this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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This is designed to be predatory. They want you to forget to cancel in time, because once they charge you, you will never be able to get a refund. And that's if they don't "forget" to not charge you in the first place.
That a lot of these that I see only have, or at least default to, expensive yearly subscriptions, make these even worse.
Reality is it is very easy to create a new email every 30 days and use a service for free. It is just a bit harder to create a card every 30 days and apparently most people are not going that length. If you were a business owner you would do the same
I think it’s both. There’s no reason I should have to jump through three layers of account pages to cancel a free trial. Additionally, if they are using cards as an identity measure, then why would they charge you at the end of the trial? They could shoot you a message asking you to renew instead.
"we know no one wants our service, so we'll pretend to give it away and then charge for an entire year up front"
Used to work for Books-a-Million.
We had a metric that asked us to sign people up for magazine trials. You could choose three, and you’d get your trials alright. But cancelling in itself was more obtuse and time consuming than cancelling a Prime membership. People often would complain, I kind of just figured it was people complaining because.. well, that’s what people do.
Then I signed myself up one week to help our metrics. No money out of my wallet, w/e, I’ll just cancel. When I went to go cancel it, though, that’s when I realized it was a lot more difficult than I imagined. You had to call in, you’d be out in a long-ass queue (15 or more), and you’d have to speak to someone you couldn’t understand and who couldn’t understand you to cancel magazine trials one at a time. And remember, you could sign up for three, so you had to go through this whole rigamarole three times to be fully cancelled, which in itself wasn’t clear. Sometimes people would cancel just one thinking they’d cancelled all of them. For the elders, it’s even worse, they wouldn’t even remember they’d signed up for anything, they would just see the transactions on their bank statements. Or shit, sometimes they just wouldn’t.
This reminds me of back in the original Xbox Live days.
Back on the OG Xbox, when Halo 2 came out, they gave out 3 month (maybe less, don't quite recall) trials of Xbox Live.
Cool, I'll sign up, play with my friends and randoms online for a few months. I just need to add my credit card. OK sure, no problem.
Fast forward 3 monthes. None of my friends play it anymore, they community is mega toxic, way more than you could imagine, and I see my first charge as I forgot to cancel.
OK, whatever. I'll just go into my account settings and cancel my membership. Why can't I find the option? So after researching it, I found out that you have to call their 800 number, Monday through Friday, between 8 and 5, talk to a live person and get them to cancel your account.
So I do that, and after wait on hold for a bit, I get this lady who tries to talk me out of canceling. She offers me a free game (if I sign up for a year), she tries to sell me a second account to practice on so I will play better on my main account, then she insults me for a bit before finally canceling like I asked. I still remember this call vividly some 15 years later.
And the best part? Next month I get charged again.
So I have to call again, have to wait on hold again. When I finally get someone, and I explained that my account was supposed to have already been canceled, he checks my account history to make sure I didn't play since I called last (which I hadn't, since I thought it was canceled), when he confirms that, he tells me that if I had played since then, he couldn't cancel my account, but since I didn't he would go ahead and take care of the cancelation for me.
I didn't touch anything Xbox for about 10 years after that.
That’s rough, buddy
Every subscription service that takes your credit card will let you cancel in advance. Some have gotten wise to it and will cancel your trial if you do that, but I've only encountered it a few times, but if you've actually paid they will always let you cancel early and complete the period you've paid for.
... did you actually try asking for the refund? I just got one recently when I started a Kogan subscription for a few bucks off shipping on an order I was doing and forgot to cancel. Nothing to it, just emailed and asked.