Subscription Economy News 05/11/20

Every week, we bring you the top stories and analyses from the global Subscription Economy.

Headspace is offering free mindfulness courses to unemployed Americans

Excerpts from an article by Christine Fisher on Engadget

There’s no question that losing your job is incredibly stressful, and since the COVID-19 pandemic began, millions of people in the US have been laid off or furloughed. In an attempt to ease some of the stress that causes, the mindfulness app Headspace is offering a free one-year subscription to anyone in the US who is now unemployed.

According to Headspace, 59 percent of Americans say mental health is “more important” since the pandemic began. The company has already made its meditation and sleep exercises available to anyone in New York, one of the cities hit hardest by the virus, and all US health professionals who work public health settings have access to Headspace Plus for free through 2020.

While the app won’t solve the financial hardship of unemployment, it may help mitigate some of the stress.

For more, read the full article on Engadget

Google’s Nest Aware revamp is here to simplify your subscription

Excerpts from an article by Jon Porter on The Verge

Google’s new Nest Aware pricing model is rolling out starting this week. The new model means that a single subscription now covers all of your Nest devices, rather than asking you to pay on a per-device basis.

The new Nest Aware subscription now costs $6 a month or $60 a year to cover all of your devices. That gets you 30 days of “event video history,” meaning you get the recordings from whenever the camera detects motion or sound. Jumping up to $12 a month ($120 a year) for Nest Aware Plus doubles your event history to 60 days and also gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording history.

It’s a lot simpler than Nest’s previous pricing model, in which subscription prices ranged from $5 to $30 per month per camera, with discounts offered to cover each subsequent device.

For more, read the full article on The Verge 

How the Subscription Model Revolutionized the Way We Buy Perfume

Excerpts from an article by Robert Klara on Adweek

In the past few years, fragrance subscription services with names like Luxury Scent Box, Perfume Surprise, Scentbird and ScentBox have exploded onto the scene. Buoyed by venture capital and adding subscribers at a steady clip, these companies have upended the tradition of heading to department stores or specialty retailers to buy large and costly bottles of perfume.

In a broad sense, fragrance subscription services are a variation of a trend that started a decade ago with on-demand content streaming.

Rejecting cable providers’ all-or-nothing business model that required consumers to buy a costly bundle of hundreds of channels or simply do without, consumers instead flocked to services like Hulu and Netflix, which allowed them to make à la carte purchases for far less money. It’s a highly popular option, which is why the subscription model has spread to industries ranging from shaving razors to fishing lures.

For more, read the full article on Adweek

For more Subscription Economy resources and events, head to www.subscribed.com and subscribe to Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo’s Subscribed Weekly newsletter, coming to your inbox every Saturday. 

Recommended for you

ZEOs Investing in Women this International Women’s Day
Strategic Insights from Zuora’s Subscribed Institute Executive Breakfast in London
How to create personalized subscriptions using Zephr