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Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by matthewdgreen on Monday December 13, 2021 @04:07PM (#29544655)
Yes, I understand that people will charge what the market will bear, and in this case Toyota has decided they can charge a lot -- because you bought the car and now they have you at their mercy. I was responding to the GP poster who explicitly justified it by the cost of operating the service.

This might not be a big deal if Toyota was the only company contemplating this business model (what's $8/mo, after all?) but I doubt they will be. If every product in your life adds a "small" subscription fee (calculated at 50-1000x actual service costs), things are going to get painful very quickly.

Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by dotancohen on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @04:59AM (#29550008)
People are already getting normalized to this.

I paid a few dollars for a better dialer, because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Another few dollars for a good calendar app, again because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Hell, I'd gladly pay for a decent web browser. And I say that as a happy Ubuntu user who has been coding for over two decades in VIM, I know my way around FOSS software.