I guess Spotify and Copilot are okay if all you do is listen to music while writing code, but consider more common lifestyles:
- NYT & other media publications are common subscriptions.
- YouTube can be pretty hard to watch without YouTube premium. Given that it's a wealth of information for fixing your house, learning to cook, getting better at your job, or just pure enjoyment, seems well worth it.
- Netflix and/or {HBO, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+} are hard to beat given how much TV an avg American consumes per day. Yeah it's not great for you and yeah you can do piracy to save money but it's not unreasonable to have at least one of these subscriptions.
- iCloud if you want to back up your phone without plugging it in to your computer (or if you don't have a Mac but you have an iPhone). Google One if you use Google Photos a lot.
- Subscription vitamins, shaving razors, baby {food, diapers, toys}, groceries, ____ <insert other item you use frequently but is a consumable>, etc.
- Some folks support creatives by way of patreon or pay for newsletters by way of substack.
- Amazon prime, costco membership, nest/ring camera, nintendo switch online, other annual subscriptions.
- Web hosting & domain names are also common for YC readers, since you mentioned copilot :)
"We" could be anyone with some combination of subscriptions that bring value to their lives. It's definitely a lot of recurring costs to manage, and many don't do a good job of culling things that once brought them value but haven't lately (e.g. I only canceled my HBO subscription 3-4 months after realizing I wasn't using it).
If a huge percentage of content is only available via subscription, it becomes prohibitively expensive to diversify the content you buy.
The only solution (apart from abandoning the subscription model) is for all subscription services to merge into a small number of media empires that each contain a diversified portfolio. This only serves to exasperate the original problem.