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A warehouse club card, a shipping pass, and a software license used to be different kinds of deals. Over the last decade they collapsed into one form: pay first, belong, keep paying. The incentive is lifetime value, not a plot against shoppers.
The argumentOrdinary purchases became memberships because a prepaid club fee, proven at scale by Amazon Prime after 2005, raises customer lifetime value and makes revenue easier to forecast than a one-time sale. Software copied the model when Adobe ended perpetual Creative Suite licenses in 2013. Carmakers then tried to apply the same billing logic to hardware already sitting in the vehicle, which is where the membership form stopped looking like a club and started looking like a toll.
Why did so many ordinary purchases turn into recurring memberships over the last decade?
Amazon last published a global Prime count in April 2021, at 200 million members. Its subscription-services line, which includes Prime fees plus other non-AWS digital subscriptions, reached $44.4 billion in 2024, up from $35.2 billion in 2022, according to the company's Form 10-K.
Adobe stopped selling new perpetual Creative Suite licenses in May 2013. Creative Cloud revenue was $12.7 billion in fiscal 2024, part of $20.5 billion in total subscription revenue, according to Adobe's SEC disclosures.
Zuora's 2025 Subscription Economy Index, built from anonymized billing activity for more than 600 companies plus a Harris Poll of 3,087 US adults, found index companies grew revenue about 11 percent faster than the S&P 500 over two years, and unique subscribers rose 25 percent. Among people who canceled in 2024, 47 percent cited price increases.
BMW offered heated-seat subscriptions in several markets in 2022, then withdrew them in 2023 after customers treated the fee as a second charge for hardware already in the car. The company kept subscriptions for software-like driver-assist features.
A Costco card, an Amazon Prime account, and an Adobe Creative Cloud login do not look like the same product. One gets you into a warehouse. One makes two-day shipping feel like a default. One keeps Photoshop opening. What they share is a billing form that used to be reserved for clubs, magazines, and gyms: you pay before you use the thing, you keep paying to remain in good standing, and the company gets a customer whose next dollar is easier to collect than the first.
That form is now attached to razors, meal kits, cloud storage, car software, and, for a while, heated seats that were already wired into the car. The shift is not a story about shoppers suddenly preferring to rent. It is a story about what a prepaid relationship is worth to the business collecting it, and about a specific template, Amazon Prime, that showed how to wrap a fee around an ordinary purchase until the fee itself became the product.
A one-time sale ends when the box is paid for. A membership does not. The customer has already spent the fee, which makes the next order, stream, or software launch feel cheaper than it is, because the membership cost is sunk. The company, meanwhile, can forecast next quarter from a roster of people who will be charged again unless they take an active step to leave. Recurring revenue is easier to lend against and easier to value at a premium than a pile of one-off transactions. None of that requires a conspiracy. It only requires that a dollar of predictable revenue be worth more, to investors and to the finance team, than a dollar of one-time revenue. For most of the last decade, it has been.
Amazon launched Prime on February 2, 2005, as a $79 annual membership for two-day shipping on eligible items. The original pitch was logistics, not a content bundle. Video, music, e-books, and later grocery and health perks were added over the following years, which is the membership trick in slow motion: once the fee is in place, each new benefit makes canceling feel like giving up more than shipping. Amazon last published a global Prime member count in April 2021, at 200 million. It has not disclosed a successor figure in its annual filings. What it does disclose, every year, is a revenue line called subscription services, which the 2024 10-K defines as fees associated with Prime memberships and access to digital video, audiobooks, digital music, e-books, and other non-AWS subscriptions. That line was $35.2 billion in 2022, $40.2 billion in 2023, and $44.4 billion in 2024.
Prime is no longer a shipping discount with extras. It is a tens-of-billions membership business whose revenue the company can recognize over the subscription period, which is the financial reason other retailers and software firms copied the form.
Amazon.com, Inc. Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024 · accessed 2026-08-12 · Audited net sales as reported in Amazon's 10-K note on disaggregated revenue. The 'Subscription services' line includes Prime membership fees and other non-AWS digital subscriptions. It is not a count of Prime members, which Amazon has not published since 2021.
Amazon has not published a successor global figure in its annual reports. Later estimates from research firms are not Amazon's numbers and are not used as facts here.
Amazon.com, Inc. public disclosures, as reported in contemporaneous coverage of the 2021 figure
Software had its own conversion event eight years after Prime launched. On May 6, 2013, Adobe said it would not release another perpetual Creative Suite. Future versions of Photoshop, InDesign, and the rest would be Creative Cloud only. Scott Morris, then senior director of product marketing for Creative Cloud, told CNET the company had 'no current plans to release another perpetual release of the CS tools and suites.' Customers who stopped paying would lose the applications and, in many cases, a convenient way to open files saved in Adobe's formats. That is a different kind of lock than free shipping. It is a lock on the work already made.
The financial result is visible in Adobe's own filings. Creative Cloud revenue rose from $10.5 billion in fiscal 2022 to $12.7 billion in fiscal 2024. Total subscription revenue across Adobe reached $20.5 billion in fiscal 2024. A company that once booked a spike of license sales every time it shipped a boxed suite now books a smoother stream. That smoothness is the point. Microsoft moved Office in the same direction with Office 365, later Microsoft 365. The perpetual disc in a jewel case became an account you log into.
Zuora, whose billing platform processes payments for hundreds of subscription businesses, tries to measure the sector as a whole in its Subscription Economy Index. The 2025 edition covers the twelve months ending December 31, 2024. The index is not a census of the US economy. It is a weighted growth measure built from anonymized, system-generated activity on Zuora Billing, plus publicly available data from 17 selected subscription companies, covering more than 600 firms. Older methodology notes describe a one-year rolling window to strip out seasonality, a burn-in period so new tenants do not inflate the index with account migrations, and the removal of the top and bottom 10 percent of constituents as outliers. Zuora also commissioned The Harris Poll to survey 3,087 US adults.
Inside those bounds, the 2025 report said companies in the index grew revenue about 11 percent faster than the S&P 500 over the prior two years, and that unique subscribers rose 25 percent over the same window. Sixty-eight percent of consumers surveyed said they had signed up for a new subscription service for the first time in 2024. Among people who canceled at least one service that year, 47 percent named price increases as the reason. Those figures describe Zuora's customers and a commissioned survey, not every membership in the country. They are still the clearest industry dataset that treats recurring billing as a measurable business, rather than a vibe.
The membership form jumped a category when it attached itself to hardware the customer had already bought. In 2022, BMW's Functions on Demand store in several markets, including the UK, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa, offered to switch on heated front seats for about $18 a month, $180 a year, or $415 for 'unlimited' access. The heating elements were already in the car. BMW was selling a software permission to use them. The Verge reported similar pricing for heated steering wheels. US buyers were largely spared the heated-seat SKU; a company spokesperson later said it never came to the United States.
Customers treated the fee as a second charge for a feature they believed they had purchased with the vehicle. In September 2023, BMW board member for sales and marketing Pieter Nota told Autocar the company was dropping heated-seat and heated-steering-wheel subscriptions and would focus on software-like services instead. Driver-assist packages and similar features remained in some regions as subscriptions. The retreat is as informative as the experiment. A membership around shipping or Photoshop can be defended as an ongoing service. A membership around a coil in a seat cannot, at least not to the person who already paid for the car.
Costco opens as a paid-membership warehouse. The fee is the price of admission to a store, not a substitute for owning the goods you take home. The analog matters because later digital memberships borrowed the language of belonging while changing what the fee actually bought.
The original offer is two-day shipping. Over the next decade Amazon stacks video, music, books, and other perks onto the same fee, turning a logistics pass into a bundle that is harder to leave than shipping alone would be.
Creative Cloud becomes the only way to get current versions of Photoshop and related tools. Software that used to be a boxed product with a one-time license becomes an account that expires when the bill stops.
Several markets are offered monthly, annual, or 'unlimited' unlocks for seat heaters already installed in the car. BMW withdraws the heated-seat and heated-steering-wheel offers in 2023 after backlash, while keeping some software-feature subscriptions.
Amazon 10-K description of Prime; CNET reporting on Adobe's May 2013 announcement; The Verge reporting on BMW's 2022 offer and 2023 withdrawal.
| Question | One-time purchase | Membership |
|---|---|---|
| When does the company's claim on the next dollar end? | At checkout, unless you buy again. | It does not end until you cancel, the term expires, or the company stops the service. |
| What is the customer paying for? | A specific good or a perpetual license, depending on the contract. | Ongoing access, plus whatever new benefits the company later folds into the same fee. |
| What does the company gain besides the first payment? | A completed transaction. Future revenue requires a new sale. | A forecastable stream, a higher expected lifetime value, and a reason to keep adding perks that raise the cost of leaving. |
| Where did this form look legitimate for decades? | Appliances, furniture, boxed software, a DVD. | Gyms, magazines, warehouse clubs, then shipping, then software, then features inside products already paid for. |
The word 'membership' does cultural work that 'subscription' does not. A subscription sounds like a bill. A membership sounds like belonging: Costco, a museum, a frequent-flyer club. Prime's name is doing that work. So are the credit-card 'membership rewards' programs that predate it. Once the fee is framed as joining rather than renting, adding video to a shipping pass, or adding cloud storage to a software seat, feels like generosity instead of a new product. The customer is not wrong to use the benefits. The company is not wrong to want a smoother revenue line. The mismatch is that many of the new memberships are attached to things that used to be sold as finished goods, and the language of joining disguises a change in when the commercial relationship is allowed to end.
Regulators have treated the other half of that change, how hard it is to leave, as a consumer-protection problem. The FTC's 2024 Click to Cancel amendment to the Negative Option Rule would have required cancellation to be at least as easy as signup. A federal appeals court vacated that rule in 2025 on procedural grounds, and the FTC later reopened the process. That fight is about billing friction. It is not the reason memberships multiplied. Memberships multiplied because a prepaid relationship is worth more, per customer, than a completed sale, and because Prime and Creative Cloud showed two industries how to install that relationship at national scale. Heated seats were the moment the same logic was applied to a coil you could see, and the public rejected it. The quieter memberships, the ones wrapped around shipping, software, and media, stayed.
Prime showed that a prepaid fee around an ordinary purchase (shipping) could be stuffed with more benefits until canceling felt like leaving a club, not dropping a shipping rate.
Adobe's 2013 cutover showed that software companies could replace a one-time license with an account, and that the resulting revenue line would be large enough to justify the customer anger.
The membership form fails in public when it is applied to hardware already in the product, as BMW learned with heated seats. It holds when the ongoing service is at least arguable: updates, catalogs, logistics, cloud storage.
Related, but not the same. Recurring billing is the payment mechanism. Membership is the cultural wrapper: a club fee, a bundle of benefits, a sense that you have joined something. This piece is about why that wrapper got attached to ordinary purchases. The legal fight over cancellation (click-to-cancel, negative-option rules) is the billing half of the same decade.
Some memberships are convenient. Prime shipping is a real service. Creative Cloud delivers updates. Convenience is not the same as a request that razors, seat heaters, and fonts all become clubs. Zuora's own survey found that among people who canceled in 2024, price increases were the top reason, which is not the behavior of a market that feels undercharged for belonging.
No. A membership is a contract you can end, subject to the term you agreed to. The practical problem is inventory: many households now hold several memberships that were easy to start and slower to find. That is a record-keeping problem, not a legal transformation of the goods in your closet.
Sources and further reading
Audited net sales for 'Subscription services' of $35.218 billion (2022), $40.209 billion (2023), and $44.374 billion (2024). The line includes Prime membership fees and other non-AWS digital subscriptions. Amazon describes Prime as a membership program with an evolving suite of benefits treated as a single stand-ready obligation.
April 15, 2025 press release for the 2025 SEI. Methodology: anonymized, aggregated, system-generated activity on Zuora Billing plus publicly available data from 17 selected subscription companies, covering more than 600 firms; consumer figures from a Zuora-commissioned Harris Poll of 3,087 US adults. Key figures: 11 percent faster revenue growth than the S&P 500 over two years; 25 percent increase in unique subscribers; 68 percent of consumers subscribed to a new service for the first time in 2024; 47 percent of cancelers cited price increases.
May 2013 announcement that Adobe would not release another perpetual Creative Suite and would focus solely on Creative Cloud subscriptions.
Creative Cloud revenue $10.459 billion (2022), $11.517 billion (2023), $12.682 billion (2024). Total subscription revenue $16.388 billion, $18.284 billion, and $20.521 billion in those years.
Documents BMW Functions on Demand pricing for heated seats in several markets (about $18 a month, $180 a year, $415 unlimited) and notes the hardware was already installed.
September 2023: BMW board member Pieter Nota said the company was dropping heated-seat and heated-steering-wheel subscriptions after customer backlash, while keeping some software-feature subscriptions.
October 2024 final Negative Option Rule requiring cancellation to be at least as easy as signup. Later vacated on procedural grounds in 2025; cited here as evidence that regulators treated memberships as a billing-friction problem, not as proof of the current legal status.
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Recurring billing used to be reserved for magazines and gym memberships. Now it is the default checkout option for software, razors, and even cars, and the reason is not consumer preference, it is a decade of favorable investor math meeting deliberately hard-to-leave signup flows.
Culture / Consumer Culture / 9 min
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