TechTakes

The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0.

it’s also fucking remarkable how doomed this is. did they talk to none of the people responsible for frog boiling over at Prime Video? come on, we all know the steps:

• you start your janky, subpar service at $0, as a value add to an existing Amazon product. this starts you with a massive userbase right off the bat.
• you then implement a lock-in mechanism. for a streaming service that’s exclusives; for a voice assistant, that’s probably API integrations designed under an exclusivity contract
• now that switching off of your service carries consequences and the lock-in mechanism has given it an aura of prestige (even though it’s probably still janky as fuck), increase its price to $1-2 a month to see how much of your userbase is pliant and willing to accept the introduction of a subscription mechanism. do what it takes to make the idea of a subscription tolerable; segregate your userbase into paid (which get exclusives) and free (which get ads) tiers if you need to.
• now that your userbase has been primed (heh) to accept the idea of paying for a previously complementary service, boil the fuck out of that frog. increase subscription fees regularly. introduce ads even for paid tiers. run constant experiments to see how and where you can introduce ads relative to the amount you’re charging before subscriber numbers drop; use that to make the service just annoying and expensive enough that you’re still making a massive profit even after shedding what I’m very certain Amazon considers the dead weight of bad consumers.
• the product is now in its final form under capitalism: some horseshit that’s functionally and economically indistinguishable from paying a cable company far too much for a premium TV channel, but with even more ads and customer data exfiltration enabled by the underlying technology. for some shit like Alexa, the value for the customer is even worse — the platform does so little other than push ads and steal data.

but amazon’s not doing the above obvious shit they always do in this case, and I think I know why: unlike streaming, people fucking hate voice assistants, so this $5-$10 fee might just be a desperate strategy to get true believers paying (or they’re fine with killing Alexa by making the subscription version mandatory)