Would you pay a $10 subscription every month for a pair of high-end headphones?

Headphones can be expensive. High-quality headphones can be really expensive. If you really wanted a nice set, would you be willing to pay a monthly fee for a rental service on a pair?

That's exactly what Nura is offering. They're an Australian company that's developed a pretty snazzy pair of headphones, and they apparently offer a subscription service to get them into your hands to play with.

Hardware subscription

To be fair, these are some really nice headphones. The Nuraphone is a customized set of headphones that are fine-tuned specifically for you thanks to some impressive learning with the companion app. They feature active noise cancelation, they have a unique design that combines in-ear buds with over-ear cups, and they've won tons of awards. They're $399, too, so not cheap at all.

So the NuraNow subscription gives you an easier way to slide into a pair of those headphones. You can pay $100 upfront, then $10 per month, $15 upfront and $15 per month, or $0 upfront and $18 per month for the headphones. You can't keep the headphones if you cancel, and Nura will disable them if you stop paying, and you're not paying it off, so it's not a rent-to-own program. But they do offer a replacement once every two years if you break or lose them, and they'll send you a new device every 24 months and you can keep the old device, so long as you keep paying.

There are some clear cons to this, like having active DRM on headphones and continually paying for some hardware that you never actually own. But they're also probably the nicest headphones that many of us will ever own, and for $10 to $20 per month, it's not that bad of a price to always have a new, easily replaceable pair if you're really into audio. Subscription creep is a concern, sure, but that's not unique to NuraNow.

Would you pay a monthly fee for some nice headphones, or is this a laughable idea that I should've never even mentioned?

Check it out: Nura