Because mortgage prices are variable and depends on who you are and your credit worthiness. It cannot apply to homes like you’re suggesting.. obviously.
Yes, I’m aware. But because mortgages can be guesstimated, there are some real estate companies that will sell that way. Real Estate agents know what minimum salary you need to have in order to afford a mortgage for their homes, and make estimations based on that.
That said, when it comes to online products, one could argue that companies are confident you can afford the yearly price, hence why they emphasize the monthly price. Some people can definitely not afford the yearly cost, which is one of the reason I find this practice deceptive. But the primary reason is that it doesn’t correspond to what you’ll be paying in the end.
Why not emphasize the real cost yearly, and put what it comes down to monthly in smaller print? Or why not put both numbers in the same font and size? To me, it’s manipulative.
We’re getting off topic now. Let’s stop.
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I think you are absolutely right and I have been thinking similarly myself; I do think some of the PPs are missing the point somewhat.
I used to work with people who were financially disadvantaged and being poor and living in poverty is not just about how many pounds you do or do not have. There is the obvious disadvantage of not having enough money. People who are living hand to mouth, do not have spare cash to spend on an email service or a VPN or an E2EE storage drive. Their money goes on essential living costs. If they do have a small amount of disposable income, these services will understandably not be at the top of their priority list.
But the wider issue is one of understanding, education and bandwidth. If you are struggling to put food on the table, digging into privacy or even caring about it, is just not at the forefront of your mind. And in my experIence, such people are usually just not coping with poverty, there are other issues at play such as mental health issues, domestic violence, ill health, caring responsibilities, disability etc etc. and it’s usually a list, not just one or two of those. With all that going on who has the bandwidth to add researching and understanding something which is deliberately (imo) made opaque and unclear and difficult to navigate and understand and constantly changing as big tech and government try to fight the online privacy efforts.
Plus many such people are dealing with a lack of education or poor literacy levels or a language barrier. I’ve only recently been switched on to how bad the privacy situation is and started trying to do something about it, and I have found the information to be confusing and contradictory and it’s extremely difficult to navigate and find reliable sources. A lot of information is written in very technical language. Many of the people I used to work with struggled to use their own (usually android) smartphone, many of them didn’t even put passcodes on them, thinking about privacy is not just off their radar, it’s nowhere near it.
I have time and bandwidth and (sort of) the capability of attempting to understand it. But there are many people who don’t. Including the poorest and disadvantaged in society.
So yes, I agree that privacy (if anyone can have it) is the privilege of those with money and time and education at the moment. And this needs to change, privacy should not be a privilege of the wealthy.
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I’m privileged enough to pay for services I use and self-host my own server. But before I started paying, I was able to get far as a free user, and I think it’s possible for everyone depending on your use case. If I had no money to spend on privacy, I would have to cancel Mullvad and use Proton free plan, maybe RiseUp on my phone and I would be using Tor more often.
I use Proton Drive to back-up my files off-site. I would have to cancel my plan and back-up any new files on existing hardware that I have. That would mean backing up to an external drive and handing it to my friends or family or self-host at their place if I can. SimpleLogin would be hard to give-up because I do like their premium features, but the alternative would be to send e-mails from my Sudo e-mail or throwaway Gmail account and use my Bitwarden instance or KeePass.
I also pay for Tasks.org and Notesnook, but I could give up their premium features easily. I won’t be able to support developers through donations or recurring subscriptions on platforms like Patreon or Liberapay. If I couldn’t pay for anything, there are free alternatives I could use and I would have to change my back-up method, but I would say this option would match closely to my current privacy-oriented workflow. While privacy greatly benefits those who are privileged, I believe free users (and even freeloaders) can get very far with privacy too.