By now, it is so ingrained in our behavior, and we are so conditioned, that few of us even seem to notice. We buy a product, pay our money and then have to sign up for the service that allows us to use the product for a fee every month. Whether the fee is 99 cents (paid annually, of course) or significantly more, unless it really offends our sense of value, we pay the money. In fact, if most of you went and looked at how many SaaS services you pay for monthly or annually that allow your devices and hardware to operate at full productivity, you would probably be surprised.

We’ve entered this quiet new era where the subscription line item has replaced the power cord as the thing that actually turns your device on. And we barely blink. The friction is gone; the conditioning is complete. But every so often, someone snaps out of the trance, sticks their head out the window like Peter Finch in Network, and screams: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

I read about one such person in a recent New York Times article, a piece that perfectly captured the absurdity of where we’ve landed: Paying rent on things we already own. The story profiled Paul Wieland, an IT guy whose personal bridge too far came when his garage door opener software provider demanded a subscription to MyQ just to make his garage door work with Apple Home and other standards. That’s right — a subscription. For a garage door. Something that, for most of human history, has functioned perfectly fine with a chain, a motor, and maybe a clicker you clipped on your visor.

Wieland basically said, “Nope. Not today.” Then he went out and invented his own workaround: A little blue device called RATGDO — Rage Against the Garage Door Opener — that bypasses the subscription and reconnects you with the radical idea that the hardware you bought should actually work. Installation is not for the faint of heart; this isn’t exactly plugging in a Roku. But once it’s in, you’re free. And apparently tens of thousands of people felt the same way, because Wieland has sold an awful lot of them.

His story may sound niche, but it’s actually a perfect microcosm of something bigger: A creeping tech malaise where every piece of hardware becomes a hostage to a recurring charge.

And trust me, I’ve felt this one personally.

Take the Oura Ring. My wife and I both have one, and we genuinely like the device. Slick little thing. Tracks your sleep, your readiness, your stress — it’s a mini bio-lab for your finger. But here’s the part that needles me: After paying nearly $400 for the ring itself, we’re expected to shell out an additional six bucks a month to access the data that I generate with my body. My heart rate. My sleep. My recovery. For six dollars a month, the privilege of seeing how tired I am.

If I had a clean, consumer-friendly way to collect that data directly and run my own analysis? I’d switch in a heartbeat. Heck, I might even pull a Wieland and solder something together.

Because the truth is, examples like these are everywhere. The problem isn’t the fee — six dollars isn’t going to break most people. It’s the underlying assumption that the vendor always gets a piece. It’s the idea that hardware isn’t something you own, it’s something you rent access to. Vendors might not say it out loud, but the business model sure does: You bought the object, but the company owns the experience.

And somewhere along the way, we forgot it wasn’t always like this.

There was a time when you bought hardware, it came with the software it needed, and you didn’t have to fork over additional monthly payments to keep it alive. Your data was local. Your device wasn’t phoning home to three cloud endpoints to see if you were paid up. If a device was discontinued, well, it still worked — because everything it needed was already baked in.

But gradually, SaaS became the air we breathed. In the B2B world, SaaS won because it solved real problems — patching, upgrades, scalability, predictable billing, the whole song and dance. And IT teams adopted it enthusiastically. At some point, the consumer world looked over the fence, saw how smoothly it ran, and decided, “Why not us?”

So now your doorbell is SaaS. Your fridge is SaaS. Your car is SaaS. Your kid’s toothbrush probably has a SaaS tier coming any day now.

It’s like rolling your own cigarettes. Sure, some people still do it. It’s cheaper, it’s customizable, and they look cool tapping the tobacco into the paper. But most folks? They want the pre-roll. And the tech companies know it.

But even pre-roll fans revolt eventually — usually when the manufacturer overreaches.

Remember the printer company that bricked printers if you didn’t pay your ink subscription? That’s the kind of thing that pushes people over the edge. “My printer won’t print unless I pay? For ink I already bought?” It’s a business model so nakedly contemptuous it feels like a practical joke.

And that’s where the right-to-repair movement comes roaring in.

The people fighting for the right to repair aren’t fringe radicals; they’re the canaries in the subscription coal mine. They’re the ones saying that devices shouldn’t die because their vendor got bored, pivoted, or decided the support costs weren’t worth it. Think about Google Nest, which has discontinued support for older devices multiple times over the years — effectively turning smart homes into dumb homes overnight.

In the software world, we’ve started seeing alternatives emerge. Companies like HeroDevs are stepping in to maintain “orphaned” open-source software that the original vendors no longer support. Imagine applying that model to hardware ecosystems too — a new class of maintainers who keep abandoned IoT devices alive, secure, and functional long after the manufacturer has moved on.

You might laugh, but Wieland’s RATGDO is basically a one-man HeroDevs for the garage door opener.

And if history tells us anything, where one innovator breaks ground, others follow.

Because here’s the truth: Consumers aren’t anti-subscription. We’re anti–feeling taken advantage of. We don’t mind paying the “vig,” as long as the vig feels reasonable and we get actual value in return. But what people hate — loathe, really — is feeling like there’s a gun to their head. Pay or your device breaks. Pay or your data disappears. Pay or your home stops functioning.

That’s when “SaaS” stops being a service and starts being a shakedown.

So maybe the tide won’t turn all at once. But it will turn — gradually, then suddenly — as enough Wielands show the world that alternatives exist. Not everyone is going to solder a bypass device or reverse-engineer their wearables, but all it takes is a few heroes in blue-cased gadgets to remind us that we do, in fact, have agency.

Shimmy’s take? It’s simple: Consumers want choice. If we decide to pay monthly fees, it should be because we genuinely see the value — not because the manufacturer has our hardware locked behind a velvet rope. RASaaS isn’t an anti-SaaS rebellion. It’s a pro-freedom movement for the subscription era. A reminder that hardware should still come with a little dignity. A little autonomy. A little respect for the fact that we bought the thing.

And if companies forget that? Well, someone like Paul Wieland will be there with a small blue box, a soldering iron, and a growing army of people who refuse to pay rent on their garage door.