You shouldn't hate yearly subscriptions, but you should absolutely hate how they're done by some companies. You might be on the ball about them, having a list to check and evaluate, but grandma isn't, and that's how they get her.
How a Yearly Subscription Works
Often yearly subscriptions are given a discount for committed use. It adds to the economies of scale and startups can rely on counting you as a user for a year even if you used the product for 10 minutes and forget about it. Admittedly, I think if I forget about a subscription after a very short time, that's on me. Even 6 months in, the subscription is mine to waste and I know that. I made the commitment.
What happens at the end is where the MBAs get involved.
Do We Care About Users?
Think about it from a user standpoint. When I have a yearly subscription coming up, I would like a notice that it's about to happen, because after a year it's hard to know when things will be coming up, when they'll actually get charged, and what weasel worded legalese is getting applied to the contract. We don't read those agreements, let alone put them in a planned book of "what is required of us and them" list. People tend to have to look up how to cancel their gym memberships.
So we'd all like that notice at the very least, so we can evaluate "oh, do I still use this at all?" kinds of questions. Of course, the reason we don't get those is because we will forget, and if they have a simple no refund policy, or if getting a refund has a high barrier, we'll just eat the few dollars to maybe even a few hundred every time we forget. Then we feel like, well, we paid for it, maybe we should give it a try again.
Some MBA could read this and just self-justify instantly that they're giving the user a better incentive to use the product if they fell off, to join the family again and get back into it. Especially like those gym membership people, where they have that instant excuse that gyms are healthy so getting them to use it more is also healthy and good. No.
Aligned Incentives Always Win
If I run a gym and I want customers to use the gym, I'm going to do two things. First, I'm going to say, the price is N a month, billed monthly. If you don't use the gym Y times a month, as tracked by check ins and checkouts, we charge N*3, prorated down for how much you meet that bar. I'm also going to be able to incentivize other hours as counting more towards that so I can spread usage around. It's win win because the incentives for customers are aligned to the incentives of the gym.
Contrary to an MBA vision, the ideal business is not a service or product that people pay for and then you don't have to deliver. That's just pure extraction of value for nothing. You have to give to get for the economics to work. If I just sit and stare at the wall and get paid, I'm only taking from the flow of activity. This is sort of related to "rent-seeking" in the terminology, but really it's more about the community effects. Everyone paying for an empty gym is making the community worse because we lose all those opportunity costs, and we aren't motivated to do the thing that was supposed to be delivered from X and we didn't do our part.
Yes, there are a lot of things that we will forget to use that we should. The onus is not on the business to make us do the thing we want. I get it. Yet that's what makes good products and services, things that build value across the relationship. You don't make a good product that nobody wants to use. We should all shame an empty gym for both its gym owners and the users. They're a waste together.
If the MBA Left
If we could get the MBA-ification to go away (and you can in fact find some MBAs who don't have MBA-ification attitudes, and those can do great stuff), you'd see reminders for those subscriptions. You know who I get reminders for every month? Cometeer. I've quit their subscription model 4 times now, and they keep getting me back with the convenience and quality of the product. I'm not endorsed by them, this isn't an ad of any kind, they just tell me "hey, your subscription is coming up next week." Here's why that works.
I have an incentive to evaluate, but I also have an incentive to modify my subscription, to engage with what I want. I recognize that will not be universal. I also don't think a monthly subscription needs a reminder, but they do it. If I had that from everyone, I'd be more incentivized to consider the value, and the company would be more incentivized to make sure the product or service was something I valued enough to stay. That's the right alignment.
If you get the MBA out, some product oriented person or even just a smart business head could say "I want this product to grow in revenue, I need it to be worth sticking with, and the rest is marketing." That's not an MBA attitude. They say those words, but their actions say not to send the subscription reminder for fear they will cancel. That's good signal if they do cancel. You're not doing enough. You're not priced low enough. You're not necessary anymore. The MBA doesn't see a problem with making sure people don't move off their phone book to a more context based internet service. The MBA doesn't value the laggard customer they have, they just want the money to flow. They're too busy seeing the forest to value trees.
Don't support MBA-ification of tech. Make a better product or service, give the customer a reminder, at least for yearly subscriptions.