I'm not sure what the alternative is. You can pick up a newspaper for 20p,or a "quality" newspaper for 50p (UK rates). Would I pay 50p a day to browse a news site? At the moment, no, because I can get my news for free elsewhere, with similar political alignment. I feel like I would pay something for really, really good curation and aggregation of news I'm interested in. But not all the time.

It seems subscription is the only alternative to free and I don't want endless subscriptions to news (be it tech news or what's going on in the world). Because it all adds up. I want to be able to buy stories/news etc. ad hoc as I do/did a newspaper rather than being committed to a month subscription where I may not take advantage of it all the time.

Spotify is an example of a service I use frequently but probably don't use it every day and as such I sometimes unsubscribe from it. I'd love to be able to subscribe to it when I'm using it. Say 25p/30c a day (or less ideally).

Sure it may end up coming out costing me more than a monthly subscription but some months it wouldn't because I don't use it all the time.

I'm all for paying for content but all these subscriptions add up.

AWS has got it figured out, to a degree - more so than media companies. Charge for usage.