Uh, or just don’t get one? This is a stand-alone product with an unconventional business model. It’s not like they’re forcing it on anyone.
Uh, that’s not really the point? If you’re making a product that aims to promote safety and save lives, then you shouldn’t be able to cancel it at the will of the company. It would be like waking up in the middle of a surgery and the doctor telling you “Hey, looks like your anesthesia subscription expired, so unless you’ve got an extra $20 in your pocket right now, then we’re just going in raw.” If you absolutely NEED the extra money as part of your business model or whatever, then just charge them AFTER the service is used. Don’t just fucking turn the airbag off with no warning because they’re behind on a payment
Nobody really likes the implementation of the insurance model of healthcare, but… You do at least asunderstand the idea behind it, right?
Insurance charges a much lower rate than the actual price, but everyone pays even when they don’t need it. That way the people who aren’t using it cover the people who are. It doesn’t work if you only get charged when you use it.
That’s all this is. You pay a subscription that is much lower than the price of the product. If it gets used, they send you another one.
The cost is fixed, and you don’t have to worry about going without an important piece of safety equipment or incurring further costs after needing to use it.
If you have enough money to buy one directly, nobody is stopping you. This is actually aimed at people who can’t afford that and would not have access to this technology at all otherwise.
I do wonder if the product you paid full price for also has a remote kill switch… Just morbid curiosity, I have no take in this.
Marketing safety equipment subscriptions specifically to people who can’t afford to buy that equipment outright, and then disabling it when they fail to make a payment (because you’re specifically targeting the demographic most likely to miss payments) is a great way to kill poor people, and this individual business should absolutely get the shit they get for doing it
Poor people do have options. Better options, in fact. There are mechanical airbag vests that cost about $700, and don’t use proprietary CO2 carts. If you can afford this subscription for 2 years, you can afford a better vest. Helite has no way of disabling the vests you get from them.
Hot take: if you can afford $400 plus $12 a month, you can afford to save up another $300 for a device that doesn’t use a battery and that the company can’t ever disable
