Maximum Convenience
Convenience comes with trade-offs, most importantly: dependence and inflexibility.
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Allow me to propose for you my patent-pending Amazing Lifestyle System of Maximum Convenience.
The system will do everything you'll ever need, without troubling you over petty decisions and per-item expenses:
Medical care
Transportation
Meals
Stylish clothing
A place to live
Social life
... Everything. If you need it, we provide it.
And the best part? You never have to lift a finger, or fret over tedious matters like scheduling, budgeting, or personal preference. We do it all for you.
Okay, just kidding.
What I've described might be an amazing personal lifestyle service. (Or it might be your local state prison. Hard to tell.)
But one thing's clear: all that convenience comes with diminished flexibility and increased dependence.
Don't like the mattress we've chosen for you?
You could buy your own mattress. But you'll have to put it on your own bed. In your own apartment. Which you'll have to get to with your own car.
Our provided transportation only takes you to our provided accommodations, which only include our provided furnishings.
Is this month's price increase (or change in privacy policy, or decrease in customer service quality) too much for you?
You can easily (one hopes) end your subscription …
Whenever you're ready to scramble to replace every single service for which you've come to depend on us.
And possibly leave behind anything of value that you've been storing with us.
And probably let us quietly retain tons of information about you and your associates.
Here's the thing:
Monolithic subscription services can offer some very attractive convenience.
Everything they offer fits together nicely (for their own convenience as much as for yours).
You don't have to understand how it works under the hood (and they probably won't explain it to you)
or stress over deciding the best way to get something done (because there's only one way).
But they can be very hard to customize for your own needs;
and once you've bought in, leaving them is very difficult, however strongly you may come to dislike their values, pricing, or practices.
I'm not here to tell you that an open-source system like CiviCRM will solve all your problems, because it won't.
It can be pretty inconvenient when it’s time to sort out technical details.
But it does give you both flexibility and independence.
In the long run, that's often worth a lot more than convenience.
All the best,
A.