
Meanwhile, what do phone manufacturers do? They push iCloud and Google One as the “solution” — and make it progressively harder to manage storage locally. Apple gives you 5 GB free. Google gives you 15 GB. Both fill up within months for any active user.
And here’s where the lock-in becomes nearly permanent. Once your photos, contacts, notes, WhatsApp backups, and documents live in iCloud or Google One, switching feels impossible. You’re not paying for storage — you’re paying for the fear of losing everything.
India’s personal cloud storage market was valued at $3 billion in FY2024 and is projected to reach $10.9 billion by FY2032, growing at over 17% CAGR. Personal cloud users globally have more than doubled — from 1.1 billion in 2014 to 2.3 billion in 2025. And 71% of consumers say photos are the primary reason they use cloud storage.
The pricing looks small: iCloud+ starts at ₹75/month for 50 GB. Google One starts at ₹59/month for 30 GB (the new Lite plan). But most active users quickly outgrow these entry tiers. A family plan with 200 GB on iCloud is ₹129/month. Google One’s 2 TB plan is ₹1,950/month with AI Pro bundled in.
Here’s what I think will happen over the next five years. As phones get better cameras, as AI generates more content, as we accumulate more digital memories, the average household’s cloud storage bill will quietly climb from ₹100-200/month to ₹500-1,000/month.
And because these services hold your most personal data — your family photos, your children’s milestones — the switching cost isn’t financial. It’s emotional.
This is the subscription trap in its purest form. A product you can’t leave, with a price that only goes up.
The Math That Should Make You Uncomfortable
Let’s look at the numbers that should genuinely bother any serious wealth creator.
Take a modest ₹5,000 a month in “unconscious” subscription leakage — services that don’t add real value to your life. That’s ₹60,000 a year. Sounds manageable, right? Until you look at the opportunity cost.
If you redirected that same ₹5,000 into a simple index SIP earning 12% annual returns over 20 years, the terminal value is approximately ₹50 lakhs. That isn’t a rounding error; it’s a significant chunk of a retirement fund or a child’s education, quietly being converted into someone else’s recurring revenue.
This leakage compounds in the other direction as well. While individual players like Netflix have occasionally slashed prices to capture the Indian mass market (dropping their Premium plan from ₹800 to ₹649 to stay competitive), the broader “subscription stack” is trending upward. Platforms like YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Disney+ Hotstar have implemented price hikes of 12–20% in recent cycles.
This is the Pricing Power Trap: you aren’t just paying for access instead of ownership—the cost of that access keeps rising, and your only leverage is to cancel, which most people won’t do.
There is deep psychological architecture at play. Subscriptions reduce cognitive load and exploit “reward uncertainty”— the same mechanism that makes gambling compelling. You keep paying because you might need it, or simply because you’ve forgotten you’re paying at all.
While we calculate our leakage, platforms calculate their windfall. According to a joint report from Google, Temasek, and Bain & Compansame, India’s online media revenue is projected to hit $40-50 billion by 2030 — a staggering 5x growth from 2022 levels. With the average Indian spending ~3 hours a day on recreational video, we are witnessing a massive structural transfer of wealth from the Indian household balance sheet to the P&Ls of global tech giants.
The Legacy Gap: What You Can’t Pass On
Here’s a dimension that doesn’t get discussed enough.
If you spent ₹5,000 a month on Kindle Unlimited, Spotify, and Apple TV+ for 30 years, you’d have spent ₹18 lakhs — and leave your children exactly zero books, zero music, and zero films. The moment you stop paying, everything vanishes. No resale. No lending. No inheritance.
84% of US music revenue now comes from streaming. Physical media is under 2% for video. We are in the middle of the largest shift from ownership to access in human history. Your financial assets transfer. Your real estate transfers. Your gold transfers. Your digital subscriptions die with your last payment.
For wealth creators who think carefully about generational transfer, the subscription economy creates a structural hole in your legacy that most people haven’t fully accounted for.
The Subscription Audit: A 4-Step Framework
I’ve built a simple four-question audit framework. Run it once every quarter, and you’ll know exactly where your money is going — and whether it’s working for you.
Q1. The Utility Test: “Have I used this in the last 30 days?” If it’s been dormant for two quarters, cancel it.
Q2. The Replacement Test: “Is there a one-time purchase or free alternative?” Often, a lifetime license or a tool like VLC delivers 80% of the value without the recurring tax.
Q3. The Multiplier Test: “Does this generate income or save meaningful time?” ChatGPT Plus for a CXO is a high-yield investment; a neglected meditation app is just an indulgence.
Q4. The Ownership Test: “Am I renting what I could own?” Shift from “renting” software to owning assets wherever possible to create permanent value.
After running these four questions, one more step: disable auto-pay for high-ticket services. Force yourself to manually approve the expensive ones each cycle. A little friction is the friend of the conscious spender.
🔗 Your Personal Subscription Calculator
We’ve gone one step further. Our team has built a Subscription Audit Calculator — a simple Google Sheet where you can:
✅ Select from a pre-loaded list of 30+ common Indian subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, Zomato Gold, iCloud, ChatGPT, and more)
✅ See your total monthly, annual, and decade-long outgo in one glance
✅ Compare it against what the same amount would grow to as a SIP at 12% returns over 1, 3, and 10 years
✅ Identify which subscriptions fall into each quadrant of the audit framework
[👉 Access the Subscription Audit Calculator here] (Link to Google Sheet)
I’d genuinely recommend spending ten minutes with this. The numbers tend to surprise people.
In Summary
Audit ruthlessly. Use the calculator. The ₹7,000-8,500/month in unconscious outgo is a ₹50 lakh+ terminal wealth gap over 20 years.
Be on the equity side. Own recurring-revenue businesses, not just the memberships.
Watch your cloud bill. It’s the one subscription that only grows — driven by your own content creation.
The most expensive way to live isn’t spending too much. It’s paying for the same thing every month, forever, and building zero equity in the process.
Sandeep Jethwani Co-founder, Dezerv
Before I sign off, here’s your reminder to catch the latest episode of the Create Wealth podcast — where we break down the investment and lifestyle themes that matter to India’s wealth creators. Link in bio.
Disclaimer – The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or recommendation.