7 ms·

I wouldn't call this generosity. This is the normal conduct of normal honest businesses.

• e-clinton 6y ago
  Normal? What other business does that? I can’t think of one.
  • bumby 6y ago
    The fact that it’s NOT normal to act reasonably should be telling us something. Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?” We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people... Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
  • astura 6y ago
    Banks and credit cards cancel inactive accounts.
    • mikepurvis 6y ago
      My experience with this was having a dormant Chase account with like $100 in it, which they chipped away at, withdrawing the $4/mo fee or whatever, until the balance was at $0, whereupon it was immediately closed. I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
      • CrazyStat 6y ago
        Wells Fargo "accidentally" failed to close my account when I went in person to close it--though they did give me a check for the balance and told me it was closed--and then when I realized six months later it wasn't actually closed, they tried to make me pay them 6 months worth of monthly fees before they would close it.
        • px43 6y ago
          When I closed my Wells Fargo account, they took out all my money, charged me some account closing fee, which over-drafted and fell back to a credit card which now had a balance on it due to the overdraft and they told me they couldn't close my account. I think I ended up paying something like 130 dollars of fees just to close my account, but at that point they'd already screwed me over so many times that I just paid it all and walked out. Terrible, terrible company. Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
          • lostlogin 6y ago
            I closed a bank account in the UK in about 2001. I emptied it at an atm then walked into the bank to close it. The cashier gave me all the cash I’d already taken from the account.
            • aligray 6y ago
              I really hope this is true, always nice to hear about the robbing happening in the opposite direction.
              • lostlogin 6y ago
                I gave the money back when I realised what had happened, which was about 5 minutes later.
            • csomar 6y ago
              Do you mean you got your balance twice?
              • lostlogin 6y ago
                Yes. I gave it back.
            • freetime2 6y ago
              In the US, they would reopen your account without telling you and start charging you fees and/or interest on the amount they overpaid. I know this because it happened to me last year when American Express mistakenly refunded a credit to me twice when closing an account (one check and one bank transfer). I never even cashed the check but apparently that didn’t make a difference to them.
      • meling 6y ago
        This is why I loved Simple Bank so much. No such fees; too bad they are shutting down.
        • ddalex 6y ago
          Perhaps that's why they are shutting down?
          • yurishimo 6y ago
            No, they’re shutting down because their parent bank got bought by a bigger bank who likely wants the tech/team for something else.
          • hkt 6y ago
            I've no experience with the bank named and assume it is in the US, but for what it is worth, in the UK people hardly ever pay for bank accounts. It does appear to be viable, although I'm not sure how it works.
            • OJFord 6y ago
              Revenue from account fees must be peanuts, they make their money lending/investing/etc. deposits, in normal times interest rates are positive, so they might even pay for custom, getting more deposits, giving them more capital to make their money from. Charging for bank accounts in North America is just like commission on retail brokers - everyone else is doing it, so why not? Eventually probably 'fintech startup challenger banks' with the novel idea of not charging will gain too much market share, and the big boys will scrap the fees too in order to compete (and barely feel it).
              • technothrasher 6y ago
                The big US banks each make over $1.5B in overdraft fees yearly. Fees on consumer accounts make up about 3-4% of the big banks annual income. Not as much as they make on consumer interest payments, but those are still some pretty big peanuts. I think they'd feel it if they scrapped fees. https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/22/investing/atm-overdraft-fees-rise/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/22/investing/atm-overdraft-fee... https://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/banks-income-fees.html https://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/banks-income-fees.html
      • stevage 6y ago
        Ha, I had a bank account that I opened for one specific purpose then forgot to close. It was empty. They kept withdrawing account keeping fees, sending it into overdraft. Then they added overdraft fees. When I went to close it, they tried to badger me into paying all the fees first.
      • Closi 6y ago
        I closed an account with Santander and they sent the remaining monies in it to another bank account. Then they accepted a charge on the account from a subscription I had forgotten to move, even though the account was closed, and because my account was then in deficit decided to reactivate my account without letting me know. Then they charged me an overdraft fee and daily penalties, and then eventually sent me a bill with like £120 of charges. I challenged it and had to speak on the phone to people for ages. Eventually they took the charges off as a "one-off gesture of good faith" which annoyed me, because it still implies that it was my mistake and not theirs.
        • colourgarden 6y ago
          Did you close the account manually or via the Switch Guarantee service? https://www.currentaccountswitch.co.uk https://www.currentaccountswitch.co.uk If signed up to the scheme (most are, including Santander), your old bank is responsible for passing on any deposits directly to your new bank account and the new bank is responsible for processing any transactions made using your old details. This carries on for, I believe 12 months. I found the Switch Guarantee service to be excellent and believe it's a significant driver of innovation and competition in UK banking (which is far ahead of many other European countries in my experience). My payees from my old bank were even transferred over to my new one. (Current account = checking account to any non-UK readers.)
          • Closi 6y ago
            Ah, that's good to know for the future - I closed it manually. I wasn't told about this and didn't know about it - mind you it was a few years ago so not sure if this is a newer service.
            • colourgarden 6y ago
              Since 2013 although I don't know if Santander was in it from the start. I'd guess yes.
    • clintonb 6y ago
      That’s part of of most states’ escheatment processes. Inactive bank accounts are typically closed after three years, and funds are given to the state to hold until you claim them.
    • baron816 6y ago
      I’ve had an empty Ally bank account open for at least a decade. Still get statements for it each month. Every time I’ve tried to close it, it’s accumulated $0.01 interest, which I have to transfer out before closing. That transfer takes a few days, so by the time I can close it, I’ve totally forgotten about it, or don’t have the will to go log in.
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        Leave it. If you're in CA (or some other states, but I know for CA) it'll get shut down after 5 years or so and the funds will go through escheatment to the state. Then you can go get them from the state. But you have to remember not to login and ignore all notices from them.
    • lostlogin 6y ago
      They do. I bought a house with a cheque. It was the only cheque I’d ever written and it bounced. The bank had closed the account without telling me. Fun times.
      • growt 6y ago
        So did the bank close an account with a lot of money in it, or did you write a cheque for an empty account?
        • lostlogin 6y ago
          Ive slightly misstated it - they closed the cheque function on the account (although the account is still called a ‘cheque account’ now, 10+ years later). The account was active but no longer had a cheque book associated with it. However I had a physical cheque book. Cheques basically don’t exist here in NZ now.
    • jason0597 6y ago
      You can't compare an inactive bank account or credit card with a monthly subscription.
  • kristianc 6y ago
    If you don’t use Amazon Prime during the trial period (or over the year if you sign up for a year) Amazon auto refund you.
    • eightails 6y ago
      Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.
    • helsinkiandrew 6y ago
      They actually refund rather than just cancel further payments?
      • abenga 6y ago
        I don't know about refunding here, but I love that whenever you cancel Prime, you receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the period you had paid for.
        • helsinkiandrew 6y ago
          That's actually what I meant - that's pretty good
      • kristianc 6y ago
        If you haven't used any Prime features, Amazon will refund you in full https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GTJQ7QZY7QL2HK4Y https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
    • ianbooker 6y ago
      But canceling prime does not make you a non-customer for amazon. People tend to forget that. You can still order, you still have your account and the refund is an incentive to "come back" -- although you never left. Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
  • Silhouette 6y ago
    Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period. Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well. In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently. We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too. And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time. This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
    • Stratoscope 6y ago
      I know you don't want to self-promote yourself needlessly here, but do you mind if I ask the name of your company? With a positive attitude like yours, it seems like something I would want to know about.
      • Silhouette 6y ago
        Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    Exactly. The normal SOP is to require a credit card at the beginning of the free trial period in hopes you will forget about it and allow them to keep charging every month.
  • phlo 6y ago
    SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers: * Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees. * If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy. * When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email. This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
    • Denvercoder9 6y ago
      But please offer the option to autorenew. I don't want to have to spend time renewing all my subscriptions every year. I have my subscriptions for a good reason and see their charges every time -- if I want to cancel I'll do that.
    • tekknik 6y ago
      This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
  • matkoniecz 6y ago
    Beeminder https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-subscriptions-work https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-... https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/ https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/
    • PoignardAzur 6y ago
      I mean, they can afford it. Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
      • dreeves 6y ago
        We don't feel awkward about it! We're leaning into it hard. See https://blog.beeminder.com/focus https://blog.beeminder.com/focus and https://blog.beeminder.com/defail https://blog.beeminder.com/defail But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work. For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you. Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
• ThePadawan 6y ago
  > normal honest Well, which one is it? /j