https://bobbyapp.co/ is another app good to tracking subscriptions
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I donât consider Amazon a subscription any more than I consider oxygen an optional gas. amazon is amazon and I will always pay their annual âdelivery feeâ.
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I have to say, online shopping is becoming a question of ânot whether, but whichâ. There are so many little things - especially tech gizmos and doodads and adapters and such - that one used to just go to the local Radio Shack (anybody else remember those bins of adapters and electronic components? 
) or Best Buy and pick up, but that are now basically âonline onlyâ.
And once youâre opening a browser instead of a car door, youâre going to be spending some money on shipping. While Amazon sucks in a variety of ways, most of the other online retailers arenât really that much better, if theyâre any better at all.
Two small online orders per month at $5 or so each for shipping pays for Prime, at which point itâs almost not even a subscription - itâs a discount for prepayment of shipping fees.
On principle, if Iâm buying something larger Iâm more inclined to try to deal with a more specialty retailer thatâs going to take care of me better. I bought my QNAP DAS from B&H, for example. But for the little day-to-day stuff, I agree that Amazon Prime is typically the best value.
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Itâs getting to be that way for me as well. At this point Amazon is more entrenched in my life than Google is
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Between my wife and I plus two kids, I couldnât keep track of all our digital subscriptions. So I use Airtable to track my whole familyâs subscriptions in one place. We have everything grouped by category, and tagged with fields for which family members use it, how much we pay, and where we subscribed (via App Store or Direct) so we know where to go to manage the subscription. I also include notes like â50% off for first yearâ or â[Child] pays us back with his allowanceâ or whatever is relevant.
I used to also track renewal dates but I found that I didnât reference that info often enough to bother keeping that data up to date.
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That is a terrific to use AirTable as it is I am using it daily to monitor my economics.
I monitor which subscriptions Apple has noted. They are not always right.
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Ahh this is like Masterclass with perhaps a bit more focus on Creators. I might set a reminder to check them out when we get to the silly season of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.
I bought my wife Masterclass and she enjoyed the content she was able to view but the problem is always time.
Iâm not really a Numbers person, but Iâve seen the difference described as: Numbers is a spreadsheet; Airtable is a database with some spreadsheet-like features.
Here, Iâve made a slightly sanitized/anonymized version of my Subscriptions database in Airtable. You can take a look and see if itâs the sort of thing youâd recreate similarly in Numbers:
(Anyone else can take a look too if it might be helpful for you)
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The databases are set up for you and you can modify them as opposed to with Numbers where Iâd pretty much have to start from the beginning. AirTable is a cinch to use.
I use to be really good at databases but that was using FileMaker Pro. I certainly wish that app was affordable.
I never really got into Numbers.
Air Table is free for iOS and I think for the Mac as well. You ought to take a look.
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That is very nice! I like the UI too. Great work, imho!
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I donât like the notion of Amazon being as huge as it is. I donât even know what the fee is. But they have an incredible catalogue of items. You get most things within a day or two. And who wants to pay for shipping??
Their movie service is pretty good unlike Netflix which has way too much violence. They are both raising their prices so I am just going to stay with Prime and cancel Netflix.
No kidding. If you find it, let me know. Iâll try looking.
No luck.
The secret is, we all still pay for shipping somehow - Amazon is just huge enough that they can dollar-cost-average the transactions where they lose money on shipping with the ones where they make money on shipping. They can also take less profit per-item since their volume is so huge. And as long as they come out ahead overall, theyâre good.
They actually did that with Kindle ebooks for a long time. Theyâd sell any NYT bestseller for $9.99. Even the ones where their cost was more than $9.99. They just applied the extra profits from the ones they could get for substantially less than $9.99, and dollar-cost-averaged across the category. As long as they were making money overall, they were good.
Itâs an interesting business.
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all kindle books were $9.99 in the beginning. thats all they are really worth as you donât really own them. when the publishers forced amazon to charge more, I quit buying kindle books.
Oh, I realize there are hidden shipping charges.
Then there are coming to the house in their large trucks bringing next to nothing.
Were they? I seem to remember more varied pricing, even in the beginning. Either way, the NYT bestseller thing was definitely the case as I remember reading an article about it. Somebody interviewed an exec from a publishing house and asked them how they felt about Amazonâs ebook pricing, and the exec said âwell, they donât sell our books for $9.99 - we charge them more than thatâ. The reporter then showed them Amazonâs site where that exact book was $9.99. 
I started with the 2nd gen kindle so maybe I missed the very beginning. I remember never paying more than $9.99 and it was huge deal when Hatchett and the other publishers strong armed amazon into raising the price. they lost my $$ with this move. Im not going license electrons for more than $10
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This was the thread which mentioned MacSparkyâs subscription database:
This links to the MacSparky blog but I received a 404 error when I clicked to download:
Someone or @MacSparky might have a copy they could share with you.
I agree but itâs not for me. I was just replying to another post about the whereabouts of the subscriptions database.
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