These days, everything seems to be moving toward a subscriber model rather than outright ownership. From endless streaming to coffee, printer ink, and even gaming mice, it seems like it's in the best interest of companies to put pennies in your bank account instead of eating up the bulk of it when you make a big purchase.

NZXT's Flex subscription program allows you to rent the most hallowed of things, a gaming PC with good specs out there, in exchange for tasty monthly installment payments (via The Verge) According to NZXT's newly announced specs, $59 per month (plus $50 for setup and shipping), you can become the owner of Player: One Core i5 14400F-powered gaming PC with RTX 4060 handling graphics.

Important specs such as RAM size and speed and SSDs are missing from the new spec sheet, but they amount to $708 per year (excluding additional fees) for a system that should actually be able to handle the latest games quite well.

Of course, these specs are probably included to make a functional machine, but they are very important in gauging the potential performance of the next PC you buy.

The higher up the spec sheet you go, the more quickly things scale up.Player: Two models with AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 4070 Super. Both are great mid-range components, but at $119 per month, that comes to $1,428 per year (again, including fees).

At the top of the list is Player: a system with an Intel Core i7 13700KF and RTX 4070 Ti Super, again with unknown RAM and SSD specs. Frankly, you should not pay this much for a gaming machine with these specs.

Not that these components are bad. In fact, they are solid choices for an excellent gaming PC. However, it is a bit disappointing when we often see machines with the more powerful RTX 4080 Super for less money. [This subscription system is for people who are struggling to save up the big bucks needed for a good machine, and NZXT, of course, expects to make some money from this arrangement. Furthermore, NZXT expects only monthly payments that can be cancelled at any time at will, along with 24/7 customer support, free replacement if something goes wrong with the machine, and a guarantee of hardware upgrades every two years.

However, looking at the RTX 4070 Ti Super machine above, if you kept the PC for two years expecting an upgrade, you would have spent $4,056. That's about $1,000 more than you would have paid upfront for a discounted RTX 4090 rig. And that system is not only much, much more powerful than Player, it is reliable: not only is this system much more powerful than Player: 3, but it will take more than two years before it approaches what can be called "slow."

After all, I wouldn't recommend saving cash and going with a rental option rather than buying something from our cheap gaming PC guide. There, you can find a comparable machine for less than what you'd pay for a year on these plans, or a more powerful machine for the same amount, and you won't be draining your bank account every month. You only have to make one big purchase.

Moreover, if you choose well, you can get an upgradeable platform for some time to come for much less than what you would pay in the next few years under such a subscription model.