Now the toilet has a subscription

I bought a €120 voice recorder that turned out to need a monthly plan. I wrote that story down and thought I had found the floor.

I had not. The floor is a toilet seat.

The seat

Casana makes the Smart Seat. It replaces the seat you already have, and while you sit on it, it reads your blood pressure trend, your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your blood oxygen and your breathing rate. No cuff, no watch, no button. It recognises up to five people in a household and tells them apart. It has FDA clearance for home heart monitoring. As engineering it is genuinely impressive, and I want to be clear about that before I say the rest.

The price is $199, and that includes the seat plus the first year of service. After the first year it renews monthly. Reporting puts that renewal at $19.99 a month, though at least one write-up says $9.99. I could not pin down which, and that ambiguity is itself worth noticing: the part you pay once is printed everywhere, and the part you pay forever is the part nobody can quote back to you.

Take the higher number. Own the seat for four years and the plan has cost you more than twice the hardware.

What you actually bought

You bought a seat. You did not buy the reading.

The sensors sit under you in your own bathroom. The numbers they produce are measurements of your body, taken in your house, by an object you paid for and screwed to your own floor. Then they go to Casana's servers, and come back to you through Casana's app and Casana's web portal. Stop paying and the seat is a seat.

This is the same deal I got from the recorder, and it is worse, for three reasons.

It is fixed to the floor. A gadget that disappoints you goes in a drawer. A toilet seat is installed. The cost of walking away includes a plumbing job.

It is your body. A recorder holds a meeting. This holds a blood pressure trend, which is the kind of data you want continuous and long. The value is in the years of it. The years are exactly what the meter is attached to.

And it is aimed at people who cannot easily leave. The pitch is effortless monitoring for older adults and for the family watching over them. The whole point is that the person being measured does not have to do anything, which also means they are not the person who will notice the renewal, argue about it, or move to something else.

This is not one bad company

Casana did not invent this. Everyone is doing it, and that is the story.

The subscription started on software, where it made a kind of sense. Servers cost money every month, so bill every month. Then it moved to hardware with software in it. Then to hardware where the software was mostly an excuse. Now it is on a seat.

There is no natural stopping point on that road, because the model does not care what the object is. It only cares that the object cannot finish its job alone. Build the useful half of the device somewhere else, keep it there, and anything at all becomes a monthly bill. A car. A printer. A bed. A toilet.

That is what makes this feel out of control rather than merely annoying. It is not that one company got greedy. It is that we have run out of categories that are too dumb, too private, or too bolted down to be rented back to us.

The one thing that decides it

Here is the part that is not a mood. Where a device computes decides whether it can be metered.

If the seat did its arithmetic inside the seat, there would be no monthly cost to pass on, and no lever to pull. The company would have to charge once, because there would be nothing recurring to bill for. The subscription is not a pricing decision that happens after the engineering. It is the engineering.

I want to be fair here, because this is the strongest possible case for the other side. Casana has clinical validation to maintain, models that improve, and a regulatory position that a firmware blob on a seat makes harder. A server is the easy way to hold all of that. I am not claiming they are cynical. I am claiming that the easy way has a bill attached, and once the bill exists it never gets smaller.

Someone will build a seat that does this locally. When they do, it will cost more up front and nothing after, and it will still be working in 2040.

Why I keep writing this down

yapyap records a conversation, writes the transcript, works out who spoke, and drafts the write-up. All of it happens on the computer you already own. €69, once.

That price is not generosity. It is the only price the architecture permits. A new customer costs me nothing to serve, because their machine does the work, so I have no monthly cost to pass on and no honest reason to bill you again. The refusals that follow from it are written out in full, including the one that matters most here: no server of mine holding your recordings.

Run out of money, lose interest, get hit by a bus. Your copy keeps working.

You should not have to keep paying a stranger for permission to read your own life back to yourself. Not your meetings. Not your heartbeat.