The Psychology of Paid Subscriptions: Why People Pay and How to Make Them Pay You
The psychology behind why people subscribe and how to use it to make paying for your Substack feel inevitable.
Before I ever built my own businesses, I was sitting in a corporate office as the VP of Worldwide Marketing for a small streaming service you’ve definitely never heard of. My job? Spend $100,000 every single month across Amazon Prime Video, Meta, and Google to drive subscribers. Make sure our CPA (cost per acquisition) was less than the LTV (lifetime value) of a customer and we were good to go.
On paper, it sounded exciting. I was running big campaigns, analyzing data, testing creatives. In reality? The product was absolute trash. The library of movies and series was outdated, the “new” content was bottom-of-the-barrel or independent and in a foreign language, and everyone inside the company knew it. We weren’t Hulu, Netflix, or Disney+. Hell, we weren’t even Shudder. In fact, we weren’t even in the same league.
And yet, somehow, it worked.
We had 40,000 people paying $7.99/month, plus tens of thousands more through cable deals. That meant millions of dollars in recurring revenue for a product nobody should have wanted. Every month, those payments rolled in like clockwork, even though the value on offer was paper thin.
I was floored. I kept asking myself: why the hell are people paying for this? They could’ve canceled. They could’ve found better free content on YouTube. They could’ve spent that $7.99 on literally anything else.
But they didn’t. They kept paying.
That was my wake-up call. It hit me like a freight train: if a shitty streaming service with second-rate content could convince tens of thousands of people to pay, then so could I. And so can you.
That experience taught me one of the most important business lessons of my life: subscriptions aren’t about the product, they’re about psychology.
People don’t pull out their credit cards because you’re the best in the world. They pay because of how subscribing makes them feel, because of the habits they build around your product, and because canceling feels harder than staying.
Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. I started studying the psychology of subscriptions everything from loss aversion to habit loops to perceived value. And what I found is that every successful subscription business, from Spotify to Substack, leans on the same handful of psychological levers.
And if you understand those levers, you stop worrying about “will anyone pay for my newsletter?” and start focusing on how to design it so paying feels inevitable.
So let’s break it down.
Here are the 10 psychological levers that make people subscribe and keep subscribing even when the product isn’t perfect. These are the same forces that keep 40,000 people paying for a shitty streaming service, that keep millions hooked on Netflix or Spotify, and that you can use to make your Substack irresistible.