I subscribed to Sample Society for the first time this month and decided to cancel Ipsy about the same time. I didn't intentionally swap them, but I looked over my Ipsy bags for the past 10 months and realized that I had only used or was excited about roughly 2 things out of each bag. While $10 isn't a lot of money, the Ipsy cost was just too high. I also noticed that I received 6 products total from BaB or Pop Beauty (3 each) and 50% of my bags contained one of those products. Breaking it down a bit further, I received a total of 50 items from Ipsy and 24 of those items were from 11 different brands. I realize that there are a finite amount of beauty brands out there, but I also felt like I wasn't getting exposed to brands that Ipsy advertised that I would get samples from.
The brands that they claim you could receive (on their initial homepage) are Benefit, Urban Decay, OleHendrikson, NYX, Josie Maran, Buxom, and Sexy Hair. For me, that is mostly true, as I received 1 product each from Benefit, UD, and Buxom and two products each from Sexy Hair and NYX. I also was supposed to get OleHendrikson, but that was was lost. So I received 7 products out of 50 from their advertised brands and that feels a bit deceptive to me.
I realize that I've only received one Sample Society box, so obviously things could go downhill later, but I was impressed that I received two higher end products in my first box (Butter London and Laura Mercier), as well as a somewhat new drugstore product (the L'Oreal, which a google search indicates might have been launched at the beginning of the year). I've already used two products (the BL and L'Oreal), am happy to play around with the Laura Mercier (highlighters are tricky for me) and the hair mask, and plan to use the perfume closer to fall.
I guess I just got tired of being disappointed with Ipsy. I felt like if they were offering anything from BaB, Pop Beauty, or Pixi in a given month, I'd be getting that product and was just tired of the constant brand repeats.