Silicon Valley has been subsidizing millennials' lifestyles for most of our adult lives. We'll still end up poorer.

• There's a reason why in the 2010s everything from Ubers to Netflix subscriptions felt oddly cheap.
• It's down to a "millennial lifestyle subsidy" — startups made a loss to lure in customers.
• Now alternatives are gone and prices are up — so we'll still end up poorer.

There's a reason why the 2010s felt like a great time for young people who wanted their lives phone-orientated and cheap.

We said goodbye to the stale and expensive world of booking hotels, hailing cabs, and only ordering food from restaurants that offered delivery. Instead, we stuffed our home screens full of colorful apps that promised to fix these inefficient systems.

It was so convenient that many of us were willing to overlook the increasingly obvious truth that these apps very much relied on real, underpaid humans working as contract workers rather than fully paid-up employees, and that they undercut independent businesses. The free-market believers thought they saw competition operating as it should. The progressives, perhaps, were a little too willing to compromise their principles for convenience.

And yet, we also knew these companies were not making a profit. The naive assumption was that this was down to these firms reinvesting their revenue into growth. But it looks as though the dysfunctional business model was intentional.

My colleague Adam Rogers reported that this whole counter-intuitive system, which two law professors now argue is illegal, had a clear winner: Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who "get in, get a hefty return on their investment, and get out before the whole scheme collapses." In other words, a ride-hailing app can turn up, kill off traditional taxis with cheap fares and an easy-to-use app, go public for shedloads of cash, then hike up the prices once the competition is dead — a practice known as predatory pricing.

There was little public outcry as this all ostensibly benefited consumers, and temporarily created what the New York Times' Kevin Roose described as a "millennial lifestyle subsidy."

I benefited just like everyone else. But now we'll all be paying up.

The price increases we've all felt in recent years across services like Airbnb, Uber, and Netflix weren't just down to inflation, they marked the final death of this subsidy.

Millennials have been told our whole lives we're the poorest generation. While things may in reality be a little more complicated than that, we're still plagued by disadvantages like prices rising faster than salaries, which means less savings, and little hope of being able to afford homes as nice as our parents'.

It felt like tech slightly alleviated these issues, offering convenient, affordable small luxuries. It turns out even that wasn't real.