Yahoo Finance Gift guide: The best subscription services for life’s essential perks
The best gifts may be the ones that keep on giving, because they always manage to stay in the present. One of the easiest ways to do this is also the most literal: a subscription. They also tend not to take up much—if any—space. And thanks to technology, there’s a lot of appealing options to choose from.
Spotify
Music streaming services are pretty ubiquitous at this point, but plenty of people still don’t actually pay for them. Unlike the free version of Spotify, the paid version allows you to download music to your phone to listen without a connection, effectively putting millions of songs in your pocket.
Spotify costs $9.99 a month for individuals, with a student membership for $4.99 a month and family plan for $14.99 a month, and if you’re giving, you can give a gift card. The advantage here, over an outright subscription, is that the recipient can get a three-month trial for 99 cents—so if they do it themselves they can save.
There’s a hack here: If you upgrade your $9.99/month plan to the friends and family plan for $14.99/month, you can give five friends Spotify for just $5.99 a month.
Amazon Prime
Amazon Prime (AMZN) may not be a particularly personal subscription, since it covers such broad ground, from free express shipping to streaming movies and music. But the same things that make it an impersonal gift also make it a very useful one. A year costs $99, or you can give a month-to-month for $10.99.
Netflix
Giving somebody a Netflix (NFLX) subscription probably isn’t that useful, because they scam it off their friends, parents, or children. But giving it is a great way of saying, “it’s time to grow up and pay for your own procrastination tools.”
Hulu
In a similar vein to giving Netflix, except with a focus on mainstream network television—and the entire “Seinfeld series.” That technically has no value, but Hulu had to start somewhere. It’s $7.99 a month for a subscription with ads, $11.99 a month commercial-free, and for an extra $8.99 a month you can add Showtime.
Filmstruck
Hulu used to be the go-to pick for movie buffs, because the venerable Criterion Collection was included. As of November, though, Criterion Collection has said goodbye to Hulu after five years and now has its own streaming service with TCM. Called Filmstruck, it starts at $6.99 a month and has tons of hard-to-find masterpieces. The $10.99-a-month version adds a larger section of the Criterion Collection. There is a $99-a-year version of that too.
Strava
For the aerobic crowd, Strava is the go-to social network and fitness tracker. The premium version offers coaching, live feedback if you’re into monitoring your workouts in real-time, and analysis for improvement and costs $59 a year or $6 a month. Avid cyclists can pair it with Zwift, another subscription service for $10 a month that allows you to turn your bike into a video game so you can ride indoors with a trainer in the winter without getting bored. It’s out for desktop and iOS right now, and VR could be in the future as well.
Coffee
Not all subscriptions have to be relegated to the tech world. With an ever-increasing number of excellent roasters popping up around the country, good coffee can be had anywhere. Blue Bottle and Counter Culture’s subscriptions may be the most well known at around $20 per 12-oz. bag (with shipping), but there’s plenty more to choose from, like Portland, Oregon’s Heart Roasters, which offers a full pound for $23 per bag in a six-bag subscription.
News and magazines
In this age of digital news content, paper news might seem bizarre. But it can be nice to read things outside of a backlit screen. The publication and price will vary based on the recipient, of course, but something like a New Yorker gift subscription costs $69, and includes digital and print versions. Another option: A full year of National Geographic for just $15. Many newspapers also offer paper weekend editions, if you don’t have time to read them in the pulp during the week, that include the digital subscriptions so you don’t have to get caught behind a paywall.
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumerism, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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