Picture this. You hear a knock at the door, or maybe just the thud of a package landing on your porch. You already know what it is before you open it. You pull back the flap, lift out a bag, and the smell hits you first. Rich, roasted, earthy, alive. For just a moment, everything slows down. This is not simply a coffee delivery. This is an event.
That sensory moment is exactly why coffee subscription culture has moved from a niche convenience into something much bigger. It has become a lifestyle anchor for millions of people. The ritual of receiving fresh coffee, knowing it came directly from a farm or a roaster who cares about every detail, connects people to something they cannot get from a grocery store shelf. It is the difference between a transaction and a relationship.
Coffee subscription sales grew by 109% in a recent measured period, while the number of sellers offering subscriptions grew by only 25%. That gap tells a clear story. Consumers are not just passively accepting this model. They are actively seeking it out, chasing it, demanding it. The demand is real, and it is driven by people who want better coffee, more control over their mornings, and a genuine connection to the source of what they drink.
In this article, we want to explore all of it. We will look at the numbers behind the coffee subscription boom, the psychology of why monthly deliveries feel so satisfying, the science of freshness that makes farm-direct subscriptions superior, the growing gifting culture around coffee, the wellness lifestyle that subscriptions tap into, and the honest framework you need to evaluate any subscription before you commit to it.
We will also share what we do here at Buddha's Cup, our Kona coffee farm in Holualoa, Hawaii. We roast, pack, and ship from origin. We grow mamaki tea on the same land. We believe a subscription should collapse the distance between the farm and your cup completely. If you want to understand what that looks like in practice, our Buddha's Cup coffee subscription is a good place to start.
But first, let us talk about why any of this matters at all.
The Numbers Behind the Love: How Big Coffee Subscription Culture Has Become
It is easy to assume that coffee subscriptions are just a clever marketing trend, a way for companies to lock in recurring revenue. But the data tells a more interesting story. Consumer behavior changed, and the subscription model followed. Understanding the scale of that shift helps explain why so many people are now getting coffee delivered to their doors on a regular schedule, and why that number keeps growing.
A Market That Grew Up Fast
Coffee subscription culture did not emerge overnight. It grew through a series of conditions that converged in a relatively short window of time. The pandemic years pushed enormous numbers of people into home brewing. Coffee shops closed or became inconvenient, and people who had relied on a daily cafe run suddenly needed to replicate that quality at home. Subscriptions were the obvious solution. You could get the same quality, or better, delivered directly to your kitchen.
What happened next is what makes the market interesting. When things opened back up, the subscriptions did not stop. People had developed new habits, new preferences, and new expectations. They had discovered that home-brewed coffee from a quality roaster was better than most of what they had been paying cafe prices for. They had learned to appreciate origin stories, processing methods, roast dates, and tasting notes. The category had educated its own customers.
The global coffee subscription service market is now valued in the billions and continues to grow at a compound annual rate that outpaces the broader specialty coffee sector. What began as basic convenience has diversified into curated selections, reserve lots, competition-winning micro-batches, and farm-direct relationships. The market matured quickly because the consumers inside it matured quickly. If you want to understand what Hawaii-grown coffee offers within this landscape, our page on coffee subscriptions available in Hawaii gives a useful local perspective.
The category is no longer dominated by large roasting companies shipping commodity blends in branded packaging. Small farms, regional roasters, and origin-direct operations have entered the subscription space with offerings that are genuinely different. Consumers are noticing. They are willing to pay more for the right coffee from the right source, and they are willing to commit to a subscription when the trust is there.
The Demand Outpacing the Supply Side
That 109% growth in subscription sales against only 25% growth in sellers is not an accident. It reflects something real about consumer preference. When demand grows more than four times faster than supply, it means people are not just accepting what is available. They are searching for it, recommending it, returning to it, and spending more on it than they ever did before.
What drives that search? Story and specificity. Consumers want to know where their coffee came from, who grew it, how it was processed, and what elevation the trees sit at. They want to taste the place in the cup. They want their money to mean something beyond just keeping themselves caffeinated. Generic subscriptions with vague sourcing cannot hold their attention for long. The products that retain subscribers are the ones that deliver a genuine narrative alongside a genuinely great cup.
This is precisely why regional and origin-specific offerings have become a focus for sophisticated subscribers. Hawaiian coffee, and Kona coffee specifically, represents exactly the kind of specificity that today's subscriber wants. There is a place. There is a story. There is a flavor profile that cannot be replicated anywhere else on Earth. Our Big Island Hawaii gourmet coffee page explores how that distinctiveness translates into an experience worth subscribing to.
The takeaway from this data is not that subscriptions are a growing industry category. It is that consumers are voting with their money for coffee that is worth caring about.
Who Is Actually Subscribing?
The demographics of coffee subscription culture are broader than many assume. Research suggests that female coffee drinkers account for significant spending, with average annual coffee expenditure reaching as high as $2,300 in some demographic segments. That figure spans everything from cafe purchases to home brewing supplies to subscription services, but it signals something important. Coffee is not a minor budget line for the people who love it. It is a priority spend.
What is shifting is where that money goes. Home brewing is capturing a growing share of coffee spending that once went to coffee shops. This is not about frugality. It is about quality and control. When you have a subscription delivering fresh-roasted coffee from a farm you trust, every cup you brew at home competes favorably with most of what you would pay four times as much for in a cafe. The math is obvious. The experience, when done right, is even better.
Different demographics want different things from their subscriptions. Younger subscribers often prioritize discovery, rotating through new origins and experimental processing methods. Older subscribers tend to favor consistency and relationship, returning to the same farm or roaster season after season. Gift-givers are a category unto themselves, using subscriptions to deliver ongoing thoughtfulness rather than a single gesture.
All of these audiences are well served by farm-direct subscriptions. Our Hawaii farm-to-table coffee page explores what it actually means when the farm is also the roaster, and why that matters for every type of subscriber.
The Psychology of the Monthly Ritual: Why Subscriptions Feel So Good
Numbers explain the size of the market. Psychology explains the loyalty. Coffee subscriptions retain customers at rates that most consumer product categories can only envy. That retention is not driven by contract obligations or cancellation friction. It is driven by something far more powerful. People genuinely love getting their coffee this way. Understanding why requires looking honestly at how human beings experience routine, reward, and discovery.
Anticipation as a Feature, Not a Bug
There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from knowing something good is on its way. Behavioral science has documented this extensively. The anticipation of a reward activates many of the same neural pathways as the reward itself. For coffee subscribers, the knowledge that a fresh bag is arriving on a known schedule creates a low-level but consistent sense of positive anticipation. It is something to look forward to without having to think about it too much.
This is not trivial. In daily life, most of what we look forward to requires significant planning or effort. A subscription delivers a small, dependable moment of delight on a schedule you set. The package arrives, you open it, you smell it, you brew it. This sequence becomes a ritual, and rituals carry enormous psychological weight. They anchor days, mark transitions, and provide a sense of order that feels comforting even when nothing else in life does.
Coffee is already a ritual product for most people who love it. The morning cup is not just about caffeine. It is about a moment of quiet, a pause before the day begins, a sensory experience that signals that something good is starting. A subscription amplifies that ritual by adding a layer of periodic renewal. The coffee in the bag is fresh. The choice was deliberate. Someone, somewhere, grew this and thought about you as a person who deserves a great cup.
Pairing great coffee with the flavors of where it came from deepens that ritual even further. Our page on how to enjoy Kona coffee paired with seasonal fruits offers ideas for making your morning ritual something worth genuinely savoring.
The Control Factor: Customization and Cadence
One of the strongest drivers of subscription satisfaction is the feeling of control. Modern coffee subscriptions have learned from early failures in the category, when rigid boxes arriving on fixed schedules frustrated customers who either ran out before the next delivery or ended up drowning in bags they could not get through. The best subscriptions today give you genuine flexibility. You choose how much coffee you receive, how often it arrives, what roast level suits your preference, and what grind works for your brewing method.
Industry data shows that weekly and biweekly delivery cadences represent roughly 70% of subscription preferences. This is not just about convenience. It is about freshness. People who subscribe to quality coffee have learned that freshness matters, and they calibrate their delivery timing to match their actual consumption so they are always brewing coffee within its optimal window. That awareness is itself a form of control. The subscriber is no longer at the mercy of whatever happened to be available at the grocery store. They are running their own coffee program, with the farm doing the logistics.
When subscribers feel like the subscription fits their life rather than demanding something from their life, they stay. Loyalty follows naturally from a good fit. Our Buddha's Cup coffee subscription is built around this principle. We want your delivery to arrive when you need it, in the quantity you will actually use, so every bag gets the attention it deserves.
Discovery as Delight: Exploring New Flavors Without the Guesswork
Human beings have a complicated relationship with novelty. We crave new experiences but feel anxious when those experiences feel risky or overwhelming. Coffee subscriptions solve this tension elegantly. They deliver novelty within a trusted framework. You know the source. You trust the roaster. You have a baseline sense of what to expect in terms of quality. But within that safe container, there is genuine discovery. A different processing method. A new microclimate lot. A seasonal harvest that tastes slightly different from last year's because the rains came at a different time.
This is what makes curated and special-edition subscriptions so compelling. The subscriber is not just buying coffee. They are exploring a world of flavor without having to navigate that world from scratch every time. The roaster or the farm does the curation. The subscriber does the enjoying.
At Buddha's Cup, we sometimes offer access to lots that are not available through regular retail channels. If you are curious about what that looks like, our page on special-edition Kona single estates gives you a sense of the kind of discovery that becomes possible when you have a direct relationship with the farm producing your coffee. Single-estate Kona is not a marketing phrase. It is a specific, traceable, remarkable thing. And subscribing is often the best way to access it.
Freshness Is Not Optional: The Science of Why Timing Matters
Coffee has a shelf life that most consumers significantly underestimate. The beans sitting on a grocery store shelf in a vacuum-sealed bag may look fine. They may even smell acceptable when you open the package. But coffee flavor is a fragile thing. It peaks, holds briefly, and then deteriorates in ways that are scientifically measurable and sensorially obvious. Freshness is not a marketing claim. It is chemistry.
What Happens to Coffee After Roasting
When coffee beans are roasted, a series of complex chemical reactions take place that create hundreds of distinct flavor compounds. Many of those compounds are volatile, meaning they escape from the bean over time. This process begins the moment roasting ends. In the first 24 to 48 hours, freshly roasted beans also release carbon dioxide in a process called degassing. This is normal and necessary. If you brew coffee too soon after roasting, the CO2 interferes with extraction and produces a less balanced cup. If you wait too long, the volatile aromatics have escaped and the oils have oxidized, leaving you with a flat, stale, sometimes bitter result.
The ideal window for brewing most roasted coffee is somewhere between three days and four weeks after roasting, depending on the roast level and the brewing method. Light roasts can hold their complexity a bit longer. Darker roasts tend to fade faster. Either way, the window is narrow compared to the timelines of conventional retail coffee.
When you buy coffee at a grocery store, that bag has already traveled through multiple hands: the farm, the exporter, the importer, the roaster, the distributor, and the retailer. The roast date stamped on the bag is often a legal requirement rather than a freshness signal. By the time you brew that coffee, you may be working with beans that are six weeks, three months, or even older than their optimal window. The coffee is not dangerous. It is just not as good as it could be, and if you have ever tasted truly fresh coffee, you know exactly what has been lost.
Why Delivery Cadence Directly Affects Cup Quality
This is why delivery cadence is not just a logistical preference. It is a quality decision. The 70% of subscribers who prefer weekly or biweekly deliveries are not being impatient. They are being smart. They have figured out how much coffee they drink in a given period and tuned their subscription timing so that a new bag arrives just as the previous one is finishing. They are always brewing coffee that is within its optimal window. They are always, as one framework puts it, "inside the window."
Stockpiling fresh coffee defeats the purpose. A large monthly delivery of three or four pounds may feel economical, but the last bag in that delivery will be significantly older than the first by the time you open it. Smaller, more frequent deliveries preserve freshness from the first cup to the last. This is a detail that matters far more than most coffee marketing suggests, and it is one of the reasons why subscribers who pay attention to their brewing outcomes are almost universally happier than casual shoppers who grab whatever is on sale.
If you are exploring brewing methods that work beautifully with fresh Kona coffee, our page on brewing Kona coffee using immersion methods walks through some approaches that really let freshness shine in the cup.
Farm-Direct Freshness: The Buddha's Cup Difference
At Buddha's Cup, we sit at the beginning of the coffee supply chain, not somewhere in the middle. Our farm is in Holualoa, on the slopes of Hualalai volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. We grow the coffee. We harvest it. We process it. We roast it. And then we ship it. That is four steps. Compare that to the conventional retail path, which typically involves the farm, an exporter, an importer, a roaster, a distributor, a regional warehouse, and finally the retail shelf. Each handoff costs time. Time costs freshness. Freshness costs flavor.
When your subscription coffee ships from Buddha's Cup, you are receiving beans that were roasted by people who also grew them, on a farm that sits at elevation in a microclimate uniquely suited to producing the kind of coffee worth protecting. Holualoa averages around 1,500 to 2,000 feet in elevation. The mornings are cool and clear. The afternoons bring the cloud cover that moderates temperature and provides natural irrigation. The volcanic soil is mineral-rich and exceptionally well-drained. These conditions are not incidental. They are what make Kona coffee taste like Kona coffee, and they are what make freshness worth fighting for.
Our Hawaiian full-circle farming page explains how our approach to growing and processing is designed to protect every element of quality from seed to shipment. A subscription from Buddha's Cup is not just about getting coffee on a schedule. It is about getting coffee that has never been handled by anyone who did not care about it deeply.
Coffee Subscriptions as Gifts: The Trend That Keeps Giving
Gift-giving is one of the most powerful drivers of coffee subscription growth. While personal subscriptions are growing steadily, gift subscriptions are growing even faster in certain segments. And it makes sense when you think about it. A subscription is not just a gift. It is a recurring gesture. It says, "I am thinking about you not just today, but next month, and the month after." That is a meaningfully different kind of thoughtfulness than a one-time purchase.
Why Gift Subscriptions Outperform One-Time Gift Purchases
The appeal of a one-time gift is the moment of opening. The appeal of a gift subscription is every moment that follows. When you give someone a great coffee subscription, you are giving them a morning ritual for weeks or months. You are giving them the anticipation of an upcoming delivery. You are giving them something to talk about with the people in their life who also love coffee. And when the first bag arrives and they brew it and it is extraordinary, they think of you again. The gift keeps working long after the original giving moment has passed.
This dynamic is why gift subscriptions trend strongly around the holidays but maintain sustained growth throughout the year. Birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, housewarming celebrations, graduations, and "just because" moments all create natural opportunities for a coffee gift subscription that keeps delivering value beyond day one.
If you are exploring gift options that connect to Hawaii specifically, our Hawaii gift card for coffee and tea page offers flexible options that let recipients choose their own path into the Buddha's Cup experience. Sometimes giving someone the choice is the best gift of all.
The Corporate Perk Phenomenon
Coffee subscriptions have moved firmly into the corporate world. More than 420,000 offices globally received recurring coffee deliveries via subscription in 2023. That number reflects a genuine shift in how organizations think about employee experience. Coffee is not a minor office amenity anymore. It is a signal of how much a company values the people working there.
This matters especially in the era of remote and hybrid work. Research suggests that more than a third of remote and hybrid employees report decreased satisfaction with the coffee available to them when they do come into the office. When a company sends a coffee subscription box directly to an employee's home, it closes that satisfaction gap in a tangible, memorable way. The employee does not just receive coffee. They receive recognition. They receive a signal that their employer is paying attention to their daily experience.
Corporate gifting of coffee subscriptions also serves client relationships, prospecting campaigns, and brand positioning. A bag of genuine 100% Kona coffee from a Hawaiian farm carries a story and a prestige that a standard gift basket simply cannot replicate. It is specific. It is rare. It is impossible to mistake for a generic gesture. When companies want to give something that actually gets noticed, Hawaiian coffee subscriptions deliver that.
Gifting Hawaiian Coffee: Why Kona Subscriptions Land Differently
Kona coffee is one of the most geographically specific coffee appellations in the world. It can only come from a defined growing district on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is grown in a microclimate that cannot be replicated anywhere else. It has a flavor profile, smooth, bright, medium-bodied with notes that shift subtly from farm to farm, that is instantly recognizable to anyone who has tasted the genuine article. When you give someone a Kona coffee subscription, you are giving them a small, recurring piece of a place that most people dream about visiting.
At Buddha's Cup, we also grow mamaki tea on our farm. Mamaki is a native Hawaiian plant with a long history of traditional use for wellness. Pairing a Kona coffee subscription with a mamaki tea option gives gift recipients a full Hawaiian farm experience in their own home. Morning coffee, afternoon tea, all from the same land, all grown with the same care. It is a gift that tells a complete story.
Our Hawaii monthly tea subscription page has more details on what that companion option looks like. For those who want to send a truly distinctive Hawaiian gift, the combination of Kona coffee and mamaki tea is hard to beat.
Beyond Coffee: When Subscriptions Become a Lifestyle
Coffee subscriptions do not exist in isolation. They sit inside a broader cultural shift toward intentional, story-driven consumption. People are increasingly interested in knowing what they put in their bodies, where it came from, how it was produced, and what values the producer holds. Coffee subscriptions, especially farm-direct ones, are one expression of this shift. But the conversation extends naturally into tea, wellness, sustainable agriculture, and the philosophy of how we relate to the food and drink that shapes our daily lives.
The Rise of the Wellness Subscription
The wellness category has exploded across nearly every consumer product sector. Coffee sits interestingly within this world. For some consumers, coffee is simply a caffeine delivery mechanism. For the subscribers we hear from most often, it is part of a broader daily wellness practice. They care about how they start their morning. They are intentional about what they consume and why. They want products that have a health story, an origin story, and a quality story all at once.
This is where Hawaiian plants like mamaki become genuinely interesting in the context of a subscription. Mamaki is a native Hawaiian nettle that has been used in traditional Hawaiian healing practices for centuries. It contains antioxidants and has been studied for potential benefits related to digestion, blood pressure, and overall vitality. It makes a mild, earthy, caffeine-free tea that is naturally at home as a companion to a morning coffee ritual or as a standalone afternoon drink. We grow mamaki right here on our farm in Holualoa, and it is one of the most distinctive things we offer.
If you are interested in the wellness dimensions of Hawaiian plant medicine, our page on the benefits of drinking hibiscus tea regularly offers a related perspective on how Hawaiian and tropical botanical teas fit into a wellness-oriented daily routine. While hibiscus and mamaki are different plants, the broader context of intentional, plant-based wellness drinking is the same.
Supporting Farmers Through Subscriptions
There is an economic argument for farm-direct subscriptions that does not get made loudly enough. When you subscribe to a farm-direct roaster, your money travels an unusually short distance before reaching the people who grew your coffee. In conventional commodity coffee markets, the farmer typically receives a small fraction of what the consumer eventually pays. The margin gets distributed across multiple intermediaries, each of whom adds time, handling, and cost without adding flavor or story.
Farm-direct subscriptions break that chain. When you subscribe to Buddha's Cup, you are buying from the farm. The economics are direct. That matters for the farm's ability to invest in quality, to pay fair wages to the people who help with the harvest, to maintain the land in a way that is sustainable for future generations, and to stay independent rather than selling to larger commodity buyers who have no interest in quality or story.
Our full-circle farming philosophy is built on this principle. We grow, we process, we roast, we sell. Every step stays on the farm or close to it. The result is coffee that is better for you, better for us, and better for the land. Our Hawaiian full-circle farming page explains this in more detail, including how our farming practices connect to the flavor in your cup. Supporting a subscription is not just a purchasing decision. It is a vote for the kind of agriculture you want to exist in the world.
From Delivery to Destination: Subscriptions That Lead to Farm Visits
Something interesting happens when people subscribe to a farm-direct coffee for long enough. They start to feel a pull toward the place. They have been drinking coffee from this specific piece of land for months. They know the story. They know the elevation, the microclimate, the name of the farm. And eventually, they want to see it with their own eyes.
This is one of our favorite things about running a subscription alongside a working farm that is open to visitors. We hear from people regularly who tell us they booked a trip to Hawaii and scheduled their visit to Buddha's Cup specifically because they had been subscribers. The subscription created a relationship. The farm visit is where it becomes personal and unforgettable.
When guests come to our farm in Holualoa, they can experience the full story of Kona coffee in person. We offer a free farm tour where you walk through the growing areas, learn about our farming practices, and taste what we produce. Our Deluxe Tasting experience goes deeper into the flavor profile and processing side. Manny's Walking Tour is a guided, intimate look at the farm led by someone who knows every tree. And our VIP ATV Tour takes the whole experience up a level, literally, covering more of the farm terrain in a way that gives you a sense of the scale and beauty of what it takes to grow Kona coffee properly.
If you are curious about what a visit actually involves, our page on what happens during a Kona coffee farm tour gives you a full picture. The subscription is the ongoing relationship. The farm tour is where it becomes something you will remember for years.
What Makes a Great Coffee Subscription: An Honest Evaluation Framework
Not all coffee subscriptions are equal. The market has grown fast enough that there are genuinely excellent options alongside plenty of mediocre ones dressed up in attractive packaging. If you are evaluating a subscription, whether ours or someone else's, we think you deserve honest guidance about what to look for and what should give you pause. Good coffee is too important to settle for something that just looks good on paper.
Questions to Ask Before You Subscribe
Start with freshness. Ask specifically about the roast-to-ship window. A quality subscription should be shipping coffee within days of roasting, not weeks. If a company cannot or will not tell you how fresh the coffee is when it leaves their facility, that tells you something important about their priorities.
Ask about customization. Can you choose your grind size? Can you specify roast level? Can you adjust delivery frequency when your consumption patterns change? A good subscription should flex around your life, not force you into a fixed format that may or may not suit you.
Ask about transparency. Where does the coffee come from? Can you trace it to a specific farm, region, or lot? Is the processing method disclosed? Is there a harvest season or vintage associated with the coffee? The more specific and confident a roaster is about these answers, the more seriously they take their product.
Ask about flexibility and exit. Can you pause your subscription if you go on vacation? Can you cancel without penalty? The best subscriptions are built on the confidence that the product is good enough to keep you without trapping you. Our page on which coffee bean variety is used in Kona coffee gives you a sense of the kind of specificity you should expect from any quality coffee operation answering basic questions about what they grow and why.
Red Flags in Coffee Subscriptions
Vague sourcing language is the most reliable red flag. Phrases like "premium blend," "artisan roast," "world-class beans," or "carefully selected origins" without any specific farm, region, or processing information are almost always a sign that the company does not have a meaningful origin story to tell. Marketing language fills the space that facts would occupy if they existed.
Inflexibility is another warning sign. If a subscription locks you into a fixed quantity, frequency, and roast profile with no option to adjust, it is designed around the company's logistics rather than your experience. Good subscriptions are designed around you.
Coffee that ships weeks after roasting is a dealbreaker for anyone who cares about flavor. If a company is warehouse-stocking roasted coffee and shipping it on a retail timeline, the subscription model is not improving the quality of what you receive. It is just automating a purchase that is no fresher than what you would find in a store.
And a specific one for Kona: watch for blended Kona marketed as authentic Kona. Hawaiian law permits coffee labeled "Kona blend" to contain as little as 10% Kona beans. Some sellers rely on this to market the prestige of Kona at commodity prices. The result is a product that tastes nothing like genuine 100% Kona coffee. Our page on whether Kona coffee can be blended and still be labeled Kona explains this in full. If you want real Kona, make sure the label says 100% Kona coffee and that the company can back it up with farm specifics.
What a Farm-Direct Subscription Actually Looks Like
A genuine farm-direct subscription starts with transparency. You know the farm. You know the elevation. You know the growing conditions, the coffee variety, the processing method, and the roast date. You can ask questions and get specific answers from people who were actually there when the coffee was grown and processed.
At Buddha's Cup, our subscription includes 100% Kona coffee, roasted on our farm in Holualoa and shipped with freshness as the first priority. Subscribers can explore our standard offerings or inquire about special-edition and single-estate lots when they become available. Our special-edition Kona single estates page explains how those reserve offerings work and what makes them different even within the Kona category.
This is the direction the subscription market is maturing toward. More choice, more story, more direct trust between the person growing the coffee and the person drinking it. The best subscriptions in any category are the ones that make you feel like a valued participant in something meaningful, not just a recurring credit card charge. That is what we aim to be for every subscriber who chooses to drink Kona coffee from our land.
Kona Coffee Subscriptions From the Source: Why Buddha's Cup
We have covered a lot of ground in this article. Market data, psychology, freshness science, gifting culture, wellness trends, and evaluation frameworks. We want to bring all of it home now, back to Holualoa, back to the land that produces what we ship, and back to the specific reasons why a coffee subscription from Buddha's Cup is different from most of what the subscription market offers.