A candid look at the hard week inside our studio — the changes, losses, and decisions shaping what comes next.
A lot can happen in a week. At the time when we posted our last newsletter to our subscribers about our new (improved?) blog style and new business beginnings, we were facing a series of blows.
It began with our online office. We pay for a subscription for unlimited use of the essentials, including space. It’s called “The Unlimited” tier. Sounds unlimited, right? But now, our provider has introduced another tier above us – “The Business Tier” – and locked us out of some of the tools we use the most. One of those tools is essential for discussing and figuring out images – which is the core of what we do! When we complained about it, we were just given the up-sell, telling us how good this higher (much more expensive) tier is, and we should consider it. But we simply don’t have the money for that extra tier. We are stretched to the limit financially as it is and already taking a loss every month. Yes, a loss.
We were left in a bit of a strange state of disbelief over it, and had to try and adjust in our minds how we’d work around it and if that was even possible.
At the same time, our distributor, who has gone the way of subscriptions, took away one of the tools we use all the time – our mockups of our products. Unless we pay now every month, and a huge amount of money at that, no more of those wonderful images we have been able to create that we need for the website and for Pinterest.
I was growing suspicious when the number of usages on our free plan started to drop and drop. I wrote to Naomi before this happened and said, “I can feel them starting to close in on us, squeezing us and forcing us to pay for the higher tier.” But I honestly believed they would leave us some free generations of images, and we’d have to get by with our meagre rations. At that time, I had thirty images a month on my free plan. It had gone from ten a day, to thirty a month. I knew I had a few left from my allowance that month, and I went to use them. Not even a week later, after that comment to Naomi, and I went to create a new image for a product I had made and was told that I’d reached my limit. No more. Ever. Ten total images for the lifetime of my “plan”.
When we first joined them, it wasn’t a plan; we were just one of their clients. You either were their client or you weren’t. Just as it has been with businesses for hundreds of years. Soon the tiers came in, and though nothing had changed from our end, we were just their lower-class “free plan”. And because I’m just that lower class, they’ve taken away free mock-up generations entirely, even the ones I had left for the month. I couldn’t believe it. Unless I pay for the very, very pricey next tier, I get nothing. This is on top of watching them, over the two years this subscription model has been in, shave away many, many features that I originally used.
This blow came just days after the blow with our virtual office provider, and it was so discouraging, but again, these weren’t deal-breakers, just heart-breakers. The biggest blow was yet to come.
I am writing this on Saturday, just a day after finding out that our financial provider or our payment gateway, has decided to jump on the subscription bandwagon. Financial provider! In other words, our bank account. With absolutely minimal and very misleading notice, they switched us to a paid plan – no choice. The amount they want for just the very basic tools, just the right to receive and pay out money with our shop, is more than we can afford. (Let’s be clear, this is a financial organisation worth, as of May 2025, $6.2 BILLION, according to their own website. They made their money just fine until now without any subscription tiers.)
You might be thinking: “Find someone else”, but the problem is that we tried many, many financial providers before we found this one company that works for us. It was the only company that let us have a cash flow in that they don’t take seven days to release our funds like all the others. When you have a print-on-demand model, the instant someone buys something, our distributor charges us out of our bank account. If that money isn’t there, the order fails. Yes, the customer has just paid us, but the financial institutions hold on to that payment for seven days, even longer. So how do we pay our distributor instantly to get the order rolling? We need those funds to clear straightaway. The provider we found lets 70% of our funds clear instantly and withholds the other 30% for thirty days. That at least gives us the money to pay our distributor, even if we have to wait for ages for our actual profits. It was better than the alternative of zero funds cleared for a minimum of a week.
Plus, we need a financial provider that lets us have accounts in different currencies without charging us enormous amounts to exchange it. The amount that banks and credit card companies take for exchanging of currencies is criminal. The provider we found was the only one that worked for us, and the only one that would take a chance on us. So we cannot simply move on.
This is crunch time for us. If we don’t start making profits soon, Willow Lane & The Lonely Creative (yes, probably the books too) will close by the end of the year. Years of work and waiting and doing everything we can to keep this business going will have been for naught. We will sadly have to start dismantling all that we have. Yes, it’s that serious. And that heart-breaking.
If you want to know exactly what I think of subscription models and how they hurt people and businesses, you can read about it here.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
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