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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

407 points by hhs 3y ago

bogota 3y ago
This is why pretty much everything i subscribe to is through apple. Walled garden and all that but i subscribe and instantly cancel all but a few things and it makes sure im not throwing money away on services i only use for a week or two
olliej 3y ago
s/forget to cancel/unable to cancel/
marcrosoft 3y ago
Use virtual credit cards and privacy.com. It really helps with peace of mind that you can really have a free trial and not worry about it.
- rwbt 3y ago
  How does one get virtual credit cards? I remember some banks like Discover offered them, but I don't see them anymore.
  - criddell 3y ago
    Apple Card does this: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-virtual-numbers/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-virtual-... It’s not unique to Apple though. I think it’s this standard from EMVCo https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/ https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/
    - guntars 3y ago
      Apple lets you replace your card number with a new one, but it's not quite the same as creating single-use virtual numbers for sketchy businesses.
      - criddell 3y ago
        The EMVCo link is actually more interesting. The payment tokenization scheme means that the merchant never gets your card number (the PAN), they get a token. > EMV Payment Tokenisation enhances transaction security by removing the most valuable data to a fraudster within a transaction, the primary account number (PAN), and replacing it with a unique alternative value, a payment token. > This reduces the value of payments information stolen in the event of a data compromise, as a payment token should not be able to be used beyond the environment in which it was intended. Payment tokens support both face-to-face (F2F) and remote payment transactions. Basically, if Amazon leaks my credit card data, thieves can’t use it because the number is associated with my Amazon account only. That one token can be cancelled and the next time I buy something a new one is issued and I don’t have to replace my credit card just because one merchant leaked my info.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    with capital one they have a browser extension called Eno that remembers which card is for which domain and autofills it.
  - _rs 3y ago
    Citi still offers it
  - dustincoates 3y ago
    Wise offers them: https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/ https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/
  - cwbriscoe 3y ago
    privacy.com
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I was about to post this. The usual HNers with nothing better to do will warn about how you're still liable, they can come after you, yada yada yada. Ignore them. Just give a virtual credit card to any subscription service, and set a credit limit on it. Problem solved. If they try to keep charging your card: too bad, the charges are declined.
- grotorea 3y ago
  Potentially stupid question: if you cancel the virtual credit card, can't the company then send your debt to collections resulting in a bigger headache?
  - bhaney 3y ago
    What debt? Typically when you sign up for a service with a free trial, they charge you before each paid period. You get X days for free as part of the trial, then at the end of the trial they attempt to charge you for the next month of service. When that charge declines, they just don't provide you with the next month of service, and all they've given you is the free trial which incurs no debt. If you're receiving a service at cost but agreeing to pay for it later, then yes they could send you to collections if you refuse to pay it, but that model is only really used for a select few services (some phone plans come to mind). The vast majority of online services are prepay.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  no, this is bad advice . Credit cards are better because the dispute process is more favorable to buyers and longer dispute window. A debit card has worse buyer protection.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    The virtual cards offered by Privacy are credit cards (specifically, charge cards) and feature the normal credit card dispute process.
- UIUC_06 3y ago
  Recent story: I had Duolingo, for some reason I've forgotten. They sent me a "we are about to renew" message. So I went there and cancelled my account, and they even sent me a "sorry to see you go" message. They definitely got it. Then they went and charged my card anyway. But it was declined, because I'd closed the privacy.com virtual card I'd given them. That's why you do this.
neogodless 3y ago
https://archive.is/Kh4Zy https://archive.is/Kh4Zy
mysterydip 3y ago
Forget to? Or involve so many dark patterns it's nearly impossible to?
- ksd482 3y ago
  I think it's both. To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.
  - bonton89 3y ago
    Is it true you can use a fake name (and presumably address I guess) for privacy.com credit cards? I have virtual cards through capital one but they seem much less feature rich.
    - nunez 3y ago
      Yup. you can use any name and address you want. Excellent for increasing online shopping security. (Parent company of the three companies you bought stuff from got big hacked? Who cares; all they're getting from you is fake data.)
  - redrove 3y ago
    US only…
- cratermoon 3y ago
  I was looking for this comment. Sometimes the only way to cancel is to make a telephone call (to a number that may not be easy to find) and wait on hold to talk to a person, who will then do everything they can to convince you to stay. Companies put a lot of effort into making signup frictionless, I don't buy an excuses that say cancelling is intrinsically harder than signup and can't be streamlined.
blueridge 3y ago
I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  I check all my accounts every day.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  No, they don't.
- gumby 3y ago
  I put all my subscriptions on a single credit card (and use it for nothing else) so that it's easy to scan. Otherwise they'd be buried.
- ksd482 3y ago
  Yes, exactly. I am myself guilty of exactly that. My excuse (a really lame one): logging in to my credit card accounts is too much of a friction with 2FA and all that, and then sifting through statements is work. I don't want to do the work. Of course, that's a pathetic excuse, and I tell myself that one of these days I will check my statements but that day never comes. It's quite easy to be lazy in the moment and put this "work" off to tomorrow. As a result, days, weeks and months go by. I now use privacy.com for most subscriptions and one-off trials etc. It at least notifies me via email every time there is a transaction.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Absolutely not. It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail. But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many. The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do that is for budgeting -- reviewing transactions is just a side effect. It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly email. As long as there's a secure email transmission connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.
cooper_j 3y ago
Its so ironic because WSJ is one of those subscriptions...
- capital_guy 3y ago
  and the WSJ is one of those subscription companies that uses dark patterns. When I had WSJ ~2 years ago, there was a separate page for people living in California where you could click to cancel, and everyone else had to jump through hoops. Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1]. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/federal-trade-commission-proposes-rule-provision-making-it-easier-consumers-click-cancel-recurring https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
- anotherevan 3y ago
  I give them points for mentioning that in the second paragraph.
mfwit 3y ago
And when you do try to cancel, you have to chat or call somebody. I'm looking at you SiriusXM.
- b112 3y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I will never try them (buying a new car soon).
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    Dealers get a commission for converting you, keep an eye on the paperwork.
    - b112 3y ago
      Excellent, good point, thanks
  - mikestew 3y ago
    We bought a new car last April. We also had XM radio about fifteen years ago. Much like GP comment, we will never sign up for SiriusXM ever again, so much so that we didn't even bother with the "free" six month subscription with new car purchase...because I don't want to do deal with canceling, or deal with anything to do with SiriusXM. I'll sing a cappella at the top of my lungs before I'll be so desperate as to turn on SiriusXM. That's right, SiriusXM can't even give us their service, that's much they poisoned that water well.
    - natch 3y ago
      That’s how I feel about non-Tesla EVs. Well Rivian is good, other than lack of charging network; I’d never get one due to that gap. But legacy manufacturers have burned their bridges.
- dave78 3y ago
  I had XM (before the Sirius merger) and cancelled it >10 years ago. The process was difficult enough that I would never even remotely consider signing up for them again. If it had been more painless, I may have resubscribed at some point. Instead, they've completely poisoned their brand with me permanently. I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for those - entire industries that I write off because of bad behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions. I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.
massysett 3y ago
"They recognized that getting a new card is one of the rare times you must actively renew your automatically renewing subscriptions, since you have to update the payment information on file with those companies." This isn't true: I've had subscriptions roll over to the new credit card number - and not just for a month or two. Apparently the bank will continue to process them (I'd rather they didn't.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 3y ago
  The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.
  - el_benhameen 3y ago
    I get the concern. At the same time, when my card was stolen last year, it was helpful to not have to update my billing info on 8,000 different vendor websites or risk having an account cancelled. I think tying a credit card to an account number versus an account as an entity is becoming somewhat antiquated.
    - chucksta 3y ago
      It goes both ways, a couple years ago I had to deal with a scammer who the bank kept "helping" with each new card they issued me. It happened like 5 times before it stopped, nothing I could do.
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        You issue a chargeback. It's been a while since I've worked on these systems, but IIRC back in the day you would get a refund and they would be penalized an extra $25 or so on top of it. If they get too many they can loose their merchant account. We always made cancels easy in our system, and if someone issued a chargeback we would ban their email from signing up again.
xnx 3y ago
It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12 month spend by merchant and merchant category. Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I can see past 12 months by category in Bank of America. https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-online-banking-features/spending-budgeting/ https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli... I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    Amex too.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Similarly, it sucks that banks don't allow you to unilaterally stop recurring payments on your credit card. Some companies make cancelling a subscription like getting out of a Saw trap. Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
- brianleb 3y ago
  To chime in with the others, my Chase card offers this service automatically as well. I think most major credit card companies are starting to offer these services because they want a piece of the pie that companies like Intuit (through Mint, now Credit Karma) are grabbing by just siphoning up financial data.
- matwood 3y ago
  CapOne does, along with a quick view of 'recurring charges'. Amex also lets you view by category across custom date ranges, custom tags, etc...
- waynesonfire 3y ago
teeray 3y ago
It’s almost like we need legislation to reign in subscriptions.
commandlinefan 3y ago
Or can't figure out how to cancel.
lucidguppy 3y ago
You can set up alerts for all charges going to your card to your phone.
quartz 3y ago
I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods. After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them. Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill because it was on autopay. Turns out now after 4 years I'm paying more than double the published rate. Called the storage facility and they said the only way around it is to rent a new unit at the new rate and move my things there to start the process all over again.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.
  - bratsche 3y ago
    They're also difficult to cancel. They gave me a student discount for using my .edu email address, but after awhile I realized I wasn't really using it so I tried to cancel. They work really hard to make that difficult to do.
    - quartz 3y ago
      Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if you changed your address to California you could cancel online since IIRC it's a law there. I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel after a trial.
    - zachwdc 3y ago
      When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.
jdofaz 3y ago
I've been reconciling my transactions in GnuCash for 20 years, I've been pretty good at catching charges I don't expect. I also set the credit cards to send me an email for any transaction over $1.
bruceb 3y ago
Alternative headline: People who actively use their subscriptions are being subsided buy those who don't. If you use the gym a lot be grateful people are paying that don't. If they did, the gym would have no room. While bits based subs are not quite the same, still holds that if people who don't need that sub any more cancelled then others would probably pay more.
- daxfohl 3y ago
  IDK if that holds. If pricing is such that people would probably pay more, then the business will raise the price. The fact that they're getting free money from zombie subscriptions doesn't really change things. Though perhaps you could say businesses then actively reduce pricing to keep things just under the zombie radar, but that's even more effed up: it means the pricing strategy is such that zombie accounts are actually the business's goal, not just a side effect.
  - bonton89 3y ago
    I think it does. The amount of effort people will put in and outrage that will ensue is going to scale up with the price of the service. So there is probably a careful identified max here. But they also use the "only $2 for the first 6 months" thing to get you hooked first and then wait for you to become complacent and forget about it.
wolverine876 3y ago
The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and could easily stop it. It should be shame that also falls on them, but somehow we give businesses a pass. No matter how awful or shameful, people say 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil. If you took monthly payment from your elderly neighbor to shovel their walk and it never snowed, it would be shameful to keep taking it - people's opinions of you would change negatively if they heard about it. If you said 'well, they have autopay setup and didn't stop it', you would look even worse!
- bombcar 3y ago
  The way I see it, if they can register if you're using it, then after a year of disuse (or getting close to it) they should send a "we will cancel this for you" type notices. If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Interested in filing public comments on this if the FTC asks for them?
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    This is what Credit Cards do. They're shady AF but have no problem cancelling your card due to inactivity.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  I believe this is implemented in Russia: I did not check that but when I sign up for some streaming service, after some time they start begging me to watch something and then stop charging me. I guess they may only charge on the months when I've showed up. They may resume it immediately when I come back, though. Myself would like to know how that works in detail.
JohnFen 3y ago
One of the reasons why I avoid subscriptions to anything if at all possible is to avoid this. More than a couple and the cost of having to keep track of them exceeds any value of having them.
lostmsu 3y ago
Reminded me to cancel my Disney+ I got for Loki S2 (disappointing)
weinzierl 3y ago
The irony is that Americans are probably spending a lot because they forgot to cancel their WSJ subscription;-) When I canceled mine a couple of years ago I think it could only be done by phone, which already is a hurdle. To be fair to WSJ, it was smooth sailing from there and they did not bother me or try to trick me to renew it, in or after the phone call.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
This sort of thing exists in many areas, not just subscriptions. Starbucks has over $1.5B (something like 17% of its free cash, don't quote me though) in the form of spare change lingering on Starbucks Cards. It fundamentally affects their financials, but is also perceived as just spare change slipping into the couch.
- dangus 3y ago
  Well, it’s still a liability on the balance sheet. But it’s great for cash flow and general accounting flexibility. This is a similar to how airlines are more like banks than airlines these days. They issue credit cards and collect transaction fees, but instead of giving cardholders cash back they give them miles…gift cards for future travel, essentially. If something bad happens financially it’s a great buffer for them. They can always manipulate the value of miles within some level of reason until customers get mad (see: Delta). It’s also great to be a bank when you’re in a capital-intense business. This concept is also how how fast-growing businesses can have cash flow problems. Let’s say I pay my vendors right away, but when I sell my widgets I get paid 30 days later. If I sell 10 widgets the first month, and suddenly sell 1000 widgets the second month, I might look like I’m an incredibly profitable company. But I probably ran out of cash to pay my vendors for the raw materials to build my widgets.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 3y ago
This requires government regulation. Sorry but the free market incentivizes bad behavior in this instance. If it means that the price of a subscription will go up cause they can no longer extract payments from the lazy/forgetful then so be it.
daxfohl 3y ago
Just did this with Xfinity an hour ago. I didn't even _forget_, per se: been trying to cancel online for months. It says they'll call you, then they never do, and _then_ I forget until I see the next billing statement. Finally went into the store this morning, but without any proof of previous attempts on hand, all they could do was cancel as of today. Frankly, they couldn't even give me a paper confirmation, and they say the email confirmation will come in a day or two, so this probably isn't even over yet. I actually did get a screenshot of the most recent attempt, but everyone involved knows I'm probably not going to find it worth my time to fight it. They win.
izzydata 3y ago
Sounds like a multi-million dollar business opportunity for a relatively cheap monthly service that automatically cancels services you don't use.
- wjnc 3y ago
  This is my dream. A company in between me and all kinds of service providers (energy, insurance, internet, mobile, let’s go crazy and add: mortgage, mobility) and just regularly switches me to the best offer while I retain service. They could get probably get away with a 10% fee and still deliver, because they can reverse auction their portfolio and get massively better deals than usually available. They can do KYC and vouch for my credit rating, keep my PII safer while putting my saved money to work in an investment account while bargaining for the lowest costs. Worth billions. We could then use those billions to buy stakes in the firms that give us shitty service to force them to put the customer first.
  - izzydata 3y ago
    Sounds pretty awesome albeit vastly more complicated than what I had imagined. The idea of customers collective bargaining to force competition is neat.
- blamazon 3y ago
  It's not quite the same pitch, but I use privacy.com to set up a unique virtual card for every subscription I sign up for - that way, all in one dashboard and can stop them on demand. I also set the spend limit just above the current price so if there's a price hike it denies the transaction.
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  podcasts advertise this to me all of the time. I think it's called rocketmoney or zenwallet or something along those lines
- Klonoar 3y ago
  You mean the company listed in TFA, that was formerly called TrueBill before Rocket bought them for $1B a few years back? ;P
snarfy 3y ago
And people wonder why I write checks and lick stamps like a boomer.
paxys 3y ago
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it's the government's fault"). This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea applies to so much more – basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary. Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking out for you. You can either endlessly complain about it or build some good habits. 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  People tend to act shocked when I tell them my finance app requires me to enter transactions manually and doesn't magically categorize everything. You spend a third of your life working for that money, surely you spend 5 minutes at most tracking how you spend it.
  - drawnwren 3y ago
    which finance app do you recommend?
    - maleldil 3y ago
      YNAB is pretty good. I like their zero-based budget system.
  - tunesmith 3y ago
    I'm guilty of being averse to this too, even though I intellectually know that if I accept manually entering transactions, then there are so many more options I can choose for tracking finances. As it is, I'm locked into a Banktivity subscription fee... I think part of it is that it is just so hard to centralize all finances through just one bank. The best bank for retirement doesn't support business credit cards; the best credit cards are with completely different companies, etc. Monthly finances are a huge hassle as it is.
jmyeet 3y ago
Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many are willing to blame the victim: the consumer. We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares [1]. I would dearly love to give money to some quality news publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions department should I ever want to cancel. Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance, someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist available. Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same should apply to taking their money. Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to cancel it. All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that quietly gets jacked up over time. You can go through a "cancel dance" to renew that rate every year or so but it's absolutely exhausting to have to deal with this. VPNs do the same thing. $2.99/month introductory price! Wow! Bargain! It just quietly gets jacked up later on. This is what government is for. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
- the_snooze 3y ago
  >Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. My gym managed to find itself in a great little niche by being the complete opposite: they'll call you if you haven't been in for two weeks, then bug you to either start coming in again or pause your membership. The result is a dedicated membership base of regulars who seriously want to be there, which sustains itself on word-of-mouth referrals. Of course, this is a small-time operation and not a national chain like Planet Fitness.
cryptozeus 3y ago
This is why I use copilot or earlier Mint. They are great at detecting these recurring payments
tedchs 3y ago
Fwiw, when I've forgotten to cancel something, I've had success saying something like "I was checking my credit card statement and was surprised I'm still paying for X. I haven't used it at all since Y date. Would it be possible to have a refund, perhaps partial, since then, for $xx?". Basically I make it easy for them to say yes.
yedava 3y ago
Subscriptions should have a time based expiry option. It's trivial to implement from a technology standpoint and not providing that option is an anti-consumer tactic. The fact that all businesses are so anti-consumer is a testament to the dystopian times we live in. Technology is being used to actively harm us.
- standardUser 3y ago
  I am in favor of a LOT of pro-consumer, anti-business regulations, like dramatically expanded food labeling, mandatory event ticket refunds, standardized brake lights and turn signals... the list is a long one. But I still don't think a company should cancel my subscription without my knowledge to protect me from myself. One click cancel? Hell yes. But auto expiration? That's a bridge too far.
anbotero 3y ago
Businesses these days with these dark patterns. I denounce them and immediately cancel anything when they start just fine and suddenly implement something hard to get out of. I hate when their cancelling scheme puts blocks in front of the user so it’s harder and harder to quit. In my country I’ve noticed some have their Cancel Subscription page unavailable, or it says it has cancelled it but you don’t get email or confirmation of anything, and then surprise, another month payment, and then you have to call, and they leave you waiting for hours. I despise this and I denounce them with local regulation authorities, then they get moving, and even then they may still squeeze another month out of you, attribute it to error and just expect you don’t denounce them again because that would be even more time from you. But this is me... I know lots of people who spend at least 6 months before they have the time/energy to actually go through this process so they can cancel. I’d say to hell with them, it gives bad rap to good businesses which let you cancel/pause without too much hassle.
tppiotrowski 3y ago
I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled. Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you never logged in once) I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a service they're not using at all. Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another "dark pattern" of subscriptions.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  Obviously, if Netflix adopted a pay-per-use model, earnings would crater. AOL made so much $ from ppl forgetting to cancel.
- neilv 3y ago
  Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns. I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping option radio buttons, so that's another reason to check that.) (If only Walmart.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, etc. would close the gap to even current Amazon, we'd have better options and less trashiness. Anecdotally seems like Amazon -- either from the top, or from individuals juicing their metrics -- are taking advantage of Amazon's enviable competence and position, and cashing out excess goodwill.)
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    "Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns." I just got myself a month of Prime because of this. And cancelling requires you to go through around 5 screens with buttons "Do you want to cancel?", "Yes, I want to keep Prime" and so on. And the colors of the cancel button are always different. So you have to closely read and understand each button or your cancel attempt will get cancelled.
paulpauper 3y ago
This is why VPN and Squarespace/Wix ads are so pervasive on youtube: lots of ppl forgetting to cancel.
havblue 3y ago
This reminds me of a recent commercial where a father is looking at a phone bill and complains melodramatically that the family is wasting money, only for his wife to condescendingly tell him to switch cell phone plans and show up for dinner. Um, I think people who scan the bills to find services they don't need are on the right track...
smallerfish 3y ago
I'd like to call out ZenBusiness on this one. They allowed an LLC (which to be fair we weren't using actively) to enter a delinquent state, but continued to charge the registered agent fee for 2 additional years until we noticed; each year we'd get a "your XYZ LLC is going to automatically renew" email from them, with no mention of the fact of outstanding annual reports due. After that they had the gall to charge penalty fees to reinstate the account, on top of the state fees. Definitely moving to a competitor at end of year when it comes time to renew again.
nunez 3y ago
I can't wait for services like Privacy to enter the mainstream. It's coming. (I'd like to think that it's coming.) When 90% of your user base is using super-easily-createable disposable credit cards from valid BINs that self-destruct after your free trial's over, the way free trials work will have to change.
- llanowarelves 3y ago
  I liked the one Pennsylvania bill introduced where subscription services have to email you that they're about to charge you again. Throws a wrench into the "was hoping you forgot about it, now ask/argue with customer support on the phone" dark pattern.
nmstoker 3y ago
Isn't this how Michael Dell got going originally too? Newspapers for newlyweds, initially free they'd then keep going with the subscription
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Like wars in the Middle East?
karaterobot 3y ago
> Their average response was $62. When they were given more time to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were still way off. The correct answer was $273. I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked. People are terrible at estimating or keeping track of their subscriptions, myself included. A couple years ago I painstakingly audited all my recurring subscriptions. Painstaking because I had to go through all my bank and credit account statements for a year looking for the services that billed yearly or semi-yearly rather than monthly. I had also drastically underestimated what they cost me, by about a factor of two in my case. I think of myself as being very frugal about this kind of thing, so it was a surprise. But then I was able to save myself almost $1000 a year just by eliminating some unused subscriptions I had sort of forgotten. Not forgotten entirely, but services I sort of failed to think about as costs, because the monthly spend for them individually was so low. But once I thought about them as a yearly cost, and then about the total yearly cost for all these little services, that successfully (and more accurately) reframed the situation. I didn't find unsubscribing or cancelling to be particular onerous. I do use Privacy.com now, which would make it both easier to track and theoretically easier to cancel. Ironically, Privacy.com is a monthly subscription (at the tier I use) but it is definitely worth it. I told people about the $1000 a year "raise" I got by just trimming dead weight. I told them they should do the same exercise—make a spreadsheet, have a column that multiplies the monthly fee by 12, and think about it as a yearly cost instead—and they were all, uniformly, without exception certain that they already knew what they spent, and it wasn't really very much. My advice: do the exercise anyway, it is worth it.
- paxys 3y ago
  Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. If everyone paying into it actually expected to extract their entire money's worth of value the whole industry would collapse.
  - hartator 3y ago
    > restaurant buffets Buffets have monthly subcriptions?
godisdad 3y ago
I’m here for the recommendations for apps to cancel subscriptions
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
Serious lack of empathy in this thread, mostly by a bunch of incredibly wealthy individuals that have their life in order. When a lot of people struggle with certain categories of problems, it's worth considering if those problems could be nerfed in some way rather than telling them just "get good". There's definitely a huge slew of predatory billing techniques and dark patterns to get people to keep paying for services. These patterns should be documented and destroyed. Having more accessible billing methods also makes life better for everyone (maybe except the company). Consider how absurd it is that only from California can you cancel your New York Times subscription online while every other state requires you to call in and deal with a retention agent. Let's not pretend this is in any way reasonable, it's straight up bullshit. Sure personal responsibility is important, but there's no reason we should accept predatory and abusive practices from companies. It just makes reality worse for everyone.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Serious lack of empathy in this thread I think it's something learned, and that is, something taught by the far right ideological movement and others trying to create cultural change. Empathy is outre, it's embarassing. Embracing contempt and cruelty makes people look smart, these days. Empathy is fundamental to human rights, freedom (for others), equality, equity, justice, fairness. It leads to truth. By attacking that fundamental infrastructure (the empathy), you can undermine it all.
zoba 3y ago
I'm very eager for a consumer version of Ramp where I can issue myself a card per-subscription service. Then I can review all the cards I've issued, and turn them off if I no longer want the service. I would immediately sign up if this existed.
jmholla 3y ago
I feel like this might be a good place to share something I learned recently about credit cards: interest accrues daily, not by statement (e.g. monthly). Further, your statement does not accurately reflect what you owe for that billing period. Instead, the interest for that period will be reflected on your next bill. I had errantly figured I could postpone my payments to the due date and not accrue interest, but that is not the case and I ended up with a few hundred dollars more in interest than I expected.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dangus 3y ago
  This is true, but only if you’re not paying your full statement balance each month. If you’re paying your full statement balance then you can wait all the way until the due date since you’ve never accrued any interest in the first place.
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
For anyone trying to avoid this, sign up to Personal Capital (bought out by empower or something), link up ALL your bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Then once a month go in and check every single line item charge and ensure the charge was properly labeled. Now if a companies autocharge is extra sketchy, such as not informing you about auto pay, enabling it automatically, etc, just threaten a chargeback when contacting their support and most the time they'll immediately refund you.
- blakeburch 3y ago
  I would suggest something like [LunchMoney](https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/) instead. Built in budgeting, rules to classify payments, and recurring subscriptions are automatically found and called out. I had a bunch of issues with Personal Capital connections continuously messing up and there's no way to classify and evaluate the purchases.
steveBK123 3y ago
It's useful to periodically cancel a credit card / get a completely new number / etc to break automated billing you have forgotten. I think there's credit cards that offer this as a feature now.
hankchinaski 3y ago
I put most of my non essential subscription spending on virtual debit cards. I rotate the virtual cards frequently so stuff that is low priority gets automatically blocked and churned out.
vvpan 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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MisterBastahrd 3y ago
This was a hidden savior that helped some of the publishing industry delay what was already a precipitous decline. As soon as I became aware of recurring billing through Recurly, I switched all of the products of my employer at the time to a subscription based model. Yes, it takes a bit more work on the part of the customer service agents who deal with angry customers who do not want to be billed anymore, but on the flip side, it's usually many months before people who are not using the service realize that they have continued to be billed.
smeej 3y ago
I was recently appalled to discover how many of my subscriptions auto-updated the expiration date when my card expired. I had hoped to use "ignore it until charges stop going through because jumping through their hoops is ridiculous" to cancel a few pesky subscriptions and it didn't even work! I think this is a "feature" of using Stripe for billing? Or something? I couldn't find anything obvious that they had in common but that.
dcotter 3y ago
I'm surprised literally no one suggested just cancelling the vast majority of your subscription services and cutting ties with unethical companies. The suggestion that poor people need yet more help from the government because they're too dumb, busy, or gullible to know when they're about to get screwed is condescending. The suggestion that the core audience of WSJ and HN needs this is pitiful. Want to watch a movie? Borrow the DVD from your local library. Want to watch it repeatedly? Buy it off Amazon. Want to read a book? Library. Amazon. AbeBooks. Want to get fit? Go for a hike. Do pushups. Buy a barbell and free weights. Here's my personal finance plan: Check your bank account daily. Cancel services you don't need. Don't do 30-day trials. Don't sign up for overdraft "protection" at $40 a pop. Use cash if you can't handle plastic, and don't use credit cards. Just don't borrow money, period, if you're not using it to buy a house. Don't let anyone take money out of your checking account but you. If a company screws you, never do business with them again. Pay up front for a year of service and mark when it renews. Write checks before you give out your card numbers. I know, Stone Age, right? But I like to keep my life simple.
- javajosh 3y ago
  Do 30-day trials and put a reminder in your calendar to cancel with the URL to do so. Make this a habit. Yes, subscriptions are a dark pattern but the minimal amount of effort to avoid being charged in some circumstances (not gyms) seems like a small thing. That said, the world would indeed be a better place if businesses didn't charge you for service they weren't providing. Although you might model these monthly subscriptions as "insurance premiums" to save the 5 minute sign-up time the next time you want to watch something.
  - mportela 3y ago
    What I do is canceling the trial immediately after subscribing for it. Most services will let you finish the trial period and you won't risk forgetting to cancel it and paying for another billing cycle.
- wilde 3y ago
  Ah yes. Why do I need government help managing my subscriptions when I can checks notes literally get the content from the government?
Slow_Hand 3y ago
I'm using a service called Subly that keeps track of all of my recurring payments and puts them into a database that I can view at a glance. It shows me which day of the month it renews, how much, and to which card or account it will be charged. This includes my annual renewal fees as well. It then shows me what my average monthly expenditure is. With this I can see that I'm spending roughly $112/month on subscriptions. The whole thing couldn't be much easier. The service costs $4/month. The irony of that is not lost on me, but the convenience of seeing my recurring monthly charges is worth it for me. https://web.subly.app https://web.subly.app
- olejorgenb 3y ago
  How much does it provider over simply taking the time to add the numbers to a spreadsheet? Does it integrite with bankstatements or automate the prosess in other ways?
  - auggierose 3y ago
    People who use such a service probably don't know what a spread sheet is.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    Exactly my thought. I already review all my credit card and bank statements every month and manually extract important information to my spreadsheet. The once-a-month manual work is to me absolutely worth it to be on top of my personal and household finances.
cwillu 3y ago
I tried to downsize my google plan from 2tb to 100gb. It's now charging me for both plans every month, and my available space toggles every couple weeks (with dire warnings in every app about being at 90% capacity when it's on the 100gb plan). Support says all the things that are already on the support pages and then throw up their hands and say they don't have access to do anything to fix it.
- polymatter 3y ago
  Sounds like time to consider small claims court.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    The thought has crossed my mind, but if I win they can still (algorithmically, no doubt) say “we've decided we no longer want your business”, which would be a bigger deal given how prevalent “sign in with google” is, to say nothing of the various important and/or official things that are mailing to gmail.
baryphonic 3y ago
Ironically, I had a subscription to the print WSJ years ago. I never read it, but canceling was extremely difficult.
anthomtb 3y ago
I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually use but keep creeping up in price. SiriusXM is the worst, I think that one is up nearly 25% in the past couple years. One of those frog-in-boiling-water situations were you don't notice the ~$1/month increase but suddenly the thing is well above your mental marker of what it costs.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I use Copilot (which costs $100/y) and review every transaction across all of our accounts. Gives me a lot of piece of mind. It's very fast to audit because the UI is slick and it has simple name matching rules it uses to categorize. EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.
  - ggrelet 3y ago
    This app is only available in the US. Any other similar app you’d recommend? Maybe one you tried before using copilot?
    - justusthane 3y ago
      This might not be quite the same, but I’ve been using YNAB for years now. I religiously budget and track every dollar spent. It takes me maybe 20-30min/week, and it’s provides so much peace of mind knowing where every dollar is going, and more importantly, knowing what every dollar in my bank account is set aside for. You do need to adopt their zero-based envelope budgeting paradigm though. It’s very opinionated.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    I aggressively track my recurring subscriptions, but I still feel like sometimes my primary credit card balance is rising more rapidly than I can account for. And the data we get on our statements seems purposefully crafted to confuse and bewilder instead of inform. Part of it is the difference between the "balance" and the "available credit", the latter of which includes things like invisible holds and unprocessed payments. The two numbers are never the same, and I have no clear way of tracking the relationship between those two numbers. That's a long way of saying that $100/year might not be such a bad deal to get some genuine visibility about my own spending. Especially since the companies currently providing me the information about my spending are, essentially, my enemies.
ahati 3y ago
Right, income tax is a subscription service to stay in a country. Forced health insurence deduction is another one. They are my biggest subscriptions.
pers0n 3y ago
Meetup is one of them, I’d say about 15% of meetup are dead groups that haven’t done anything for 2yrs or more
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Reminder that you don't have to deal with these exploitative business models if you simply pirate content.
BurningFrog 3y ago
If each American spends $6 on average on something, "Americans are spending billions on it" is true.
thunkshift1 3y ago
Aholes at wsj were themselves guilty of this shit
EasyMark 3y ago
This is why I put stuff on apple pay/paypal subscription. Easy to remember to check a few times a year rather than going through credit card bills.
Fomite 3y ago
I would really like a requirement for a once yearly "Hey, do you remember you're paying for this?" reminder.
matt3210 3y ago
This is the point of subscription models
srinivasan 3y ago
The number is likely larger than the article suggests, because both Visa and Mastercard will share updated payment information to merchants who had recurring charges. The paper treats this as a "possibility" (and uses a small lambda factor to adjust for it) rather than the norm that it is in 2024.
intellix 3y ago
the typical auto renewal scam. Some reason it's common and i'm happy to see it getting some light. I wanted to order some science stuff for my kids for Christmas by ordering them 6 months of packages, one per month. They wouldn't let me only order 6 but I had to order them with a rolling subscription that automatically renewed. I emailed them and said I don't want it to renew automatically, I want 6 and then I will personally decide whether to order more, to which their system didn't even support. They're obviously banking on people forgetting to cancel, which I can't believe is legal. In this case it's not as bad cause they actually deliver a physical product. Once I looked at my bank account and noticed that i'd been paying for ancestry for the past 6 months... WTF! So I logged into my account, canceled it and requested a refund stating that I didn't even know I had it and didn't login once. They told me they don't offer refunds despite me never logging in. You basically sign up to a free trial by placing down a credit card to get access and forget about it. Total scam and I can't wait for it to be illegal.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- madhatter999 3y ago
  Absurdity aside, I set a reminder for any trial end, preferably a couple of days before.
  - redrove 3y ago
    I typically cancel the subscription right after signing up, it’s more practical. 99.9% of services keep your account alive until your trial/paid for period runs out. The other 0.1% I never sign up to.
sakopov 3y ago
I use a service called Privacy [1] to generate virtual card numbers, which I than use with all of my subscriptions. All of the virtual cards are tied to a physical credit card used as the funding source. I get a notification every time a card is charged or a charge is denied (if it's above the set limit or no longer active). This has saved me from fraud where a single-use virtual card # I used to pay for airport parking was used to buy something online and promptly denied and multiple overcharges with random subscriptions. I even started using it for things like gym and utility payments. Highly recommended to keep a tab on subscriptions. [1] https://privacy.com https://privacy.com
- pozol 3y ago
  Were you able to tie it to a credit card? Last time I tried it only let me do a debit card, which was a bummer, since I prefer using credit.
- cwbriscoe 3y ago
  I started using privacy about 6 months ago. It is a great service. I have changed all of my subscriptions over to them and I set a monthly or yearly limit depending on the subscription type.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
MenhirMike 3y ago
One of the many reasons to do household accounting. It's not even about making/keeping a budget, but simply about knowing where your money goes. It's a shame that many solutions are in turn also subscription based, so I don't have any good recommendations (I use YNAB Desktop, which was killed off a few years ago and replaced with a SaaS solution that's always increasing in price). But having insight into how you spend your money is such a powerful tool, it's worth doing even if it means manually entering stuff into a LibreOffice Calc workbook.
- _thisdot 3y ago
  If you use macOS + iPhone, a Shorcuts based approach using Numbers is simple and powerful enough for your budgeting needs. Shortcuts being the simplest way to add a row on to the budget sheet (i.e transaction) from iPhone homescreen or macOS Spotlight. I wrote a small tutorial here: https://rahulkrrrishna.xyz/notes/2023/11/18/simple-budgeting-tool-with-numbers-shortcuts.html https://rahulkrrrishna.xyz/notes/2023/11/18/simple-budgeting...
- maxioatic 3y ago
  Happy to see YNAB mentioned. I actually had no idea they used to have a desktop app! I’m a happy subscriber though and to me its yearly cost is easily made up by how much money I save using it.
petesergeant 3y ago
This is classic price discrimination, and makes the services cheaper for people who are more price sensitive
gnicholas 3y ago
> It’s like when Netflix asks if you’re still watching when you’ve fallen asleep on the couch—except this policy actually saves you money. I assumed this was because they pay for some content on a per-view basis, so they don't want to pay if you're not actually there/awake. That said, I have found the autoplay-next-episode behavior to be strangely inconsistent, even for the same show. Some nights it automatically plays 4 in a row if we do nothing, and other nights it stops after each one. I've tried to figure out if it's based on time (sometimes we watch pretty late), but there seems to be no correlation.
prossercj 3y ago
Whenever I sign up for a streaming service, my first act is to disable autopay. I really think it should be disabled by default, and you can enable if wanted. That would resolve much of this problem. Do all users even know they are signing up for autopay? Many probably do not realize it. Often 1 month is plenty of time for me to watch what I want to watch, and if not, it's easy enough to renew for one more month
- Terretta 3y ago
  Don't sign up directly. Sign up as Apple TV "channel" which forces the streamer to provide the subscription through Apple's App Store and the beautifully pro-consumer subscription management it offers: reminders you're on the subscription, transparency on the plans and pricing, one click cancellation, all in a one location. Of course, if devs are intending to make money from subscriptions, devs may rationalize how devs should be in control of the user's subscription instead of letting the user pick Apple because users trust Apple will balance power for users.
interloxia 3y ago
Rackspace charged me $5 recently for the first time in a long time. It turned out to be a few bytes of a log file for a service that I had long since removed to the best of my knowledge. Time to finally get rid of them. Unfortunately they require for me to make an international call at my expense to close my account. Naming to shame.
mkevac 3y ago
> Americans spend billions of dollars on stuff they have forgotten about How can you forget about something when you are getting an SMS / Push notification the second they take your money? Is this not true for the US?

407 points by hhs 3y ago

This is why pretty much everything i subscribe to is through apple. Walled garden and all that but i subscribe and instantly cancel all but a few things and it makes sure im not throwing money away on services i only use for a week or two

olliej 3y ago

s/forget to cancel/unable to cancel/

marcrosoft 3y ago

Use virtual credit cards and privacy.com. It really helps with peace of mind that you can really have a free trial and not worry about it.

rwbt 3y ago
How does one get virtual credit cards? I remember some banks like Discover offered them, but I don't see them anymore.
- criddell 3y ago
  Apple Card does this: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-virtual-numbers/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-virtual-... It’s not unique to Apple though. I think it’s this standard from EMVCo https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/ https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/
  - guntars 3y ago
    Apple lets you replace your card number with a new one, but it's not quite the same as creating single-use virtual numbers for sketchy businesses.
    - criddell 3y ago
      The EMVCo link is actually more interesting. The payment tokenization scheme means that the merchant never gets your card number (the PAN), they get a token. > EMV Payment Tokenisation enhances transaction security by removing the most valuable data to a fraudster within a transaction, the primary account number (PAN), and replacing it with a unique alternative value, a payment token. > This reduces the value of payments information stolen in the event of a data compromise, as a payment token should not be able to be used beyond the environment in which it was intended. Payment tokens support both face-to-face (F2F) and remote payment transactions. Basically, if Amazon leaks my credit card data, thieves can’t use it because the number is associated with my Amazon account only. That one token can be cancelled and the next time I buy something a new one is issued and I don’t have to replace my credit card just because one merchant leaked my info.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  with capital one they have a browser extension called Eno that remembers which card is for which domain and autofills it.
- _rs 3y ago
  Citi still offers it
- dustincoates 3y ago
  Wise offers them: https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/ https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/
- cwbriscoe 3y ago
  privacy.com
AlbertCory 3y ago
I was about to post this. The usual HNers with nothing better to do will warn about how you're still liable, they can come after you, yada yada yada. Ignore them. Just give a virtual credit card to any subscription service, and set a credit limit on it. Problem solved. If they try to keep charging your card: too bad, the charges are declined.
grotorea 3y ago
Potentially stupid question: if you cancel the virtual credit card, can't the company then send your debt to collections resulting in a bigger headache?
- bhaney 3y ago
  What debt? Typically when you sign up for a service with a free trial, they charge you before each paid period. You get X days for free as part of the trial, then at the end of the trial they attempt to charge you for the next month of service. When that charge declines, they just don't provide you with the next month of service, and all they've given you is the free trial which incurs no debt. If you're receiving a service at cost but agreeing to pay for it later, then yes they could send you to collections if you refuse to pay it, but that model is only really used for a select few services (some phone plans come to mind). The vast majority of online services are prepay.
paulpauper 3y ago
no, this is bad advice . Credit cards are better because the dispute process is more favorable to buyers and longer dispute window. A debit card has worse buyer protection.
- bhaney 3y ago
  The virtual cards offered by Privacy are credit cards (specifically, charge cards) and feature the normal credit card dispute process.
UIUC_06 3y ago
Recent story: I had Duolingo, for some reason I've forgotten. They sent me a "we are about to renew" message. So I went there and cancelled my account, and they even sent me a "sorry to see you go" message. They definitely got it. Then they went and charged my card anyway. But it was declined, because I'd closed the privacy.com virtual card I'd given them. That's why you do this.

neogodless 3y ago

https://archive.is/Kh4Zy https://archive.is/Kh4Zy

mysterydip 3y ago

Forget to? Or involve so many dark patterns it's nearly impossible to?

ksd482 3y ago
I think it's both. To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.
- bonton89 3y ago
  Is it true you can use a fake name (and presumably address I guess) for privacy.com credit cards? I have virtual cards through capital one but they seem much less feature rich.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Yup. you can use any name and address you want. Excellent for increasing online shopping security. (Parent company of the three companies you bought stuff from got big hacked? Who cares; all they're getting from you is fake data.)
- redrove 3y ago
  US only…
cratermoon 3y ago
I was looking for this comment. Sometimes the only way to cancel is to make a telephone call (to a number that may not be easy to find) and wait on hold to talk to a person, who will then do everything they can to convince you to stay. Companies put a lot of effort into making signup frictionless, I don't buy an excuses that say cancelling is intrinsically harder than signup and can't be streamlined.

blueridge 3y ago

I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.

supportengineer 3y ago
I check all my accounts every day.
bowsamic 3y ago
No, they don't.
gumby 3y ago
I put all my subscriptions on a single credit card (and use it for nothing else) so that it's easy to scan. Otherwise they'd be buried.
ksd482 3y ago
Yes, exactly. I am myself guilty of exactly that. My excuse (a really lame one): logging in to my credit card accounts is too much of a friction with 2FA and all that, and then sifting through statements is work. I don't want to do the work. Of course, that's a pathetic excuse, and I tell myself that one of these days I will check my statements but that day never comes. It's quite easy to be lazy in the moment and put this "work" off to tomorrow. As a result, days, weeks and months go by. I now use privacy.com for most subscriptions and one-off trials etc. It at least notifies me via email every time there is a transaction.
crazygringo 3y ago
Absolutely not. It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail. But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many. The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do that is for budgeting -- reviewing transactions is just a side effect. It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly email. As long as there's a secure email transmission connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.

cooper_j 3y ago

Its so ironic because WSJ is one of those subscriptions...

capital_guy 3y ago
and the WSJ is one of those subscription companies that uses dark patterns. When I had WSJ ~2 years ago, there was a separate page for people living in California where you could click to cancel, and everyone else had to jump through hoops. Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1]. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/federal-trade-commission-proposes-rule-provision-making-it-easier-consumers-click-cancel-recurring https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
anotherevan 3y ago
I give them points for mentioning that in the second paragraph.

mfwit 3y ago

And when you do try to cancel, you have to chat or call somebody. I'm looking at you SiriusXM.

b112 3y ago
Thanks for the heads up. I will never try them (buying a new car soon).
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  Dealers get a commission for converting you, keep an eye on the paperwork.
  - b112 3y ago
    Excellent, good point, thanks
- mikestew 3y ago
  We bought a new car last April. We also had XM radio about fifteen years ago. Much like GP comment, we will never sign up for SiriusXM ever again, so much so that we didn't even bother with the "free" six month subscription with new car purchase...because I don't want to do deal with canceling, or deal with anything to do with SiriusXM. I'll sing a cappella at the top of my lungs before I'll be so desperate as to turn on SiriusXM. That's right, SiriusXM can't even give us their service, that's much they poisoned that water well.
  - natch 3y ago
    That’s how I feel about non-Tesla EVs. Well Rivian is good, other than lack of charging network; I’d never get one due to that gap. But legacy manufacturers have burned their bridges.
dave78 3y ago
I had XM (before the Sirius merger) and cancelled it >10 years ago. The process was difficult enough that I would never even remotely consider signing up for them again. If it had been more painless, I may have resubscribed at some point. Instead, they've completely poisoned their brand with me permanently. I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for those - entire industries that I write off because of bad behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions. I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.

massysett 3y ago

"They recognized that getting a new card is one of the rare times you must actively renew your automatically renewing subscriptions, since you have to update the payment information on file with those companies." This isn't true: I've had subscriptions roll over to the new credit card number - and not just for a month or two. Apparently the bank will continue to process them (I'd rather they didn't.)

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b112 3y ago
The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.
- el_benhameen 3y ago
  I get the concern. At the same time, when my card was stolen last year, it was helpful to not have to update my billing info on 8,000 different vendor websites or risk having an account cancelled. I think tying a credit card to an account number versus an account as an entity is becoming somewhat antiquated.
  - chucksta 3y ago
    It goes both ways, a couple years ago I had to deal with a scammer who the bank kept "helping" with each new card they issued me. It happened like 5 times before it stopped, nothing I could do.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      You issue a chargeback. It's been a while since I've worked on these systems, but IIRC back in the day you would get a refund and they would be penalized an extra $25 or so on top of it. If they get too many they can loose their merchant account. We always made cancels easy in our system, and if someone issued a chargeback we would ban their email from signing up again.

xnx 3y ago

It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12 month spend by merchant and merchant category. Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
I can see past 12 months by category in Bank of America. https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-online-banking-features/spending-budgeting/ https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli... I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  Amex too.
the_snooze 3y ago
Similarly, it sucks that banks don't allow you to unilaterally stop recurring payments on your credit card. Some companies make cancelling a subscription like getting out of a Saw trap. Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
brianleb 3y ago
To chime in with the others, my Chase card offers this service automatically as well. I think most major credit card companies are starting to offer these services because they want a piece of the pie that companies like Intuit (through Mint, now Credit Karma) are grabbing by just siphoning up financial data.
matwood 3y ago
CapOne does, along with a quick view of 'recurring charges'. Amex also lets you view by category across custom date ranges, custom tags, etc...
waynesonfire 3y ago

teeray 3y ago

It’s almost like we need legislation to reign in subscriptions.

commandlinefan 3y ago

Or can't figure out how to cancel.

lucidguppy 3y ago

You can set up alerts for all charges going to your card to your phone.

quartz 3y ago

I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods. After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them. Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill because it was on autopay. Turns out now after 4 years I'm paying more than double the published rate. Called the storage facility and they said the only way around it is to rent a new unit at the new rate and move my things there to start the process all over again.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.
- bratsche 3y ago
  They're also difficult to cancel. They gave me a student discount for using my .edu email address, but after awhile I realized I wasn't really using it so I tried to cancel. They work really hard to make that difficult to do.
  - quartz 3y ago
    Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if you changed your address to California you could cancel online since IIRC it's a law there. I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel after a trial.
  - zachwdc 3y ago
    When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.

jdofaz 3y ago

I've been reconciling my transactions in GnuCash for 20 years, I've been pretty good at catching charges I don't expect. I also set the credit cards to send me an email for any transaction over $1.

bruceb 3y ago

Alternative headline: People who actively use their subscriptions are being subsided buy those who don't. If you use the gym a lot be grateful people are paying that don't. If they did, the gym would have no room. While bits based subs are not quite the same, still holds that if people who don't need that sub any more cancelled then others would probably pay more.

daxfohl 3y ago
IDK if that holds. If pricing is such that people would probably pay more, then the business will raise the price. The fact that they're getting free money from zombie subscriptions doesn't really change things. Though perhaps you could say businesses then actively reduce pricing to keep things just under the zombie radar, but that's even more effed up: it means the pricing strategy is such that zombie accounts are actually the business's goal, not just a side effect.
- bonton89 3y ago
  I think it does. The amount of effort people will put in and outrage that will ensue is going to scale up with the price of the service. So there is probably a careful identified max here. But they also use the "only $2 for the first 6 months" thing to get you hooked first and then wait for you to become complacent and forget about it.

wolverine876 3y ago

The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and could easily stop it. It should be shame that also falls on them, but somehow we give businesses a pass. No matter how awful or shameful, people say 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil. If you took monthly payment from your elderly neighbor to shovel their walk and it never snowed, it would be shameful to keep taking it - people's opinions of you would change negatively if they heard about it. If you said 'well, they have autopay setup and didn't stop it', you would look even worse!

bombcar 3y ago
The way I see it, if they can register if you're using it, then after a year of disuse (or getting close to it) they should send a "we will cancel this for you" type notices. If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Interested in filing public comments on this if the FTC asks for them?
- cptskippy 3y ago
  This is what Credit Cards do. They're shady AF but have no problem cancelling your card due to inactivity.
thriftwy 3y ago
I believe this is implemented in Russia: I did not check that but when I sign up for some streaming service, after some time they start begging me to watch something and then stop charging me. I guess they may only charge on the months when I've showed up. They may resume it immediately when I come back, though. Myself would like to know how that works in detail.

JohnFen 3y ago

One of the reasons why I avoid subscriptions to anything if at all possible is to avoid this. More than a couple and the cost of having to keep track of them exceeds any value of having them.

lostmsu 3y ago

Reminded me to cancel my Disney+ I got for Loki S2 (disappointing)

weinzierl 3y ago

The irony is that Americans are probably spending a lot because they forgot to cancel their WSJ subscription;-) When I canceled mine a couple of years ago I think it could only be done by phone, which already is a hurdle. To be fair to WSJ, it was smooth sailing from there and they did not bother me or try to trick me to renew it, in or after the phone call.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

This sort of thing exists in many areas, not just subscriptions. Starbucks has over $1.5B (something like 17% of its free cash, don't quote me though) in the form of spare change lingering on Starbucks Cards. It fundamentally affects their financials, but is also perceived as just spare change slipping into the couch.

dangus 3y ago
Well, it’s still a liability on the balance sheet. But it’s great for cash flow and general accounting flexibility. This is a similar to how airlines are more like banks than airlines these days. They issue credit cards and collect transaction fees, but instead of giving cardholders cash back they give them miles…gift cards for future travel, essentially. If something bad happens financially it’s a great buffer for them. They can always manipulate the value of miles within some level of reason until customers get mad (see: Delta). It’s also great to be a bank when you’re in a capital-intense business. This concept is also how how fast-growing businesses can have cash flow problems. Let’s say I pay my vendors right away, but when I sell my widgets I get paid 30 days later. If I sell 10 widgets the first month, and suddenly sell 1000 widgets the second month, I might look like I’m an incredibly profitable company. But I probably ran out of cash to pay my vendors for the raw materials to build my widgets.

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fullshark 3y ago

This requires government regulation. Sorry but the free market incentivizes bad behavior in this instance. If it means that the price of a subscription will go up cause they can no longer extract payments from the lazy/forgetful then so be it.

daxfohl 3y ago

Just did this with Xfinity an hour ago. I didn't even _forget_, per se: been trying to cancel online for months. It says they'll call you, then they never do, and _then_ I forget until I see the next billing statement. Finally went into the store this morning, but without any proof of previous attempts on hand, all they could do was cancel as of today. Frankly, they couldn't even give me a paper confirmation, and they say the email confirmation will come in a day or two, so this probably isn't even over yet. I actually did get a screenshot of the most recent attempt, but everyone involved knows I'm probably not going to find it worth my time to fight it. They win.

izzydata 3y ago

Sounds like a multi-million dollar business opportunity for a relatively cheap monthly service that automatically cancels services you don't use.

wjnc 3y ago
This is my dream. A company in between me and all kinds of service providers (energy, insurance, internet, mobile, let’s go crazy and add: mortgage, mobility) and just regularly switches me to the best offer while I retain service. They could get probably get away with a 10% fee and still deliver, because they can reverse auction their portfolio and get massively better deals than usually available. They can do KYC and vouch for my credit rating, keep my PII safer while putting my saved money to work in an investment account while bargaining for the lowest costs. Worth billions. We could then use those billions to buy stakes in the firms that give us shitty service to force them to put the customer first.
- izzydata 3y ago
  Sounds pretty awesome albeit vastly more complicated than what I had imagined. The idea of customers collective bargaining to force competition is neat.
blamazon 3y ago
It's not quite the same pitch, but I use privacy.com to set up a unique virtual card for every subscription I sign up for - that way, all in one dashboard and can stop them on demand. I also set the spend limit just above the current price so if there's a price hike it denies the transaction.
liveoneggs 3y ago
podcasts advertise this to me all of the time. I think it's called rocketmoney or zenwallet or something along those lines
Klonoar 3y ago
You mean the company listed in TFA, that was formerly called TrueBill before Rocket bought them for $1B a few years back? ;P

snarfy 3y ago

And people wonder why I write checks and lick stamps like a boomer.

paxys 3y ago

It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it's the government's fault"). This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea applies to so much more – basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary. Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking out for you. You can either endlessly complain about it or build some good habits. 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.

ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
People tend to act shocked when I tell them my finance app requires me to enter transactions manually and doesn't magically categorize everything. You spend a third of your life working for that money, surely you spend 5 minutes at most tracking how you spend it.
- drawnwren 3y ago
  which finance app do you recommend?
  - maleldil 3y ago
    YNAB is pretty good. I like their zero-based budget system.
- tunesmith 3y ago
  I'm guilty of being averse to this too, even though I intellectually know that if I accept manually entering transactions, then there are so many more options I can choose for tracking finances. As it is, I'm locked into a Banktivity subscription fee... I think part of it is that it is just so hard to centralize all finances through just one bank. The best bank for retirement doesn't support business credit cards; the best credit cards are with completely different companies, etc. Monthly finances are a huge hassle as it is.

jmyeet 3y ago

Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many are willing to blame the victim: the consumer. We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares [1]. I would dearly love to give money to some quality news publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions department should I ever want to cancel. Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance, someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist available. Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same should apply to taking their money. Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to cancel it. All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that quietly gets jacked up over time. You can go through a "cancel dance" to renew that rate every year or so but it's absolutely exhausting to have to deal with this. VPNs do the same thing. $2.99/month introductory price! Wow! Bargain! It just quietly gets jacked up later on. This is what government is for. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

the_snooze 3y ago
>Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. My gym managed to find itself in a great little niche by being the complete opposite: they'll call you if you haven't been in for two weeks, then bug you to either start coming in again or pause your membership. The result is a dedicated membership base of regulars who seriously want to be there, which sustains itself on word-of-mouth referrals. Of course, this is a small-time operation and not a national chain like Planet Fitness.

cryptozeus 3y ago

This is why I use copilot or earlier Mint. They are great at detecting these recurring payments

tedchs 3y ago

Fwiw, when I've forgotten to cancel something, I've had success saying something like "I was checking my credit card statement and was surprised I'm still paying for X. I haven't used it at all since Y date. Would it be possible to have a refund, perhaps partial, since then, for $xx?". Basically I make it easy for them to say yes.

yedava 3y ago

Subscriptions should have a time based expiry option. It's trivial to implement from a technology standpoint and not providing that option is an anti-consumer tactic. The fact that all businesses are so anti-consumer is a testament to the dystopian times we live in. Technology is being used to actively harm us.

standardUser 3y ago
I am in favor of a LOT of pro-consumer, anti-business regulations, like dramatically expanded food labeling, mandatory event ticket refunds, standardized brake lights and turn signals... the list is a long one. But I still don't think a company should cancel my subscription without my knowledge to protect me from myself. One click cancel? Hell yes. But auto expiration? That's a bridge too far.

anbotero 3y ago

Businesses these days with these dark patterns. I denounce them and immediately cancel anything when they start just fine and suddenly implement something hard to get out of. I hate when their cancelling scheme puts blocks in front of the user so it’s harder and harder to quit. In my country I’ve noticed some have their Cancel Subscription page unavailable, or it says it has cancelled it but you don’t get email or confirmation of anything, and then surprise, another month payment, and then you have to call, and they leave you waiting for hours. I despise this and I denounce them with local regulation authorities, then they get moving, and even then they may still squeeze another month out of you, attribute it to error and just expect you don’t denounce them again because that would be even more time from you. But this is me... I know lots of people who spend at least 6 months before they have the time/energy to actually go through this process so they can cancel. I’d say to hell with them, it gives bad rap to good businesses which let you cancel/pause without too much hassle.

tppiotrowski 3y ago

I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled. Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you never logged in once) I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a service they're not using at all. Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another "dark pattern" of subscriptions.

paulpauper 3y ago
Obviously, if Netflix adopted a pay-per-use model, earnings would crater. AOL made so much $ from ppl forgetting to cancel.
neilv 3y ago
Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns. I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping option radio buttons, so that's another reason to check that.) (If only Walmart.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, etc. would close the gap to even current Amazon, we'd have better options and less trashiness. Anecdotally seems like Amazon -- either from the top, or from individuals juicing their metrics -- are taking advantage of Amazon's enviable competence and position, and cashing out excess goodwill.)
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  "Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns." I just got myself a month of Prime because of this. And cancelling requires you to go through around 5 screens with buttons "Do you want to cancel?", "Yes, I want to keep Prime" and so on. And the colors of the cancel button are always different. So you have to closely read and understand each button or your cancel attempt will get cancelled.

paulpauper 3y ago

This is why VPN and Squarespace/Wix ads are so pervasive on youtube: lots of ppl forgetting to cancel.

havblue 3y ago

This reminds me of a recent commercial where a father is looking at a phone bill and complains melodramatically that the family is wasting money, only for his wife to condescendingly tell him to switch cell phone plans and show up for dinner. Um, I think people who scan the bills to find services they don't need are on the right track...

smallerfish 3y ago

I'd like to call out ZenBusiness on this one. They allowed an LLC (which to be fair we weren't using actively) to enter a delinquent state, but continued to charge the registered agent fee for 2 additional years until we noticed; each year we'd get a "your XYZ LLC is going to automatically renew" email from them, with no mention of the fact of outstanding annual reports due. After that they had the gall to charge penalty fees to reinstate the account, on top of the state fees. Definitely moving to a competitor at end of year when it comes time to renew again.

nunez 3y ago

I can't wait for services like Privacy to enter the mainstream. It's coming. (I'd like to think that it's coming.) When 90% of your user base is using super-easily-createable disposable credit cards from valid BINs that self-destruct after your free trial's over, the way free trials work will have to change.

llanowarelves 3y ago
I liked the one Pennsylvania bill introduced where subscription services have to email you that they're about to charge you again. Throws a wrench into the "was hoping you forgot about it, now ask/argue with customer support on the phone" dark pattern.

nmstoker 3y ago

Isn't this how Michael Dell got going originally too? Newspapers for newlyweds, initially free they'd then keep going with the subscription

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Like wars in the Middle East?

karaterobot 3y ago

> Their average response was $62. When they were given more time to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were still way off. The correct answer was $273. I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked. People are terrible at estimating or keeping track of their subscriptions, myself included. A couple years ago I painstakingly audited all my recurring subscriptions. Painstaking because I had to go through all my bank and credit account statements for a year looking for the services that billed yearly or semi-yearly rather than monthly. I had also drastically underestimated what they cost me, by about a factor of two in my case. I think of myself as being very frugal about this kind of thing, so it was a surprise. But then I was able to save myself almost $1000 a year just by eliminating some unused subscriptions I had sort of forgotten. Not forgotten entirely, but services I sort of failed to think about as costs, because the monthly spend for them individually was so low. But once I thought about them as a yearly cost, and then about the total yearly cost for all these little services, that successfully (and more accurately) reframed the situation. I didn't find unsubscribing or cancelling to be particular onerous. I do use Privacy.com now, which would make it both easier to track and theoretically easier to cancel. Ironically, Privacy.com is a monthly subscription (at the tier I use) but it is definitely worth it. I told people about the $1000 a year "raise" I got by just trimming dead weight. I told them they should do the same exercise—make a spreadsheet, have a column that multiplies the monthly fee by 12, and think about it as a yearly cost instead—and they were all, uniformly, without exception certain that they already knew what they spent, and it wasn't really very much. My advice: do the exercise anyway, it is worth it.

paxys 3y ago
Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. If everyone paying into it actually expected to extract their entire money's worth of value the whole industry would collapse.
- hartator 3y ago
  > restaurant buffets Buffets have monthly subcriptions?

godisdad 3y ago

I’m here for the recommendations for apps to cancel subscriptions

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

Serious lack of empathy in this thread, mostly by a bunch of incredibly wealthy individuals that have their life in order. When a lot of people struggle with certain categories of problems, it's worth considering if those problems could be nerfed in some way rather than telling them just "get good". There's definitely a huge slew of predatory billing techniques and dark patterns to get people to keep paying for services. These patterns should be documented and destroyed. Having more accessible billing methods also makes life better for everyone (maybe except the company). Consider how absurd it is that only from California can you cancel your New York Times subscription online while every other state requires you to call in and deal with a retention agent. Let's not pretend this is in any way reasonable, it's straight up bullshit. Sure personal responsibility is important, but there's no reason we should accept predatory and abusive practices from companies. It just makes reality worse for everyone.

wolverine876 3y ago
> Serious lack of empathy in this thread I think it's something learned, and that is, something taught by the far right ideological movement and others trying to create cultural change. Empathy is outre, it's embarassing. Embracing contempt and cruelty makes people look smart, these days. Empathy is fundamental to human rights, freedom (for others), equality, equity, justice, fairness. It leads to truth. By attacking that fundamental infrastructure (the empathy), you can undermine it all.

zoba 3y ago

I'm very eager for a consumer version of Ramp where I can issue myself a card per-subscription service. Then I can review all the cards I've issued, and turn them off if I no longer want the service. I would immediately sign up if this existed.

jmholla 3y ago

I feel like this might be a good place to share something I learned recently about credit cards: interest accrues daily, not by statement (e.g. monthly). Further, your statement does not accurately reflect what you owe for that billing period. Instead, the interest for that period will be reflected on your next bill. I had errantly figured I could postpone my payments to the due date and not accrue interest, but that is not the case and I ended up with a few hundred dollars more in interest than I expected.

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dangus 3y ago
This is true, but only if you’re not paying your full statement balance each month. If you’re paying your full statement balance then you can wait all the way until the due date since you’ve never accrued any interest in the first place.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

For anyone trying to avoid this, sign up to Personal Capital (bought out by empower or something), link up ALL your bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Then once a month go in and check every single line item charge and ensure the charge was properly labeled. Now if a companies autocharge is extra sketchy, such as not informing you about auto pay, enabling it automatically, etc, just threaten a chargeback when contacting their support and most the time they'll immediately refund you.

blakeburch 3y ago
I would suggest something like [LunchMoney](https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/) instead. Built in budgeting, rules to classify payments, and recurring subscriptions are automatically found and called out. I had a bunch of issues with Personal Capital connections continuously messing up and there's no way to classify and evaluate the purchases.

steveBK123 3y ago

It's useful to periodically cancel a credit card / get a completely new number / etc to break automated billing you have forgotten. I think there's credit cards that offer this as a feature now.

hankchinaski 3y ago

I put most of my non essential subscription spending on virtual debit cards. I rotate the virtual cards frequently so stuff that is low priority gets automatically blocked and churned out.

vvpan 3y ago

[flagged]

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MisterBastahrd 3y ago

This was a hidden savior that helped some of the publishing industry delay what was already a precipitous decline. As soon as I became aware of recurring billing through Recurly, I switched all of the products of my employer at the time to a subscription based model. Yes, it takes a bit more work on the part of the customer service agents who deal with angry customers who do not want to be billed anymore, but on the flip side, it's usually many months before people who are not using the service realize that they have continued to be billed.

smeej 3y ago

I was recently appalled to discover how many of my subscriptions auto-updated the expiration date when my card expired. I had hoped to use "ignore it until charges stop going through because jumping through their hoops is ridiculous" to cancel a few pesky subscriptions and it didn't even work! I think this is a "feature" of using Stripe for billing? Or something? I couldn't find anything obvious that they had in common but that.

dcotter 3y ago

I'm surprised literally no one suggested just cancelling the vast majority of your subscription services and cutting ties with unethical companies. The suggestion that poor people need yet more help from the government because they're too dumb, busy, or gullible to know when they're about to get screwed is condescending. The suggestion that the core audience of WSJ and HN needs this is pitiful. Want to watch a movie? Borrow the DVD from your local library. Want to watch it repeatedly? Buy it off Amazon. Want to read a book? Library. Amazon. AbeBooks. Want to get fit? Go for a hike. Do pushups. Buy a barbell and free weights. Here's my personal finance plan: Check your bank account daily. Cancel services you don't need. Don't do 30-day trials. Don't sign up for overdraft "protection" at $40 a pop. Use cash if you can't handle plastic, and don't use credit cards. Just don't borrow money, period, if you're not using it to buy a house. Don't let anyone take money out of your checking account but you. If a company screws you, never do business with them again. Pay up front for a year of service and mark when it renews. Write checks before you give out your card numbers. I know, Stone Age, right? But I like to keep my life simple.

javajosh 3y ago
Do 30-day trials and put a reminder in your calendar to cancel with the URL to do so. Make this a habit. Yes, subscriptions are a dark pattern but the minimal amount of effort to avoid being charged in some circumstances (not gyms) seems like a small thing. That said, the world would indeed be a better place if businesses didn't charge you for service they weren't providing. Although you might model these monthly subscriptions as "insurance premiums" to save the 5 minute sign-up time the next time you want to watch something.
- mportela 3y ago
  What I do is canceling the trial immediately after subscribing for it. Most services will let you finish the trial period and you won't risk forgetting to cancel it and paying for another billing cycle.
wilde 3y ago
Ah yes. Why do I need government help managing my subscriptions when I can checks notes literally get the content from the government?

Slow_Hand 3y ago

I'm using a service called Subly that keeps track of all of my recurring payments and puts them into a database that I can view at a glance. It shows me which day of the month it renews, how much, and to which card or account it will be charged. This includes my annual renewal fees as well. It then shows me what my average monthly expenditure is. With this I can see that I'm spending roughly $112/month on subscriptions. The whole thing couldn't be much easier. The service costs $4/month. The irony of that is not lost on me, but the convenience of seeing my recurring monthly charges is worth it for me. https://web.subly.app https://web.subly.app

olejorgenb 3y ago
How much does it provider over simply taking the time to add the numbers to a spreadsheet? Does it integrite with bankstatements or automate the prosess in other ways?
- auggierose 3y ago
  People who use such a service probably don't know what a spread sheet is.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Exactly my thought. I already review all my credit card and bank statements every month and manually extract important information to my spreadsheet. The once-a-month manual work is to me absolutely worth it to be on top of my personal and household finances.

cwillu 3y ago

I tried to downsize my google plan from 2tb to 100gb. It's now charging me for both plans every month, and my available space toggles every couple weeks (with dire warnings in every app about being at 90% capacity when it's on the 100gb plan). Support says all the things that are already on the support pages and then throw up their hands and say they don't have access to do anything to fix it.

polymatter 3y ago
Sounds like time to consider small claims court.
- cwillu 3y ago
  The thought has crossed my mind, but if I win they can still (algorithmically, no doubt) say “we've decided we no longer want your business”, which would be a bigger deal given how prevalent “sign in with google” is, to say nothing of the various important and/or official things that are mailing to gmail.

baryphonic 3y ago

Ironically, I had a subscription to the print WSJ years ago. I never read it, but canceling was extremely difficult.

anthomtb 3y ago

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually use but keep creeping up in price. SiriusXM is the worst, I think that one is up nearly 25% in the past couple years. One of those frog-in-boiling-water situations were you don't notice the ~$1/month increase but suddenly the thing is well above your mental marker of what it costs.

renewiltord 3y ago
I use Copilot (which costs $100/y) and review every transaction across all of our accounts. Gives me a lot of piece of mind. It's very fast to audit because the UI is slick and it has simple name matching rules it uses to categorize. EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.
- ggrelet 3y ago
  This app is only available in the US. Any other similar app you’d recommend? Maybe one you tried before using copilot?
  - justusthane 3y ago
    This might not be quite the same, but I’ve been using YNAB for years now. I religiously budget and track every dollar spent. It takes me maybe 20-30min/week, and it’s provides so much peace of mind knowing where every dollar is going, and more importantly, knowing what every dollar in my bank account is set aside for. You do need to adopt their zero-based envelope budgeting paradigm though. It’s very opinionated.
- standardUser 3y ago
  I aggressively track my recurring subscriptions, but I still feel like sometimes my primary credit card balance is rising more rapidly than I can account for. And the data we get on our statements seems purposefully crafted to confuse and bewilder instead of inform. Part of it is the difference between the "balance" and the "available credit", the latter of which includes things like invisible holds and unprocessed payments. The two numbers are never the same, and I have no clear way of tracking the relationship between those two numbers. That's a long way of saying that $100/year might not be such a bad deal to get some genuine visibility about my own spending. Especially since the companies currently providing me the information about my spending are, essentially, my enemies.

ahati 3y ago

Right, income tax is a subscription service to stay in a country. Forced health insurence deduction is another one. They are my biggest subscriptions.

pers0n 3y ago

Meetup is one of them, I’d say about 15% of meetup are dead groups that haven’t done anything for 2yrs or more

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Reminder that you don't have to deal with these exploitative business models if you simply pirate content.

BurningFrog 3y ago

If each American spends $6 on average on something, "Americans are spending billions on it" is true.

thunkshift1 3y ago

Aholes at wsj were themselves guilty of this shit

EasyMark 3y ago

This is why I put stuff on apple pay/paypal subscription. Easy to remember to check a few times a year rather than going through credit card bills.

Fomite 3y ago

I would really like a requirement for a once yearly "Hey, do you remember you're paying for this?" reminder.

matt3210 3y ago

This is the point of subscription models

srinivasan 3y ago

The number is likely larger than the article suggests, because both Visa and Mastercard will share updated payment information to merchants who had recurring charges. The paper treats this as a "possibility" (and uses a small lambda factor to adjust for it) rather than the norm that it is in 2024.

intellix 3y ago

the typical auto renewal scam. Some reason it's common and i'm happy to see it getting some light. I wanted to order some science stuff for my kids for Christmas by ordering them 6 months of packages, one per month. They wouldn't let me only order 6 but I had to order them with a rolling subscription that automatically renewed. I emailed them and said I don't want it to renew automatically, I want 6 and then I will personally decide whether to order more, to which their system didn't even support. They're obviously banking on people forgetting to cancel, which I can't believe is legal. In this case it's not as bad cause they actually deliver a physical product. Once I looked at my bank account and noticed that i'd been paying for ancestry for the past 6 months... WTF! So I logged into my account, canceled it and requested a refund stating that I didn't even know I had it and didn't login once. They told me they don't offer refunds despite me never logging in. You basically sign up to a free trial by placing down a credit card to get access and forget about it. Total scam and I can't wait for it to be illegal.

deleted 3y ago
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madhatter999 3y ago
Absurdity aside, I set a reminder for any trial end, preferably a couple of days before.
- redrove 3y ago
  I typically cancel the subscription right after signing up, it’s more practical. 99.9% of services keep your account alive until your trial/paid for period runs out. The other 0.1% I never sign up to.

sakopov 3y ago

I use a service called Privacy [1] to generate virtual card numbers, which I than use with all of my subscriptions. All of the virtual cards are tied to a physical credit card used as the funding source. I get a notification every time a card is charged or a charge is denied (if it's above the set limit or no longer active). This has saved me from fraud where a single-use virtual card # I used to pay for airport parking was used to buy something online and promptly denied and multiple overcharges with random subscriptions. I even started using it for things like gym and utility payments. Highly recommended to keep a tab on subscriptions. [1] https://privacy.com https://privacy.com

pozol 3y ago
Were you able to tie it to a credit card? Last time I tried it only let me do a debit card, which was a bummer, since I prefer using credit.
cwbriscoe 3y ago
I started using privacy about 6 months ago. It is a great service. I have changed all of my subscriptions over to them and I set a monthly or yearly limit depending on the subscription type.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

MenhirMike 3y ago

One of the many reasons to do household accounting. It's not even about making/keeping a budget, but simply about knowing where your money goes. It's a shame that many solutions are in turn also subscription based, so I don't have any good recommendations (I use YNAB Desktop, which was killed off a few years ago and replaced with a SaaS solution that's always increasing in price). But having insight into how you spend your money is such a powerful tool, it's worth doing even if it means manually entering stuff into a LibreOffice Calc workbook.

_thisdot 3y ago
If you use macOS + iPhone, a Shorcuts based approach using Numbers is simple and powerful enough for your budgeting needs. Shortcuts being the simplest way to add a row on to the budget sheet (i.e transaction) from iPhone homescreen or macOS Spotlight. I wrote a small tutorial here: https://rahulkrrrishna.xyz/notes/2023/11/18/simple-budgeting-tool-with-numbers-shortcuts.html https://rahulkrrrishna.xyz/notes/2023/11/18/simple-budgeting...
maxioatic 3y ago
Happy to see YNAB mentioned. I actually had no idea they used to have a desktop app! I’m a happy subscriber though and to me its yearly cost is easily made up by how much money I save using it.

petesergeant 3y ago

This is classic price discrimination, and makes the services cheaper for people who are more price sensitive

gnicholas 3y ago

> It’s like when Netflix asks if you’re still watching when you’ve fallen asleep on the couch—except this policy actually saves you money. I assumed this was because they pay for some content on a per-view basis, so they don't want to pay if you're not actually there/awake. That said, I have found the autoplay-next-episode behavior to be strangely inconsistent, even for the same show. Some nights it automatically plays 4 in a row if we do nothing, and other nights it stops after each one. I've tried to figure out if it's based on time (sometimes we watch pretty late), but there seems to be no correlation.

prossercj 3y ago

Whenever I sign up for a streaming service, my first act is to disable autopay. I really think it should be disabled by default, and you can enable if wanted. That would resolve much of this problem. Do all users even know they are signing up for autopay? Many probably do not realize it. Often 1 month is plenty of time for me to watch what I want to watch, and if not, it's easy enough to renew for one more month

Terretta 3y ago
Don't sign up directly. Sign up as Apple TV "channel" which forces the streamer to provide the subscription through Apple's App Store and the beautifully pro-consumer subscription management it offers: reminders you're on the subscription, transparency on the plans and pricing, one click cancellation, all in a one location. Of course, if devs are intending to make money from subscriptions, devs may rationalize how devs should be in control of the user's subscription instead of letting the user pick Apple because users trust Apple will balance power for users.

interloxia 3y ago

Rackspace charged me $5 recently for the first time in a long time. It turned out to be a few bytes of a log file for a service that I had long since removed to the best of my knowledge. Time to finally get rid of them. Unfortunately they require for me to make an international call at my expense to close my account. Naming to shame.

mkevac 3y ago

> Americans spend billions of dollars on stuff they have forgotten about How can you forget about something when you are getting an SMS / Push notification the second they take your money? Is this not true for the US?