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!
> 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.
"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.)
It's easy to decide it's malicious, but after replacing a lost card that was on file for what must have been fifty different payments, I would rather they did.
Even incurred some chargeback fees in the process because I forgot to update a few vendors.
There's apparently some kind of service that automatically updates payment processors when you get a new card. Seems kind of stupid since one of the main reasons to get a new card is that is compromised and you might just end up sending the new card info to the same company that lost it or is refusing to cancel your subscription.
Yes, miraculously my EZ-Pass bill is still being paid perfectly successfully even after two replacements for the *original* card expired since, and one was canceled due to theft. Magic!
That happens in case an existing card renews (or is replaced after getting lost etc.) If you get a net new card then retailers aren't getting that info.
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.
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.
This should be illegal. I lived in apartments like this as well, they would increase the rates for existing tenants while giving lower rates to new tenants. I’d also move out when they tried to pull this, just out of spite.
I have always heard that it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than to acquire a new one. Apparently these places don’t realize that. They don’t need to pay for advertising when they are filly booked up with people paying the market rate, nor do they need to do all the extra work invoiced in signing someone up or moving them out. I don’t own or operate a business, so maybe I’m talking out of my butt, but these people strike me as bad business owners who are chasing the wrong metrics.
Ah yeah. The good ole' storage unit scam. They all raise the prices about every 6 months. I just rent a U-Haul for a day and move it to a new place. And it forces me to throw things away that I truly don't need. Over the years, the amount of stuff I have has been shrinking and I have less to move.
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.
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.
Pandora is my favorite subscription. I have paid $3.99 a month for years, for all the music I could ever listen to. It is literally always on in my house or office.
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/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The core disappointed with credit cards and also banking in general in the US, is the existance of a company called Plaid--which generated $170 million of revenue in 2020 parsing transaction data.
There should be a standard interface to pull transaction data without having to rely on a third party as it rapes your privacy.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] neogodless|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] massysett|2 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] pxeboot|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau/overview
[+] [-] ip26|2 years ago|reply
Even incurred some chargeback fees in the process because I forgot to update a few vendors.
[+] [-] bonton89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b112|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quartz|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al_borland|2 years ago|reply
I have always heard that it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than to acquire a new one. Apparently these places don’t realize that. They don’t need to pay for advertising when they are filly booked up with people paying the market rate, nor do they need to do all the extra work invoiced in signing someone up or moving them out. I don’t own or operate a business, so maybe I’m talking out of my butt, but these people strike me as bad business owners who are chasing the wrong metrics.
[+] [-] starik36|2 years ago|reply
Rinse and repeat every now and then.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dcotter|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anthomtb|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Loughla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.
[+] [-] jimmydddd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mFixman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterydip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ksd482|2 years ago|reply
To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cwillu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anbotero|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marcrosoft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UIUC_06|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grotorea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwbt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sakopov|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://privacy.com
[+] [-] cooper_j|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capital_guy|2 years ago|reply
Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1].
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
[+] [-] anotherevan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slow_Hand|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.
[+] [-] the_snooze|2 years ago|reply
Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
[+] [-] matwood|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waynesonfire|2 years ago|reply
There should be a standard interface to pull transaction data without having to rely on a third party as it rapes your privacy.
Notably, this apparently exists in EU.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|2 years ago|reply
https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...
I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.
[+] [-] brianleb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oarla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MenhirMike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallerfish|2 years ago|reply