I can't believe I had to read this far down to find someone making this point. Exactly! There's nothing wrong with a subscription-based feature at all. Lots of people would love the ability to price-discriminate ("Do we actually need remote start? Is it worth $8/mo?").

The ethics problem here isn't the subscription at all, it's with the clear and good faith communication of what the product is to which the user is subscribing.

In this particular case, it seems like the Toyota Remote Connect service was sold and marketed as a phone app, but when terminated it also removes the capability of remote starting the car over local radio (probably bluetooth I guess) from the key fob, which no one seems to have known was part of the product in the first place. That's bad, if so.

(But to be fair, a better article would track down some Toyota owners for quotes about what they were told, and maybe a copy of the original license agreement. This coverage from Ars is IMHO a little weak.)