This is a good read and relevant to many discussions in this forum.
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Just say no. Make that more no’s till I get to 20 characters.
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Before I could read that article, I have to save 260$ on a 99$ payment, for the first article!
All following articles on that site, for the next whole year, are free…
You have until August 31st to make your decision to subscribe… 
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Ohh, I am sooo glad about that!
Someone told me recently, that it would be healthy to say „No“, at least once a day, so I could go back to that site for another 10 Days to live a healthy life…
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I’m saying no to a lot of subscriptions these days. But it’s not easy to avoid subscriptions and advertisements when even the largest companies are looking for a steady source of revenues.
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BMW has been running advertisements on television that poke fun at virtual reality, but all I could think of was… “at least the vehicles in virtual reality don’t force you to pay a subscription for heated seats!” …and laughed it off.
In regards to Apple, I’m just glad that they’re not pushing for intrusive advertisements.
I think that BMW are taking two bites of the cherry here.
Automakers don’t give anything away for free, if every BMW comes with Seat Heaters, BMW are at least covering their costs, if not adding a mark up on the hardware, even if the buyer doesn’t pay extra for seat heaters.
THEN either as part of the original purchase or as a subscription, the owner of the vehicle gives BMW even more money, with no extra costs for BMW.
The only thought I had though was that if I’m paying a subscription for Seat heaters (or I’ve bought a lifetime license) and they break who pays to fix them? I suppose the devil will be in the details of the agreement.
For the customer it makes only a kind of sense, if the cost for the single payment of the seat heater will be more, than the yearly cost over the average lifetime of the car.
As an example, BMW is offering the seat heater as a extra in its “i4 eDrive40” in Germany for 380€.
As far as I know, they offer it in Britain at 23€ (I stay in Euro, as I just want to demonstrate the point).
That means, if you drive the car longer then roughly 17 Months, this will cost you a lot extra, compared with the single price.
And also, if you sell the car, its value will be lower, than with seat heater, as it has to be considered to be a car without one, during the selling process.
BMW is producing a lot of its cars, more or less within my Neighbourhood, and beside I don’t like cars with an Rear-wheel drive anyway, I would never buy a car, where I have to spent extra money by use on already installed items, who will cost me also addition fuel or energy by driving them around, while I can not use them without the payment!
And beside that, what is happening, if you own the car, but for some reasons your Creditworthiness becomes impaired, and you loose your credit card, necessary to place those payments?
My complaint every month to BMW would be – “My seats are not getting heated. They are still cold to the touch. Now fix it or refund my monthly subscription till you fix it. I will bring it in to get it checked up every month and the wait times will itself put it to months ahead.”
If anybody complains about memory upgrades on Apple products…just point at the upgrade list by car makers. 
The car I had 3 years ago: to use the app to remotely turn on the seat heating: free for the 1 years, pay afterwards.
I downloaded a copy of the article from my library. Here’s the part that’s about the seat warmers:
A recent, egregious example is BMW’s decision to slap a subscription on that coziest of car features: front-seat heating. In vehicles with the required hardware, the automaker is now charging a regular fee –roughly $23 a month in Britain –for customers in certain countries to activate seat-warming, according to information on the company’s website. While luxury automakers aren’t new to subscriptions for services such as driving assistance and navigation software updates, the heated-seats charge triggered an international brouhaha.
The rest of the article is about subscriptions, any one of us could’ve written it. 
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I wouldn’t call $23 per month a micropayment. That amounts to $276 per year!
My idea of micropayments includes items like the less-than-$1 amounts that banks use to authenticate account linkage prior to bank-to-bank ACH (automated clearinghouse) or EFT (electronic funds transfer) payments. I conisder $23 per month to be a bona fide payment, to be considered carefully. And rejected soundly. 
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This is a one time purchase and works well.
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The way the price of electricity’s going here (UK), the cost of filling that one time purchase is gonna be higher than the BMW heated seat sub
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The only auto subscription service I’ve ever used was General Motors OnStar for my mothers car. She chose to continue driving until shortly after her 90th birthday and I found the monthly subscription helped me to sleep at night
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That made me laugh!
Good grief. This is going to lead to the situation that John Deere tractors is in currently : a flourishing jailbreak market in which equipment owners will run cracked versions of their OS in order to get access to locked features.
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I’ve always been a BMW fan, but a BMW may not be in my future. I hate subscription everything (although I’m ok with it for my very few core apps). With cars it’s a “red line” I won’t cross so long as there’s an alternative.
This reminds me of something the CEO of AT&T said at a press conference many years ago. He was proposing fees for non-favored websites to deliver their content to AT&T internet customers. He said, “Why should a Yahoo or a Google get to use our network without paying for it?” In the meantime, my household was paying over $800/year for AT&T internet service. He treated that like it was nothing. I was offended.
Same with the BMW: we pay $80k for one and apparently that means nothing to BMW.
Aftermarket Seats which can heat bypassing the BMW Paywall Software. Thanks BMW for creating a unique market. I should patent this idea.