Confessions of a Subscription Addict: Why 'Pay-Per-Lead' is the Sanest Way to Grow in 2025

Hi, my name is Marco, and I’m a recovering subscription addict.

You know the symptoms. It starts small. A project management tool here, a design software there. Soon, you’re looking at your monthly credit card statement and it reads like a novel. A dozen SaaS tools, all happily charging you every month “just in case.”

There’s the one you bought for a single feature that now sits gathering digital dust. There’s the one you signed up for because the annual plan was “20% off,” locking you into a year of payments for a tool you only needed for a six-week project.

It’s not your fault. You’ve been living in a market designed to create this addiction. But it’s 2025, the subscription hangover is real (even Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said it), and it’s time to get sober.

The subscription trap is designed to be inefficient

The standard SaaS subscription model is a brilliant business model… for the vendor. For you, the customer, it’s often a trap.

• It’s about their revenue, not your results. The vendor gets paid on the first of the month whether you log in once or a thousand times. Their primary incentive isn’t to ensure you get daily value; it’s to prevent you from churning. They lock you in, and then they’re done.
• It preys on ‘what if’ syndrome. You buy the “Pro” plan with 10 user seats and 50,000 lead credits because what if you hire more people or run a massive campaign? You rarely do. But you pay for the possibility. It’s like buying an annual pass to an all-you-can-eat buffet when you only have time for an appetizer.
• It’s designed to create ‘shelf-ware’. Because success is measured by monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the incentive is to sell you the biggest package possible, regardless of your actual needs. This leads to expensive software that sits on the digital shelf.

The ‘pay-for-what-you-use’ revolution

There is a better way. A saner way. It’s a model we use for utilities like electricity and water, but it’s revolutionary in the world of sales software.

You only pay for what you actually consume.

The principle is perfect alignment. With a pay-per-lead model, the vendor only makes money when you get a tangible asset: a lead. Our goals are suddenly, beautifully, the same. We are both motivated by you getting a high-quality result.

The benefits are obvious:

• Zero wasted spend. If you have a slow month or go on vacation, your bill is tiny or non-existent. If you have a huge campaign, you can scale up instantly without having to call a sales rep to “upgrade your plan.”
• Ultimate flexibility. It’s the perfect model for testing new markets. You can probe a new country with 100 leads without committing to a $6,000 annual contract. You test, you learn, and you only pay for the experiment itself.
• Budgeting sanity. You are in complete control. It turns a fixed, often-wasted operational cost into a variable, results-driven investment.

This isn’t about being cheap; it’s about being smart

Don’t mistake this for a cost-cutting play for small businesses. This is a strategic financial decision that the sharpest companies are adopting in 2025. It’s about maximizing ROI.

Why pay for a 12-month gym membership when you can pay per visit, ensuring your money is only spent when you’re actually getting stronger?

This philosophy is the entire reason we built Leadlister.ai on a pay-as-you-go model. We felt the pain of subscription addiction ourselves. We believe we should only earn money when we deliver a concrete asset that helps your business grow.

It’s time for your own subscription audit. Look at your monthly software bill and ask the hard question for each line item: “Am I paying for results, or am I just paying to keep a subscription active?”

The subscription model had a good run. But the hangover is kicking in. It’s time to sober up. Stop paying for access and start paying for assets. Your CFO will thank you.

Cheers and happy hunting!

Ps. We are still guilty ourselves as we have some elite users that prefer to have a fixed monthly bill and therefore we also provide custom prices for power users on which our solution is key in their day-to-day business.