Subscription fatigue is real. But when it comes to predictable, sometimes up-front revenue, tech companies still can’t bring themselves to hit “cancel.”
One such company is Oura Health Oy, the popular Finland-founded smart-ring maker. CEO Tom Hale recently made it clear the company isn’t backing away from the business model that helped turn the smart-ring maker into an $11 billion company.
His stance comes as consumers have increasingly turned up their noses at recurring fees, especially when they have to buy a product first.
Hale argues that Oura’s monthly fee of $5.99 or $69.99 per year funds the steady stream of updates that keep the product valuable long after the ring is sold. The company’s physical ring, the Oura Ring 4, ranges in price from $349 to $499. In the last year, the company has added two new integrations to provide users with more accurate data from their Oura ring, as well as 14 new features addressing, among other things, pregnancy and cumulative stress.
“Oura’s membership model is what powers ongoing innovation, and we see strong evidence that members continue to find meaningful value month over month with a better than best in class retention rate,” Hale said in a comment to Fortune.
Yet consumers have shown they may be reaching their limit with adding more subscriptions. While the business model’s proliferation means more people are used to recurring fees, they’re increasingly worried about “subscription” creep, said Kimberly Hamilton, senior financial education manager at Rocket Money, a personal finance app with subscription tracking. The average Rocket Money user adds between two and four subscriptions per year, and a quarter of its users have more than 17 subscriptions, according to Hamilton.
“While subscriptions can make life more convenient by reducing the need to constantly re-order items and services, they can also cause expenses to add up quickly,” Hamilton told Fortune.
Subscription fatigue hits consumers
Even in streaming services, which have become one of the most common subscriptions over the past two decades, 39% of consumers said they had canceled a subscription in the past two months, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends survey of more than 3,000 consumers. But consumers’ worries about juggling their growing number of subscriptions have become especially prevalent as they appear in places they hadn’t before, she added.
One example is Peloton, whose exercise bikes, when new, start at more than $1,600 each. Yet to access instructor-led classes and features such as metric tracking, users with Peloton equipment need to subscribe for $49.99 per month. Without the subscription, the bike works, but is limited, offering basic ride functionality and access to two pre-recorded workout classes. Users can access Peloton content through the app without the equipment for a lower monthly fee.
Last month, CEO Elon Musk also dragged Tesla further into the world of subscriptions by eliminating users’ ability to buy the company’s Full Self-Driving technology outright, making it available only via subscription. It also scrapped the free steering “Autopilot” that once came standard with the Model 3 and Model Y, keeping only Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC)—a system that maintains speed and following distance, but doesn’t steer—unless drivers pay for more advanced driver-assistance features starting at $99 a month. Other car companies such as Toyota and Honda offer lane assist steering as a standard feature on some vehicles, including the Corolla and Civic, respectively.
To be sure, consumers may also prefer subscriptions with a lower cost than a higher upfront fee because it spreads out the pay burden and makes the payment appear more manageable, said Aleksandar Tomic, the Associate Dean for Strategy, Innovation, & Technology at Boston College
“If they say, ‘Okay, we’ll charge you $5.99 a month, or you pay us now $350 for five years, the $5.99 a month is easier to stomach,” he said.
Meanwhile, basic economics are pushing some companies in the tech space to maintain or expand their recurring revenue streams, even if customers don’t quite like it. While companies like Oura may have high and fixed costs, including paying engineers and renting server space, on the tech side, the cost to serve an additional customer may be low, Tomic said.
“You want to wear that ring and have it work for you, essentially for years,” he said. “All of that costs money, so they have to fund it somehow.”
