The average American has 12 paid subscriptions. Each one seemed reasonable when they signed up. Together, they're a quiet drain — on wallets, on attention, and on trust.
The Subscription Trap
Subscriptions work great for services you use every day: streaming music, cloud storage, project management tools. But somewhere along the way, the subscription model escaped its natural habitat and colonized everything.
Need to edit a PDF? Subscription. Send a fax? Subscription. Convert a file format? Subscription. Scan a document? Subscription. These are one-time tasks being sold as ongoing relationships.
The business logic is simple: if you forget to cancel, they keep charging you. Industry data shows that nearly half of subscription users have forgotten about at least one active subscription. That's not a bug — it's the business model.
The Tracking Tax
If subscriptions are the financial trap, tracking is the privacy one. Most "free" online tools aren't free at all — you're paying with your data. Every file you upload, every action you take, every time you visit gets logged, analyzed, and often sold.
When you use a fax service that tracks you, they know:
- What documents you're sending
- Who you're sending them to
- How often you send faxes
- What device you're using
- Your location, browsing habits, and more
For a service that handles sensitive documents like medical records, legal filings, and financial paperwork, that's not just annoying — it's a genuine privacy risk.
A Better Model
There's a simpler way: charge a fair price for the service, deliver it, and move on. No ongoing relationship required. No data harvesting needed to supplement revenue.
This is how most of the physical world works. When you buy a stamp at the post office, they don't ask for your email address. When you use a photocopier at the library, it doesn't track which documents you copied. These transactions are simple, private, and complete.
Digital services can work this way too. They just usually don't, because subscriptions and data are more profitable.
What We Chose Instead
At SimpleFax, we made deliberate choices:
- $3.99 per fax, no subscription. You pay when you need the service, and that's it.
- No tracking cookies. We don't use analytics tools or advertising trackers.
- No accounts. We don't store your email, name, or documents.
- Files deleted after sending. Your documents don't linger on our servers.
Is this approach less profitable than a subscription model with tracking? Probably. But it's honest. And it's what we'd want as customers ourselves.
You Deserve Better
Every time you sign up for another subscription you don't really need, or accept another tracking cookie you don't want, the internet gets a little worse. But it doesn't have to be this way.
More tools should charge a fair price for a fair service, respect your privacy, and get out of your way. That's what we're trying to do with SimpleFax, and we hope more services follow suit.