Is there a word to describe the situation of being forced into paying for something sophisticated and often expensive when you only need a part of it? An example that comes to mind is that of one of the subscription-based online services that offer dozens of benefits but you only purchase it for one or two of them.
Edit: To give an example of how I want this word to be used in a sentence, suppose that a company sells two models of a widget – let's call them A and B. A customer might need more features than what widget A has, but not nearly as many features as model B has. But because there are no models in between widgets A and B, the customer will be forced to purchase widget B and most of its features will go unused. Ideally, this situation could be described with the word I'm looking for in a sentence like
a customer {maybe word} a more expensive model because {maybe word}.
One of the words that was suggested is "upselling", which is very close to what I'm looking for, but it implies that the seller intentionally withholds a cheaper, simpler item in order to make more profit. I'm looking for a word that doesn't imply any intentions, only states the fact that the purchase was an overkill for the task in a situation where there were no other options.
Best Answer
We often have to buy more than we want due to bundling. There’s a lot of legal and economic literature about its effects, both pro- and anti-competitive. iTunes unbundled music albums, letting people buy just one song off an album. Streaming services have done the same for cable bundles. You might also try “tying” and “coupling”. A razor might be tied to its proprietary razor blades. Cell phone handsets and carriers have historically been fairly tightly coupled, due to different internal radios or whatever, but are increasingly sold “unlocked”.