The sad truth of the rise of capitalism is that more or less everything nowadays seems to be subscription based.

Want to watch TV? Pay a subscription.

Want to listen to music? Pay a subscription.

Want to print something on your own printer? Pay a subscription?

See a vet? Get dental work done? Food delivery? Subscription. Subscription. Subscription.

And all these subscriptions add up, which is why the newly-married couple in this story decided to merge their subscriptions as much as possible.

But adding his new wife to the family Spotify plan left her husband in real hot water with his brother.

Read on to find out why.

AITA for removing my sister-in-law from the family Spotify plan?

I got married a couple of weeks ago, and we’re in the process of merging our finances. This includes going through all of our subscriptions to reduce redundancy and sync our bills.

In doing so, we realized that my husband’s brother’s ex-wife is still on his Family Spotify Plan – and because she is, we can’t add me.

My husband started the family plan about six years ago, for himself and his two older brothers.

It allows him to have four separate accounts in the plan, and the cost per account is lower than paying for them individually.

Let’s see how this arrangement was working out for them.

When the plan was created, each brother got an account, and the last account went to the middle brother’s wife.

The plan is under my husband’s name, so he is the administrator. He gets billed annually and the others reimburse him for their share.

At the time, this made perfect sense. They all saved some money, and the middle brother was the only one with a spouse.

Although my husband and I had been together for about a year at the time, I was about to start grad school so I could still get the student pricing, and thus had no reason to join the plan.

But over time, all of their circumstances have changed.

Now, it makes less sense. I’m out of school, we’re married, and the middle brother got divorced about a year and a half ago.

We can easily afford to keep my separate Spotify, but we also realized that the ex never paid my husband back when the plan renewed this year, so we agreed it made more sense to remove her and add me in order to simplify our subscriptions.

So that’s exactly what my husband did. He deactivated her, joined my Spotify to the plan, and texted his middle brother to let the ex know.

We didn’t text her directly because she became extremely volatile during their divorce, so the brother asked our whole family not to contact her directly so all communication could flow through a specific moderated messaging app that their lawyers recommended.

However, their plan hasn’t worked out as smoothly as they might have hoped.

This has caused a family conflict.

The middle brother is mad at us because he feels like we’re forcing him to have another fight with his ex just so we could save a buck. It’s true that she will definitely be set off by this.

Plus, he feels like she “deserves” to stay on the plan because they were together for a long time (aka, longer than my husband and I).

We can definitely see how it sucks for him to have to reach out to his ex, and inevitably set her off.

And the division didn’t stop there.

On the other hand, the oldest brother agrees with us, that she can’t stay on their family plan forever just to avoid a conflict, and it’s healthier to sever these last ties.

In the end she chose to leave the family since the divorce was her call, so she gave up any family-related benefits, and there are logical reasons for me to join the plan now.

So am I wrong for asking to join my husband’s family Spotify plan, and thereby forcing his brother to have a conflict with his ex?

AITA?

It’s simple. This woman is no longer a part of the family, so there’s absolutely no reason for her to still be part of the family Spotify plan.

Asking the brother to message her is a courteous thing to do, but it’s not entirely necessary, especially since the woman hasn’t paid for the renewal.

Sure it might cause conflict, but it’s the right thing to do. How much longer is the ex-wife going to keep taking advantage of them?

Let’s see what the Reddit community had to say about this.

This person agreed that there was no need to actually tell her.

While others thought the brother was the problem here.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought the situation was out of the couple’s hands, so they should go ahead and remove her.

In the end, the fact that the ex-wife didn’t pay for the annual renewal nullifies her right to use the service.

She’s no longer part of the family, so why would she even want to be part of the family plan. Perhaps this was her reason for not paying.

As the administrator, it’s in this woman’s husband’s remit to remove the ex-wife, and he’s quite within his rights to do so, to add his own wife on.

His brother is simply making a mountain out of a molehill in anticipation of his ex-wife doing the same.

And that’s not their problem.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.