9 ms·

This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t

by jwie 4y ago

This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel. But, to nobody’s surprise, the MBAs don’t like options where the user doesn’t give away money by accident. Auto renew is one of those things that should be illegal to default users into.

brigandish 4y ago
I'm currently subscribed to something for a year because of auto renew. The subscription is something useful but was going to use a competitor but once I'd paid it they made it so painful to back out I let it go, turned off auto renew properly, and will never use them again once this one lapses.
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  What's the service, if you don't mind saying? I'd like to avoid them if I can help it.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    I'd tell you if it was in person, sorry. Just watch out for those settings! I wonder if there's a service that handles this kind of thing, it would be worth a subscription.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  How do things play out if you call your credit card company and say, "Please don't allow any more charges from this vendor. I'm trying to cancel but they're making it hard."?
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    I wish I could cancel a credit card recurring payment as easily as a standing order or direct debit. But guess what - it's in the interests of the business and the credit card company for me to keep paying
    - eganist 4y ago
      It's even more in the interests of the credit card company to retain your long term business. That's why chargebacks are so frequently abused (and accepted by card issuers).
    - mywacaday 4y ago
      setup a virtual temp card number with revolut/paypal etc, change the card on the account then cancel the card.
      - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
        >>> I wish I could ... as easily as ... ;-) Thank you - that is actually a "solution" i will looking to it
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    Semi-related: If you don't want to go through the process of trying to work with your bank to refuse auto-renewal, there are services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards. You allot a specific amount of money to one of their cards, then use that to sign up with. It also claims to help keep your accounts a bit more safe, since if that data gets leaked, it's not your actual card number, but it's really more of centralizing the risk on Privacy's servers instead at 10 different vendors.
    - valarauko 4y ago
      > services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards. Is there an option to create virtual "credit" cards on Privacy? I only can make debit cards.
      - registeredcorn 4y ago
        Ah, sorry I was using the terms interchangeably. I think it's actually a debit setup, kind of like a gift card? I've never actually used the service, just heard some reviews about it.
        valarauko 4y ago
        Yes, you hook up your bank account to Privacy and can create debit cards. You can set them up with spending limits, and can lock them to only work with the first merchant its used with for recurring expenses (if you want). You also have the option to create one time use cards as well. For what its worth, it works well, but it seems like some merchants block Privacy cards - in my case, to buy a Grubhub gift card.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    I canceled a credit card over a un-cancellable MS Office subscription. MS, all of a sudden, came back to me. After two months or so, they forgot about it and it had no impact on the other subscriptions I had at the time.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    I have used my credit card company to do this, but like I say, it wasn't that I was particularly unhappy with their service, just wanted to use a competitor (grass looked greener). Ironically, the auto renew was the first real problem I'd had.
    - InitialLastName 4y ago
      > it wasn't that I was particularly unhappy with their service "The service is prohibitively difficult to cancel" is a perfectly sensible justification for being unhappy with the service.
bendergarcia 4y ago
The internet is full of these dark patterns. It really should be illegal to use tricky language to get people to opt into things they’re not really interested in. In this case auto renewal but often it’s sharing contact info or tracking without explicit consent.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  If crypto is allowed to exist this would be a drop in the bucket, its not going to get fixed.
vasco 4y ago
Without auto renew half the SaaS tech landscape wouldn't exist. Many tech companies operate primarily a gym without knowing it. Easy to subscribe, hard to remove, and 0 costs to keep up accounts of people that don't use it, that sounds like a gym subscription to me.
- zippergz 4y ago
  Not wrong, though my experience is that most of them _do_ know it. At least the finance people do, if they're paying any attention at all.
- steve_taylor 4y ago
  Auto-renew is fine, as long as the product's billing system has the necessary protections, such as - low-friction cancellation - email users a few days before monthly renewals and twice before annual renewals - ability to remove the payment method altogether - don't require a credit card for a free trial If cancellation takes effect immediately, the service should provide an immediate pro rata refund.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    Credit card companies could really make a difference with helping manage subscription services. For example, they could allow you to decline future charges from certain merchants essentially cancelling your subscription. You wouldn't even have to cancel with the provider, you can cancel with the cc company. Some credit card companies do the opposite! Apple Card will automatically provide merchants with your new card number if you order a card replacement, and you can't do anything about it. It's the reason I am no longer an Apple Card user.
    - llbeansandrice 4y ago
      I do see the flip-side where that's a feature. You get a new card and you have to make sure you migrate over all of your subscriptions and bill-pay to the new cc. Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.
Spoom 4y ago
I'm seeing more companies terminate accounts immediately upon cancellation, especially for free trials. This makes people back out of cancellation while it's on their mind, and then they forget to cancel before the deadline. It's a dark pattern I really wish the industry would stop pushing.
- eganist 4y ago
  Got names? Useful to know and to avoid.
  - irowe 4y ago
    ClassPass is one example I recently ran into. I’ve already bought credits for the month and am planning to cancel my current plan, but if I do I immediately forfeit my (prepaid!) credits.
    - eganist 4y ago
      Interesting. Might as well try charging that one back if you need the money back and they refuse.
- lexapro 4y ago
  The law should take care of dark patterns like this.
  - bendergarcia 4y ago
    Agree one hundred percent!
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Why isn't it already illegal for cancellation to take effect right away for prepaid services without being given a prorated refund? Isn't that basically theft?
- thibautg 4y ago
  Apple is also culprit of this. I activated the free trial for Apple Arcade because an ad for it was prominently shown in the settings app. If you cancel the free trial, they immediately terminate the access. But worse: they did not send an email before charging the first non-free month. When I saw a €4.99 charge on my credit card, I canceled the trial (that I did not even use). I was disappointed about Apple using such dark patterns.
hef19898 4y ago
If you replace MBAs with Growth Hackers I agree fully.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  "Growth hackers" imply they're doing this for the long term, which I don't believe at all. All these strategies do is give the organization a short term bump in exchange for a negative long term reputation and customer loss. I've literally been warned not to sub to the New York Times by random people without prompting when the newspaper was mentioned in passing. Is that "growth hacking?" They've made having a subscription a life choice because cancellation is so painful, and they have so many predatory pricing dark patterns.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    I just cancelled my NYT subscription, took me 5 minutes. Trying to cancel my Wired subscription, non-US subscriber, means I have to wait for the next delivery to use a number on the envelope to identify myself in order to cancel the subscription. Well, be it I guess.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      Wired is the worst. It's literally impossible to cancel online, and they still keep spamming me with "renewal notices" snail mail even after my subscription ended.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I'm already looking forward to it!
    - fomine3 4y ago
      It's funny that NYT has international help line for cancel, but can't just put a unsubscribe button. https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792927-International-contact-info https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792927-Inte...
CoastalCoder 4y ago
At one point I lived in the greater Providence, RI area. I bought an online subscription to a big local paper [0], mainly to help support local journalism. The subscription did give me full access to their articles. But it did nothing to eliminate the crap I really hate: interleaving of "sponsored content" with actual news, irrepressible autoplay videos, etc. The unavoidable, usability-destroying advertising is why I cancelled almost immediately. [0] https://www.providencejournal.com/ https://www.providencejournal.com/
Someone1234 4y ago
The harder a service is to cancel, the more unlikely I am to ever re-subscribe. That's something they need to start studying in business/MBA school. That SOME customer churn reduction strategies directly lead to indefinite loss of customers. To give a specific anecdote: Ooma offers a very interesting service, hassle-free "landline" (VoIP) turn-key phone service, the price is reasonable, and they have multiple offerings to suite many needs. I wanted to use them for a specific project, but cancelling was so toxic (call to cancel, waste my time to cancel, argue to cancel, etc) that after cancelling once instead of re-subing next time like I had PLANNED I went to a competitor. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempts_to_cancel_ooma_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempt... So they lost a customer for life. Verizon lost a customer for life. SiriusXM lost a customer for life. All because cancellation was a PITA. Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Why is business education so bad? I feel like Costco, LEGO, or Ikea need to open a business school or something, just to teach a generation of people who want a business to survive a hundred years and go from one success to another. MBA education in the US feels like a "pump and dump" scheme right now.
- losteric 4y ago
  > Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Isn't that the stereotype? Join to juice some metric, jump ship while everything looks green, leave the mess to someone else
  - techdragon 4y ago
    It’s not just a stereotype it’s often their explicit job description! They get hired or promoted with a performance metric for juicing those metrics either as an expectation of the job or as a requirement for performance incentives and bonus pay… This all of course tends to be set up by fellow MBAs higher up the corporate food chain and since everyone keeps personally profiting no one sees any reason to stop, all the dead and destroyed companies were accidents, bad decisions, acts of god, etc… never due to systemic misunderstanding of business management principles… because that might actually be something the shareholders could sue over, and no one wants that, at a primal subconscious level it’s unthinkable.
pfranz 4y ago
It also shows people just want to pay for a single piece of content--not an ongoing relationship. I want to buy a magazine or two off the newsstand before I sign up for a subscription.
NSMyself 4y ago
I use virtual credit cards with a fixed expiration date precisely to avoid this issue; auto-renewing will never work no matter the shenanigans they throw at you
aliasxneo 4y ago
I use Privacy [1] for this. Create a new card, set max amount to $1, and move on. I always get a chuckle when I get those "Oops, looks like your payment failed" emails. It also serves as a great reminder, because in some cases I actually do renew the service (by modifying the card) if it was providing value. [1]: https://privacy.com https://privacy.com
cmsonger 4y ago
Yep. This is exactly me: > This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel. In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."

by jwie 4y ago

brigandish 4y ago

I'm currently subscribed to something for a year because of auto renew. The subscription is something useful but was going to use a competitor but once I'd paid it they made it so painful to back out I let it go, turned off auto renew properly, and will never use them again once this one lapses.

registeredcorn 4y ago
What's the service, if you don't mind saying? I'd like to avoid them if I can help it.
- brigandish 4y ago
  I'd tell you if it was in person, sorry. Just watch out for those settings! I wonder if there's a service that handles this kind of thing, it would be worth a subscription.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
How do things play out if you call your credit card company and say, "Please don't allow any more charges from this vendor. I'm trying to cancel but they're making it hard."?
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  I wish I could cancel a credit card recurring payment as easily as a standing order or direct debit. But guess what - it's in the interests of the business and the credit card company for me to keep paying
  - eganist 4y ago
    It's even more in the interests of the credit card company to retain your long term business. That's why chargebacks are so frequently abused (and accepted by card issuers).
  - mywacaday 4y ago
    setup a virtual temp card number with revolut/paypal etc, change the card on the account then cancel the card.
    - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      >>> I wish I could ... as easily as ... ;-) Thank you - that is actually a "solution" i will looking to it
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  Semi-related: If you don't want to go through the process of trying to work with your bank to refuse auto-renewal, there are services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards. You allot a specific amount of money to one of their cards, then use that to sign up with. It also claims to help keep your accounts a bit more safe, since if that data gets leaked, it's not your actual card number, but it's really more of centralizing the risk on Privacy's servers instead at 10 different vendors.
  - valarauko 4y ago
    > services like Privacy (privacy.com) that allow you to essentially make "virtual" credit cards. Is there an option to create virtual "credit" cards on Privacy? I only can make debit cards.
    - registeredcorn 4y ago
      Ah, sorry I was using the terms interchangeably. I think it's actually a debit setup, kind of like a gift card? I've never actually used the service, just heard some reviews about it.
      - valarauko 4y ago
        Yes, you hook up your bank account to Privacy and can create debit cards. You can set them up with spending limits, and can lock them to only work with the first merchant its used with for recurring expenses (if you want). You also have the option to create one time use cards as well. For what its worth, it works well, but it seems like some merchants block Privacy cards - in my case, to buy a Grubhub gift card.
- hef19898 4y ago
  I canceled a credit card over a un-cancellable MS Office subscription. MS, all of a sudden, came back to me. After two months or so, they forgot about it and it had no impact on the other subscriptions I had at the time.
- brigandish 4y ago
  I have used my credit card company to do this, but like I say, it wasn't that I was particularly unhappy with their service, just wanted to use a competitor (grass looked greener). Ironically, the auto renew was the first real problem I'd had.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    > it wasn't that I was particularly unhappy with their service "The service is prohibitively difficult to cancel" is a perfectly sensible justification for being unhappy with the service.

bendergarcia 4y ago

The internet is full of these dark patterns. It really should be illegal to use tricky language to get people to opt into things they’re not really interested in. In this case auto renewal but often it’s sharing contact info or tracking without explicit consent.

yomkippur 4y ago
If crypto is allowed to exist this would be a drop in the bucket, its not going to get fixed.

vasco 4y ago

Without auto renew half the SaaS tech landscape wouldn't exist. Many tech companies operate primarily a gym without knowing it. Easy to subscribe, hard to remove, and 0 costs to keep up accounts of people that don't use it, that sounds like a gym subscription to me.

zippergz 4y ago
Not wrong, though my experience is that most of them _do_ know it. At least the finance people do, if they're paying any attention at all.
steve_taylor 4y ago
Auto-renew is fine, as long as the product's billing system has the necessary protections, such as - low-friction cancellation - email users a few days before monthly renewals and twice before annual renewals - ability to remove the payment method altogether - don't require a credit card for a free trial If cancellation takes effect immediately, the service should provide an immediate pro rata refund.
- m348e912 4y ago
  Credit card companies could really make a difference with helping manage subscription services. For example, they could allow you to decline future charges from certain merchants essentially cancelling your subscription. You wouldn't even have to cancel with the provider, you can cancel with the cc company. Some credit card companies do the opposite! Apple Card will automatically provide merchants with your new card number if you order a card replacement, and you can't do anything about it. It's the reason I am no longer an Apple Card user.
  - llbeansandrice 4y ago
    I do see the flip-side where that's a feature. You get a new card and you have to make sure you migrate over all of your subscriptions and bill-pay to the new cc. Would be nice for Apple (or someone) to build more features around that so it's easy to see recurring charges and bills automatically.

Spoom 4y ago

I'm seeing more companies terminate accounts immediately upon cancellation, especially for free trials. This makes people back out of cancellation while it's on their mind, and then they forget to cancel before the deadline. It's a dark pattern I really wish the industry would stop pushing.

eganist 4y ago
Got names? Useful to know and to avoid.
- irowe 4y ago
  ClassPass is one example I recently ran into. I’ve already bought credits for the month and am planning to cancel my current plan, but if I do I immediately forfeit my (prepaid!) credits.
  - eganist 4y ago
    Interesting. Might as well try charging that one back if you need the money back and they refuse.
lexapro 4y ago
The law should take care of dark patterns like this.
- bendergarcia 4y ago
  Agree one hundred percent!
josephcsible 4y ago
Why isn't it already illegal for cancellation to take effect right away for prepaid services without being given a prorated refund? Isn't that basically theft?
thibautg 4y ago
Apple is also culprit of this. I activated the free trial for Apple Arcade because an ad for it was prominently shown in the settings app. If you cancel the free trial, they immediately terminate the access. But worse: they did not send an email before charging the first non-free month. When I saw a €4.99 charge on my credit card, I canceled the trial (that I did not even use). I was disappointed about Apple using such dark patterns.

hef19898 4y ago

If you replace MBAs with Growth Hackers I agree fully.

Someone1234 4y ago
"Growth hackers" imply they're doing this for the long term, which I don't believe at all. All these strategies do is give the organization a short term bump in exchange for a negative long term reputation and customer loss. I've literally been warned not to sub to the New York Times by random people without prompting when the newspaper was mentioned in passing. Is that "growth hacking?" They've made having a subscription a life choice because cancellation is so painful, and they have so many predatory pricing dark patterns.
- hef19898 4y ago
  I just cancelled my NYT subscription, took me 5 minutes. Trying to cancel my Wired subscription, non-US subscriber, means I have to wait for the next delivery to use a number on the envelope to identify myself in order to cancel the subscription. Well, be it I guess.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Wired is the worst. It's literally impossible to cancel online, and they still keep spamming me with "renewal notices" snail mail even after my subscription ended.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I'm already looking forward to it!
  - fomine3 4y ago
    It's funny that NYT has international help line for cancel, but can't just put a unsubscribe button. https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792927-International-contact-info https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014792927-Inte...

CoastalCoder 4y ago

At one point I lived in the greater Providence, RI area. I bought an online subscription to a big local paper [0], mainly to help support local journalism. The subscription did give me full access to their articles. But it did nothing to eliminate the crap I really hate: interleaving of "sponsored content" with actual news, irrepressible autoplay videos, etc. The unavoidable, usability-destroying advertising is why I cancelled almost immediately. [0] https://www.providencejournal.com/ https://www.providencejournal.com/

Someone1234 4y ago

The harder a service is to cancel, the more unlikely I am to ever re-subscribe. That's something they need to start studying in business/MBA school. That SOME customer churn reduction strategies directly lead to indefinite loss of customers. To give a specific anecdote: Ooma offers a very interesting service, hassle-free "landline" (VoIP) turn-key phone service, the price is reasonable, and they have multiple offerings to suite many needs. I wanted to use them for a specific project, but cancelling was so toxic (call to cancel, waste my time to cancel, argue to cancel, etc) that after cancelling once instead of re-subing next time like I had PLANNED I went to a competitor. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempts_to_cancel_ooma_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ooma/comments/7he9zh/my_two_attempt... So they lost a customer for life. Verizon lost a customer for life. SiriusXM lost a customer for life. All because cancellation was a PITA. Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Why is business education so bad? I feel like Costco, LEGO, or Ikea need to open a business school or something, just to teach a generation of people who want a business to survive a hundred years and go from one success to another. MBA education in the US feels like a "pump and dump" scheme right now.

losteric 4y ago
> Why do MBAs keep pushing this? Are they TRYING to exchange short term retention for long term viability? Isn't that the stereotype? Join to juice some metric, jump ship while everything looks green, leave the mess to someone else
- techdragon 4y ago
  It’s not just a stereotype it’s often their explicit job description! They get hired or promoted with a performance metric for juicing those metrics either as an expectation of the job or as a requirement for performance incentives and bonus pay… This all of course tends to be set up by fellow MBAs higher up the corporate food chain and since everyone keeps personally profiting no one sees any reason to stop, all the dead and destroyed companies were accidents, bad decisions, acts of god, etc… never due to systemic misunderstanding of business management principles… because that might actually be something the shareholders could sue over, and no one wants that, at a primal subconscious level it’s unthinkable.

pfranz 4y ago

It also shows people just want to pay for a single piece of content--not an ongoing relationship. I want to buy a magazine or two off the newsstand before I sign up for a subscription.

NSMyself 4y ago

I use virtual credit cards with a fixed expiration date precisely to avoid this issue; auto-renewing will never work no matter the shenanigans they throw at you

aliasxneo 4y ago

I use Privacy [1] for this. Create a new card, set max amount to $1, and move on. I always get a chuckle when I get those "Oops, looks like your payment failed" emails. It also serves as a great reminder, because in some cases I actually do renew the service (by modifying the card) if it was providing value. [1]: https://privacy.com https://privacy.com

cmsonger 4y ago

Yep. This is exactly me: > This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel. In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."