Chances are you’ve never heard of the AI Subscription Club, and that makes sense – while it covers some majorSamsungproducts like TVs and refrigerators, it doesn’t have any footprint outside of South Korea. Yet, anyway – we could hear more when Samsung’s next Unpacked event takes place on January 22. The focus of that should be theGalaxy S25, but it’d be strange if that was the only thing Samsung talked about.
Interestingly enough, Samsung has already announced plans to expand Korean Club subscriptions not just to Galaxy phones, but itsBalliehome robot. The notion of a subscription that covers such a diverse range of products is mind-boggling, but if it succeeds, it could be a taste of where all our tech products are going, whether we like it or not.
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What is the AI Subscription Club?
Don’t let the name fool you
The AI Subscription Club isn’t really about AI, practically speaking. In truth, it’s about renting a variety of Samsung products that happen to have AI features. Many of these are smart home appliances – aside from TVs and fridges, you can also rent things like washing machines. Maintenance services are an option, too, which might save you if you don’t want to mess with that separately.
You do have to pay an upfront price for many things in the Club, but a significant amount lower than if you bought them outright. It’s similar to the way phone contracts work (or used to work) in the US. That new iPhone is cheap because your carrier knows you’ll still be paying for it every month. Samsung’s plans can put expensive products within reach, even if customers might end up spending more in the long run.
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Why the AI Subscription Club may be a glimpse at the future
Market realities and AI
Businesses around the world have discovered that they love, love, love subscriptions. As much as they enjoy getting a large chunk of your cash all at once, subscriptions provide a more predictable source of revenue, and some subscriptions can last indefinitely. While you may occasionally let your Netflix subscription lapse, you’re probably not about to let youriCloud+subscription drop if it means losing cloud sync for critical photos, videos, and other files. Many visual artists might as well be chained to Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
The industry is making a heavy push towards AI, and that comes with high costs on the business end.
Times are changing, though. The industry is making a heavy push towards AI, and that comes with high costs on the business end. The most advanced AI functions inevitably require cloud processing, which means spending on server farms, internet bandwidth, and the people to run it all. They’re also evolving at such a rapid pace that companies need a steady supply of software development and hardware upgrades.
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All of these factors risk cutting into profit margins, and making customers pay for subscriptions is a way around that. It’s why it costs more for the best versions of ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Some revolutionary AI technologies are completely paywalled – OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, is off-limits unless you have a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan.
As AI spreads further and deeper, it will be increasingly tempting to charge customers an umbrella fee to cover its support costs, especially once it’s good enough for customers to become dependent on it. The name “AI Subscription Club” may be more hype than reality, but not forever.
Our AI dependency is bound to increase
Robotics, the smart home, and more
At the moment, the average consumer isn’t truly reliant on generative AI. There are people who prefer services likeCopilotandChatGPTwhen they need to ask a question, but they could just as well track down the same info using Google and other search engines, given the right keywords. Likewise, few people need features like text rewriting or circle-to-search – they just speed up tasks you could accomplish by other means.
It may be all too easy to coerce people into accepting bundles of AI services and hardware.
What’s going to happen, though, when robots like Ballie evolve from being novelties to something in every middle- and upper-class home? When self-driving cars are everywhere? Or when smart home platforms start supporting more complex voice-created automations, like the onesAmazon has planned for Alexa? At that point, it may be all too easy to coerce people into accepting bundles of AI services and hardware. That’s particularly likely with cars and robots, I bet, given upfront prices in the tens of thousands.
Smartphones are already leaning in that direction. Aside from the AI Subscription Club, consider Google One. It’s a must-have service for a lot of phone owners, since it’s how Google sells both extra cloud storage and Gemini Advanced. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for the company to bring back a modified Pixel Pass. Apple recentlynixed the idea of iPhone subscriptions, but mostly for liability reasons. I could see it reviving the concept to both fund Apple Intelligence and keep people locked into its ecosystem.
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Is an AI omni-subscription a good thing?
Now’s the time for any resistance
On a practical level, there might not be much choice. Government regulators are bound to step in if there are antitrust concerns – which there should be – but until then, the business case is going to be strong, and customers have repeatedly shown a willingness to make sacrifices if it makes something more affordable. Look at how many apps and services are ad-supported, and why financing services like Klarna have become available for every product imaginable. I almost used one to buy myelectric unicycle, never mind people who are just scraping by to afford a basic smartphone.
If we start taking omni-subscriptions for granted, they may become unavoidable.
I propose resisting subscriptions wherever we can, however. The public can only take so much nickel-and-diming, and if we start taking omni-subscriptions for granted, they may become unavoidable. Do you really want all the core tech in your house to be tethered to a single corporation? Probably not, unless you’re like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and look at cyberpunk stories as utopias, not the dystopias they were intended to be.
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