Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

https://www.wsj.com/business/cancel-subscriptions-save-money-streaming-peacock-da7e6123

by hhs • 3 years ago

407 628 3 years ago

neogodless• 3 years ago

marcrosoft• 3 years 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.

AlbertCory• 3 years 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.

rwbt• 3 years ago

How does one get virtual credit cards? I remember some banks like Discover offered them, but I don't see them anymore.

criddell3• 3 years ago

Apple Card does this: 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/

jabroni_salad2• 3 years ago

with capital one they have a browser extension called Eno that remembers which card is for which domain and autofills it.

_rs• 3 years ago

Citi still offers it

dustincoates• 3 years ago

Wise offers them: https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/

cwbriscoe2• 3 years ago

privacy.com

grotorea3• 3 years 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?

bhaney2• 3 years 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.

paulpauper3• 3 years 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.

bhaney2• 3 years ago

The virtual cards offered by Privacy are credit cards (specifically, charge cards) and feature the normal credit card dispute process.

UIUC_06• 3 years 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.

mysterydip• 3 years ago

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

ksd4822• 3 years 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.

bonton894• 3 years 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.

redrove2• 3 years ago

US only…

cratermoon• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bowsamic• 3 years ago

No, they don't.

supportengineer• 3 years ago

I check all my accounts every day.

gumby• 3 years 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.

ksd4822• 3 years 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.

crazygringo6• 3 years 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.

xerxesaa• 3 years ago

My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar month.

Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.

josefresco• 3 years ago

Mint before it shut down

This was the best, and only feature I used on Mint. Quick glance a couple times a month was an easy way to find unusual charges etc. I haven't found a replacement.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in Quicken, which I check every single day. 1. Start Quicken, 2. Hit Update, 3. Get Coffee, 4. Review everything in boldface to make sure it's not a surprise.

I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions, so not only can know what's in my checking account today, but I know exactly, to the penny what will be in my checking account on 18-Feb.

I've in the past found credit card fraud/mistakes within a day of being charged, and have fixed them quickly, before even my next paper statement was printed.

Some friends I know don't have any idea how much is in any of their accounts outside of occasionally seeing a number on an ATM receipt. They might have a budget, but no idea how much all their monthly charges add up to in reality. And yea, they always seem to be forgetting about some subscription or charge. I couldn't live like that--not for me.

ipince2• 3 years ago

Autopay is evil. I have nothing on autopay.

Instead, I have a monthly reminder to pay my bills every month, with a list of all the bills/sites that need to be paid. There's 11 things in the list, but not all of them have a balance every month. I do this towards the end of the month (instead of at the beginning of the month), so that I can include rent in it too, and pay _everything_. It lets me see whether my spending is creeping up and gives me an opportunity to cancel useless stuff. It doesn't take long (5-30 mins depending on how detailed I'm being).

foobarian2• 3 years ago

Yes and then you log in and see:

Apple $4.99

Apple $1.99

Apple $14.99

Apple $4.99

Apple $2.99

Apple $9.99

good luck!

nlawalker• 3 years ago

I got a great tip here on HN: if your credit card supports email notifications for transactions, set it to alert you on every transaction. On my Citi card the notification is called “Transaction amount exceeds” and is configurable with a dollar amount, which I set to zero. Now I get an email within a minute or two of every charge that includes the amount and payee in the email. It’s a great way to put recurring charges you might have forgotten about “in your face” and lets you skip reviewing your whole statement at the end of the month (and gives you a searchable “database” of charge history).

howenterprisey• 3 years ago

I have this set up with push notifications on my phone and that's very helpful as well.

criddell3• 3 years ago

That would mean I would have to turn email notifications on or get in the habit of checking my email every day.

The searchable database of charge history would be nice though. My card number has changed a few times due to data breaches at places I’ve used the card and I don’t think my credit card company’s search is smart enough to follow branches.

godelski6• 3 years ago

This sounds like it can get a bit overwhelming. I absolutely abhor notifications on my phone unless they are things that need my immediate attention. Email is a particular pain where it is difficult to impossible to differentiate spam from legitimate communications.

I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality. It really would empower users to have more control over their money and improve security and privacy.

mnw21cam• 3 years ago

My phone goes ping every time any money goes out of my account. Yes, at the beginning of the month I get a slew of pings for mortgage, power, water, etc, but it's worth it. A while back my phone went ping twice and I was phoning the bank within minutes of a couple of fraudulent payments being made - ironically just before the bank sent me a text asking me if I was making the third one.

Having it go ping every time like that is definitely a way to have good knowledge of what recurring payments you are making.

thehoff• 3 years ago

I do this too for all our cards. I still go in everyday to check but the email notifications are great. Every couple years we get a charge that is fraudulent and I always catch it before the bank starts calling (if they even do that).

On topic, its a great reminder to see say the Netflix charge happened and how much. An example is we subscribed to Viki for a couple months and forgot to cancel. Seeing that charge was a great reminder to poll the house if anyone was still using it.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

Apple Card (and some but not all cards you add to Apple Wallet) pop up a little notification every time they're charged.

It can be nice, but you might miss the nighttime ones.

k2enemy• 3 years ago

I do this as well, but with Chase, and use a filter to stick them into their own folder so they don't hit my INBOX. I use maildir for my local email and have shell scripts built on top of easy filesystem access to my credit card purchases.

Oddly, I get emails for everything except gasoline purchases. I'm afraid to contact support because in the extremely unlikely event that it gets forwarded to the correct people, the attempted fix would break something in my workflow.

matwood2• 3 years ago

I love getting charge alerts. In restaurants I'll normally get the alert on my watch before the waiter gets back to the table. Though the SO sometimes gets annoyed when I text her about buying something before she's even left the store :D

ok123456• 3 years ago

I've been doing this for several years. Once, I caught someone trying to make a fraudulent ACH withdrawal from my account and was able to stop it basically instantly.

happytoexplain• 3 years ago

Seems absent-minded to me.

This is an unrealistic attitude. One can insult people all day, but it doesn't change the fact that society doesn't work properly if we don't account for things humans do, even if it only looks like they are hurting themselves. On one hand, we shouldn't use law to force people to "be responsible for themselves" in petty cases (as opposed to e.g. forcing people to have car insurance), but if enough people commit the same mistake, it's almost by-definition not purely their fault - and on a more objective note, it is certainly pointless to waste time wondering how much of it is carelessness and how much of it is reasonable given what else is going on in people's lives and what their experiences and competencies are like. We simply must give a shit, as natural as it feels to want to just let people deal with things themselves.

Again, one can continue to consider these people mostly at fault or try to get them educated or just make fun of them or hyperbolically lament the fall of society or whatever one's preferred flavor of reaction is, but we also have to solve the active problem. Modern society is too integrated and complex to not give a shit.

Ideally, what I'd like to be able to say is that modern humans are too sympathetic and imaginative to not give a shit.

godelski6• 3 years ago

It's easy for things to get hidden, especially when changes in already small amounts of money. I'm a bit embarrassed that this happened to me once. My spotify student account ended and it got switched over to premium automatically. Probably got an email somewhere but they also send spam so it likely got misread or filtered. On the bank statement, which it was a payment I was expecting, just not the right amount and it occurs at a similar time of the month as a bunch of other bills.

I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.

If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.

While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

I have a cheap VPS that I'm not using but I get the bill every month. Every time I see it I think "I should cancel that" but then I think "maybe I'll get around to doing something with it this month" and I let it go another month.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

One option to consider would be to develop locally on a VM or container and then when it's in a "let others play" state, then fire that VM back up and push your artifacts or container to it.

scruple2• 3 years ago

My wife and I review CC and bank activity every 2nd Sunday. It's part of our budgeting. We both stubbornly refused to take our finances seriously early in life, before we met. By the time we had met, we had both crawled our way out of CC debt and were both independently taking it Seriously. We combined our finances pretty early in our relationship, like before year 2. We used to "meet" once every month to discuss this stuff but since having kids we've pushed it to two weeks because it is, in our experience, so easy to go overboard if you're not regularly reminding yourself.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going.

If you use your credit card heavily, then this takes a lot more than 5 minutes. Keeping the CC usage light in order to make it easier to manage is important to me, and a key part of that is to avoid recurring charges as much as possible.

francisofascii• 3 years ago

Don't disagree. Many of my charges are some vague Amazon charge that my wife made, which could be a product delivered, or a subscription. So Amazon subscriptions is another place to check. It would take time to match up each charge to the actual order.

HumblyTossed3• 3 years ago

Most HNers have never held a job outside of a high paying tech job. When you're working retail and struggling to pay bills, literally all you think about is money. So much so that it is debilitating from the stress. When you're under that much pressure constantly, it is very easy to miss something.

"But, if it's that bad, they shouldn't even be signing up for this stuff!", I hear some of you saying. You look for an escape wherever you can. Some little thing that will pull you, even for a moment, out of the monotony of the daily grind. Don't blame these people.

BuckRogers3• 3 years ago

I worked my way up, I'm 41 and working non-stop since I was 12 receiving a check as a paperboy. Worked at tire shops, autobody, whatever you can imagine. Before I was a paperboy, I ground down spot welding tips in my dad's shop to buy my toys and video games. Worked night shifts during community college and university. Fully qualified for SS in my 20s. Never a dollar from mommy and daddy. I haven't even received a Christmas or birthday gift in 20 years.

Developer now (a career mistake honestly), but back then I would've never had any subscriptions. Can't imagine being back in those shoes and having the TIME to fully utilize Netflix, Spotify etc.

My advice is if you're in that position, work more. Study more or work more. Trying to avoid it with some escape like watching Netflix is not productive and only makes things worse.

When I was in college, I kept a strict schedule. Classes from 9AM-1PM, work from 2PM-7PM, 7PM-12:30AM I was in the library studying until it closed. My grades suffered but there wasn't any time for TV. I simply cannot imagine getting ahead NOT doing this, and sitting on Spotify or Netflix instead. Almost scary, guaranteed way to remain a dud. But I'm sure it's common. Given life is harder now than it was 50 years ago, I'm sure the lack of effort + lazy ways is why everyone thinks times are so tough. If times are tough, we need to become tough.

For me, that life was satisfying. I needed no "escape", as I liked and struggle to remain productive today and feel more than ever the need for an escape. I often tell people my hobby is "survival". Fixing my truck, reviewing/fine tuning my finances, working on my house, strategizing for life. The issue isn't not enough time watching Youtube. It's that I'm not productive enough.

Doubly true for the "downtrodden" poor. It's just that most of them are not the forgotten men, the abandoned hardy stock from the upper midwest that know what it takes to get ahead. They've been groomed to complain and sulk instead. It's a lot easier. When I meet these people I ask them, "have you done your best for the Lord?". They have everything they need, breath in their lungs. All I ever needed. It's disrespectful to Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ to not do our best in life. Once I see these people exhaust all possible options to improve their condition, then I'll give them a handout and sympathy. Till then, no Netflix, more work. Or suffer, whatever is preferred.

darkwizard42• 3 years ago

See, I used to buy into this reasoning, but now, I'm not so sure.

You can easily say the same thing about someone who does work a high-tech job. You make so much money you stop looking at your bank accounts. There are so many new grads or even late 20s professionals who barely manage their finances beyond 1-2 months. I would argue middle-class folks manage the idea of a "6 month emergency fund" a lot better than those in high-tech who make 200k+ a year and just don't think about money anymore.

I think the right reasons are:

- folks don't know how to do this (literally what does it means to review your statements and check your accounts + what to look for)

- folks do not understand how manageable it can be once you spend the initial activation energy

- last and maybe most controversial, folks don't have the ability to make it a habit (which then causes every few months for it to become a big hurdle).

jjeaff3• 3 years ago

Most credit and debit cards have the option to get a text message for any transaction over a certain amount. all of my cards are set to send me a text for any transaction over $0.

nunez6• 3 years ago

I definitely understand. There are several reasons why I can sympathize with folks that don't check their bank statements daily/weekly and miss leaking transactions.

First, there is a lot of crap in a bank statement. They are tiring to parse.

Second, logging into and using your banking portal is a chore. First, you have to remember your password. Not everyone is using a password manager. (Love the work that Apple has done to bridge this gap, and I'm ABSOLUTELY LOVING passkeys.) Second, you have to present a second factor. Some (few) banks are with the times and use a TOTP second factor. Many use SMS two-factor. Many will CALL you with the code. All of them suck. Then you have to navigate the new UIs that look very pretty and are designed to simplify common functions (mostly checking your balance) but have made things like filtering your statement by transactions from today more difficult.

Third, many merchants use very confusing IDs that make it confusing to see where a transaction originated from (for example: a restaurant that uses an abbreviated form of their former name or their parent company's name in the merchant ID). Apple, for example, uses APPLE.COM/BILL for iCloud _and_ AppleCare transactions. This segues into my last reason why navigating transactions periodically sucks.

Tracing a previous expense is an AWFUL experience 99.95% of the time.

I capture every single receipt and bank alert into Expensify (moving into Google Sheets), so tracing an unknown charge is very easy for me (search my email; failing that, search Expensify; failing that, log into bank, which is painful; see above). However, I had to spend significant effort building systems and writing code to accomplish this since there are basically zero services that do this for consumer spending.

Most people don't save receipts. Those that do often don't save them digitally. I know this because I work in consulting, an industry where we have to track receipts to submit expense reports, and EVERYONE whines about this. Many have to block time in their calendar to get this done.

Regardless, even if you do save all of your receipts and alerts, you still need to log into the portal for the vendor that charged that $5.95 and find that charge. Portals that can be even harder to log in and navigate through than banks.

Determining which Apple service that APPLE.COM/BILL charge was associated with, for example? Good fucking luck. It's clicks on clicks on clicks. (They also make you use a single card for ALL digital purchases you make with them. Want to buy an album? Want to buy AppleCare for your new iPhone? Are you forced to subscribe to this super critical app on that iPhone that used to be free? The same card is used for all of that. This is the biggest reason why I've been investing time in moving App Store subscriptions into separate accounts. But even this sucks because many app vendors will only use the App Store for managing subscriptions!)

Consequently, when your statement, which you spent five minutes _just trying to get to_, presents an unknown $5.95 charge (that you didn't get alerted on if you had alerts on because your bank won't send alerts for anything below $50), it's easier to say "welp" and charge it back (a whole process in and of itself) or say "it's five dollars" and forget about it.

dudul• 3 years ago

I do review CC statements diligently. I use GnuCash for my household accounting and refuse to use any SaaS or automated solution. I do want to review my statements, be it CC, pay stubs, 401k, etc so I know what's happening.

Yeah it takes a bit of time once or twice a month, but it's worth it I think.

Twice a year or so I catch "late fees" on my spouse's CC that shouldn't be there. Banks just seem to randomly do that because in most cases they'll get away with it.

cooper_j• 3 years ago

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

capital_guy• 3 years 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/...

anotherevan• 3 years ago

I give them points for mentioning that in the second paragraph.

mfwit• 3 years ago

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

b1123• 3 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. I will never try them (buying a new car soon).

jabroni_salad2• 3 years ago

Dealers get a commission for converting you, keep an eye on the paperwork.

mikestew• 3 years 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.

dave78• 3 years 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.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.

Probably not beyond the next quarterly results.

massysett• 3 years 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.)

b1123• 3 years ago

The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.

el_benhameen• 3 years 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.

grotorea3• 3 years ago

Missing a payment and having to pay a late fee or interruption to an important service seems bad in fairness.

foobarian2• 3 years ago

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!

paxys9• 3 years ago

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.

pxeboot• 3 years ago

Visa calls this "Visa Account Updater (VAU)" [1]. MC and AMEX have something similar.

[1] https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau/overview

bonton894• 3 years ago

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.

tomjakubowski• 3 years ago

presumably if you report a card lost/stolen, the bank will report that to these services

ip26• 3 years ago

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.

paxys9• 3 years ago

Exactly. My cards have been getting replaced on average once a year, either due to expiry or some new security feature or whatever else. It would be a monumental pain to keep updating every online account, so I'm glad this feature exists.

xnx• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I can see past 12 months by category in Bank of America.

https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...

I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

Amex too.

the_snooze2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

matwood2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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.

Notably, this apparently exists in EU.

oarla• 3 years ago

On the contrary, most big banks provide year end summaries that can be download ed as csv to analyze them in Excel.

teeray• 3 years ago

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

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

Or can't figure out how to cancel.

lucidguppy• 3 years ago

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

quartz2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

godelski6• 3 years ago

I feel like a great way to solve these <businesses practices that are indistinguishable from scams> is to require confirmations when payments change (maybe with exception of variable rate loans?).

If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed amounts that notifies customers when they change. In fact, also pitch giving your customers a fucking list of reoccurring transactions.

Seriously, how is so much software so bad and so many products lack very basic functionality that would not be very difficult to implement but have high utility? I mean my laundry app doesn't even sort the laundry rooms in alphabetical order, they're just in a random fucking list. It's impressive to me we have systems that are so low value you can hire software engineers that don't know about sort. I don't think AI is going to replace a lot of coding jobs, but I suspect it'll replace these jobs (I just fear it'll also make this type of software more common).

starik36• 3 years ago

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.

Rinse and repeat every now and then.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

My final calculus was adding up what I had spent on storage units, and realizing it was way more than the replacement cost of most of the crap, so I reduced it down to personal momentos only.

al_borland6• 3 years ago

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.

unbalancedevh• 2 years ago

I've very late to the discussion, but this seems relevant anyway -- The issue isn't just the cost of getting/retaining customers. Businesses don't charge solely based on cost, they charge based on what customers will pay. Existing customers also are willing to pay more to not have to move. If customers are willing to pay more, then it makes good business sense to charge them more. For the owner, having an empty apartment is the worst, so it's worth it to do extra work and give discounts just to get somebody renting.

It isn't nefarious, and you do your part by being willing to move instead of pay the higher price. It's all just the way the capitalist market works.

jdofaz• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

daxfohl2• 3 years 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.

bonton894• 3 years 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.

wolverine87611• 3 years 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!

bombcar5• 3 years 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.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

Interested in filing public comments on this if the FTC asks for them?

cptskippy• 3 years ago

This is what Credit Cards do. They're shady AF but have no problem cancelling your card due to inactivity.

thriftwy• 3 years 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.

Alupis3• 3 years 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.

I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so and because I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it without having to go through some sort of account activation ritual.

People need to have personal responsibility. Review your bank/credit accounts and cancel subscriptions if you want - it's your money so take responsibility.

This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.

eropple4• 3 years ago

I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as!

The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.

slaymaker1907• 3 years ago

As someone with ADHD, that's a lot to ask. However, in my opinion what we really need is a common standard for banks to handle recurring payments for subscriptions. Asking me to review every single thing on every account is a ton to ask, but it would be a lot more manageable if recurring stuff had its own section and that I could cancel stuff from my bank app directly.

Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).

madars• 3 years ago

This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.

Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks will specifically override chronological order and process -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite having positive balance all the way when processing chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance". https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charg...

Of course this only happens to you and me, whereas banks can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions in overdraft: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in above scenarios.)

wolverine87611• 3 years ago

People need to have personal responsibility.

Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there?

I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's responsibility to not do it.

Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...

Rayhem• 3 years ago

You can advocate for more personal responsibility and also advocate for businesses to behave in the interests of individual human beings. They're not mutually exclusive. Just because I don't want a business to extort every last cent from me they can doesn't mean I want to absolve myself of all responsibility to everything ever.

Review your bank/credit accounts

I mean, shouldn't it be your responsibility to know exactly how much money you've made and spent? Why should a bank provide this information for you? Does this not serve as yet another lessening of personal accountability (pun *absolutely* intended)?

omginternets3• 3 years ago

Surely it's unethical to take advantage of people, even the irresponsible ones? There's a significant minority of people out there who struggle with this kind of thing because of circumstances beyond their control. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were saying "they deserve it".

It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.

clouddrover• 3 years ago

I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it

So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?

babyshake• 3 years ago

It should be reasonable to give customers the choice to opt into a setting that auto-cancels if they do not use the service.

andrecarini• 3 years ago

I believe your use case is not impacted by the changes proposed in this thread.

Additionally, hard disagree on your conclusions since it's not about being responsible or not; it's about the process of cancelling subscriptions being convoluted, unfriendly and filled with dark patterns.

Here's an alternate proposition: what if you could quickly and easily cancel any unwanted subscriptions directly through your banking app? Right there next to your expenses statements? What if we took it even further such that you could not only cancel right there but even request a refund for unused billing periods?

And taking it to an absurd extreme: what if you suddenly went into a coma and woke up 50 years later to a large bill from a subscription service you didn't use all this time? Was it a lack of personal responsibility?

gmd637• 3 years ago

I expect you to take personal responsibility for your belongings while you're at the office and someone wants to rob your house

Don't expect the police to track the guy down

latentcall• 3 years ago

I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so.

I also can afford to do that but if that isn’t throwing money away I don’t know what is. I only consistently pay subscriptions that I consistently use. I feel like resubscribing is pretty easy and painless also, so not sure why you’d pay for something you know you don’t use consistently?

lumb63• 3 years ago

A subscription service is an agreement between a consumer and a business, where the consumer agrees to provide money in exchange for access to some service. That service might be something that they regularly receive, e.g. meal kits, or it might be something that they can choose to access, e.g. Spotify. In the former case, where there is a definite agreement that some item will be delivered, I agree with you; not providing that is fraudulent. It looks like you're talking about the latter case, though, and I starkly disagree there.

First, it is not the responsibility of the business to ensure people use the product that the business sold them. Why should it be? This standard doesn't exist for companies providing physical products. Someone could order a meal kit subscription, and after receiving the food every week, they could choose to throw it straight in the trash. The company shouldn't offer someone a refund because they chose to throw away the food they sent. The same principle applies for digital subscriptions - the subscriber is choosing to throw away access to whatever service the business provides.

Second, I think it's worth pointing out that the principle underlying your argument, that it is the responsibility of the payee to ensure the payer gets what they pay for, logically contradicts salaried or waged work. The principle you've implied is consistent with all services being paid for piecemeal, since if nothing is produced, nothing was received. This implies cashiers should be paid per transaction, chefs should be paid per meal, baristas should be paid per cup, etc. Maybe you do think that - I can't possibly know. However, I doubt you would support a minimum-wage worker having to return a day's pay to their employer if no customers showed up that day. I think that's silly, because in the absence of active demand, the employee is still providing a service: their presence, and thus the ability to fulfill transactions if requested.

I also think what you're saying not only absolves consumers of their responsibility, but also strips from them any agency in the matter. This is not a problem requiring collective action, like climate change. This is a problem where the individual's actions are 100% capable of resolving it. In a world where lots of issues are out of the individual's control, why not empower people to control what they can? Cancelling unwanted subscriptions is a simple and effective way to avoid unwanted subscription fees, and is available to every subscription-holder. Arguing that businesses should resolve, to their own detriment, a problem that consumers create, and can easily resolve, doesn't make any sense to me.

wolverine87611• 3 years ago

Taken to a logical extreme, it might mean all that. That discussion is interesting philosophically (I mean that sincerely), but in this case I'm just speaking practically, and in that context it's easy to see the solutions IMHO.

maxerickson2• 3 years ago

It might be profitable to offer terms where billing was related to use instead of canceling or not. Like I'd be more inclined to have an account with more services if they cost less (over time) and required less attention. Maybe there are lots of people like me. Note that I do currently engage in the responsibility that you speak of, by avoiding subscriptions.

cryptozeus3• 3 years ago

What would you want business to do ? See that customer is not active then go ahead and remove their subscription?? Lmao then you will have customers asking why did you stop my account. Clearly you have not faced customers before.

tppiotrowski2• 3 years ago

OP doesn't say remove subscription, just charge $0 for months where users don't use the service.

CJefferson2• 3 years ago

Why not send a message reminding them of the service, and giving an easy one-click way of cancelling? You could include some info on how they can use your service as well of course.

roland35• 3 years ago

Aren't they just providing access to their service? Different companies provide different billing methods and that's fine!

For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not every company needs to offer both.

mtmail• 3 years ago

Yes, sometimes you purchase capacity to be able to use something. The provider has to reserve that capacity.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

"It should be shame that also falls on them, but somehow we give businesses a pass."

I have always viewed the push for "subscriptions" as a business model by so-called "tech" companies with suspicion. Looks like it was warranted.

Forgetting to cancel is part of the scheme. A friend of mine once worked briefly for a direct marketing company many, many years ago, pre-www. He said they knew a certain percentage would forget to cancel. They banked on it.

This is not something new.

jimmydddd2• 3 years ago

For annual services, I think they should always remind you before charging you. Even if you've selected auto-renew. I always appreciate the services that do that.

runsonrum• 3 years ago

I'm sure there are some out there that remember 10.. 15.. 20 CDs for 1¢ mail order.

My assumption was that they would bank on guilt or forgetfulness to keep the cash flowing in.

plasma_beam• 3 years ago

I wonder how many people bought a peacock subscription last weekend for the nfl wild card game then forgot to cancel it after.

vasco2• 3 years ago

Gym membership model is the power of SaaS.

silisili• 3 years ago

I worked once for a company who internally decided to never contact paying accounts that hadn't logged in in over a year. This isn't a gym membership, this is 5 digit yearly payments.

The reasoning? "We don't want them to realize they're paying us for a service they don't use and cancel."

I guess I see the point, but feels unethical.

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

The next step should be to transform "unethical" into "illegal", except enormous business entities rely on subscription revenue.

Otherwise it's a very well know effect. There will be unsubscription peaks every time the service communicates with thei customers, even purely informative stuff like "we now have a dark mode" emails will remind people they've a subscription and some will cancel, that's part of the business and something that affects communication frequency in subtle and obvious ways.

robertlagrant14• 3 years ago

which take money for services they don't deliver

They are delivering a service.

This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service

No it's not.

No matter how awful or shameful, people say 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil

No, they don't.

Krasnol3• 3 years ago

It is quite concerning that this comment is so high up.

It is lazy, doesn't provide any additional explanation for their reasoning. It is useless and basically just says "no".

vimsee• 3 years ago

I see that you disagree with the parent comment. I would like to know why. Could you provide some details as well?

sheepscreek• 3 years ago

I only blame businesses when they make it hard to cancel a subscription. Here’s a couple from my list: Adobe and Audible. The latter cause they don’t let you keep your “credits” if you cancel.

edgyquant• 3 years ago

This is one thing slack does right, if an account doesn’t post for a month you don’t get charges for it

lr4444lr• 3 years ago

That's not fair.

A business has to plan for the future. That means investments in capital and labor. These users have the right of their contract to resume using the service at a moment's notice, which the business is honoring by keeping the server capacity available, generating content, having support staff at the ready, etc.

timacles• 3 years ago

Its the workout gym model of the 90s.

They would regularly sign up more people than the gym could hold, but most people might go to the gym once a month or once every 3 months.

gmd637• 3 years ago

It should be illegal to charge someone for a month of a service that they did not use.

It's trivially easy to see that someone doesn't log in. Then you just pause their subscription after refunding that month. Next time they log in, you can prompt them to resubscribe with one click.

crummy• 3 years ago

Gyms everywhere would go belly-up!

alexas• 3 years ago

Why should it be illegal?

hdhdjdjd• 3 years ago

Sounds just like gyms!

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

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.

Except the neighbour did buy something. You being available to shovel their driveway. You having the equipment to shovel their driveway.

Which is why you pay for snow removal services even in months without snow.

raz32dust• 3 years ago

In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.

I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).

8organicbits• 3 years ago

ready and available

This is key. I've had software contacts where I was on retainer to provide service if needed. I wasn't needed, and got paid just for making myself available.

The shovel person's availability is reduced, they can't take another job that conflicts with this contract. They needed to buy a shovel, stock salt, maintain their car, etc. This seems like a pretty normal service retainer.

andrew_eu• 3 years ago

Long ago I used to be a regular customer at a massage therapists office and paid dues into their sort of "subscription service" program. They charged a monthly fee about equal to a 1 hour massage, but would give a substantial discount when you actually get massages -- it broke even after about 2x per month which worked well enough for me.

The incredible part was that they tracked whether you got a massage that month. If not, you'd get a 1/3rd credit for a free massage. And after 3 months of no use they would stop billing the monthly fee until you return (and collect your free massage). It was, to me, unbelievably consumer-friendly and reflected well on the business. I recommended everyone I could, and they deserved it.

Unfortunately the place shut down shortly after I moved away.

PakG1• 3 years ago

I suppose the cynic would argue that if they didn't have this billing practice, they may have survived. Which the other cynic would say is the problem, are businesses being too subsidized by unethical billing?

prossercj3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the place shut down shortly after I moved away.

Clearly you were their most important customer, eh?

libraryatnight• 3 years ago

When I was a teen I worked for a credit card company doing outbound balance transfer sales, it was awful. But the day I put in my two weeks was when my sup pulled a call of mine to review and asked me what I had done wrong.

In it, a very very old woman who never used her card anymore, hadn't had a balance in some time, barely remembered she had it, was not interested in the balance transfer. My requirement in addition to the balance transfer was to also offer the product that came up for the account. The product was an account protection that basically froze your payments if you were unable to make them.

She asked if I thought that was something she really needed, I said no, you don't run a balance so it'd likely not be worthwhile if she planned to continue not using it. The sups issue with the call was that I said she didn't need the product. He wanted me to swindle that lady.

I didn't walk out or anything I just said this is my 2 weeks this isn't for me. Anyway, at some point people make these things okay, we can stop it.

prossercj3• 3 years ago

So what is the solution? A law that requires services to cancel auto-pay after a month (or so) of inactivity? Or at least requires them to provide an option or setting so that users can have this behavior as desired?

JohnFen5• 3 years 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.

olliej• 3 years ago

s/forget to cancel/unable to cancel/

lostmsu• 3 years ago

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

bogota• 3 years 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

weinzierl• 3 years 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.

SeanAnderson2• 3 years 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.

dangus2• 3 years 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.

fullshark• 3 years 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.

daxfohl2• 3 years 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.

izzydata2• 3 years ago

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

wjnc• 3 years 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.

izzydata2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

podcasts advertise this to me all of the time. I think it's called rocketmoney or zenwallet or something along those lines

Klonoar• 3 years ago

You mean the company listed in TFA, that was formerly called TrueBill before Rocket bought them for $1B a few years back? ;P

paxys9• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

which finance app do you recommend?

tunesmith• 3 years 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.

tdeck• 3 years ago

I use an app like this as well. Was working great until I moved in with someone and it became more time consuming to look over line items and split all the restaurant / grocery bills rather than just entering the total. Now I have a bowl full of receipts to go through and the balance is usually not up to date :/.

rockooooo2• 3 years ago

sure, but when there's a dozen apps that will do it automatically, why?

marssaxman2• 3 years ago

What value do you feel that you gain from all that categorization effort?

petsfed2• 3 years ago

When I was very poor (~$22k/year), I had a google sheet that had a running tally of all my transactions, what category they came from, and was therefore able to forecast months in advance when I'd be able to afford to go to a movie with my partner. If I was going to have a shortfall (maybe because I'd been scheduled for less hours unexpectedly, or I had an unexpected health issue), I'd know weeks in advance if I was at risk of missing rent, and adjust my grocery spending accordingly.

Being exposed to the crushing reality of my poverty, alongside the daily ritual of sending off job applications and reading rejection emails from last week's applications, took a heavy toll on my mental health. If I was running things that close to the bone again, I'm certain I could take that habit up again, but one of the ways I know I've come up is that my survival does not require me to categorize every transaction in real time and confirm adherence to the budget down to the penny.

SeanAnderson2• 3 years ago

Is it really that shocking? People pay a lot for convenience. Not putting effort into managing money is another act of convenience that comes with a cost.

paxys9• 3 years ago

Hiring a money manager would be the convenience here, but that's not what is happening.

grotorea3• 3 years ago

It may be simply a case of the people who most need this stuff are the most likely to lack either or both mental energy or the requisite knowledge.

And frankly, I don't see why the government shouldn't mandate making it easy to unsubscribe.

rectang7• 3 years ago

The rapacious corporations agree with you — no matter how deceptive or even illegal their practices are, no matter how much R&D money is brought to bear in designing innovative user interfaces and bureaucratic frameworks which systematically exploit human weaknesses (particularly those of vulnerable populations such as less-tech-savvy elders) to bleed the populace dry... it's all the fault of the individual victims who are "allowing" themselves to be ripped off, one-by-one.

gedy• 3 years ago

I think you are misrepresenting OPs point. We all know many people who are extremely sloppy with their personal finances, and sign up for things they can't afford, debt they are unlikely to pay back, etc.

Am I sad for companies who take in these people as customers? No, but let's not canonize people who are reckless with their spending, even when warned.

brvsft3• 3 years ago

These comments are so blatantly absurd considering in all the cases we're talking about, the user signed up for the service initially. Even if it's a trial, the user is forced to make it abundantly recognized that they will be charged money when the trial is over because they are forced to input credit card information or authorize use of Apple Pay or some other similar service to enter the trial.

I can understand suggesting that services like this, especially when using tech like Apple Pay, have made it too easy to 'check out' through a trial process, but the language is still over-the-top since the user is still clearly considering the product as potentially useful to go through the effort of signing up for a trial or an actual sub. (And on the flipside, Apple Pay, e.g., makes it easy to see all subs in one place and cancel them in one place, so it has that going for it.)

And of course, what illegal practices are you talking about? I'm going to guess most people here aren't blaming the victim if a practice is actually illegal. But I see you're being hyperbolic so maybe I shouldn't bother.

unglaublich• 3 years ago

(especially the ones who can least afford it)

There's a correlation between financial illiteracy and acquiring cripling debt.

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

Some of these are valid issues though. I'd consider myself in top 1% when it comes to financial health and I still pay for stuff I forgot to cancel. Some of the reasons:

They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm, and hold for hours to cancel, sometimes even disconnect forcing you to start over, while not offering a callback option. Sometimes there are weeks I absolutely cannot afford to do this because of work.
You buy something, and they tag a "3-4 months free" of another service, which you can't opt out of even if you want to, and then suddenly charge you that extra money on the 5th month. You obviously cancel it, but you still overpaid for a month.
Services that charge you once a year. You forgot to cancel the Xbox subscription because you bought a PS5, got charged a year later. Now you cancel it, but you paid for the year.
Services that make you use or forgo credits that you already paid for if you cancel. (Audible) You want to cancel, but you put it off for another month because now, you need to figure out 5 ebooks to buy. Next month, you end up in the same situation and now you need to figure out 6 ebooks to buy.

The point being, you could check all your statements weekly, and still end up spending money on something you forgot about.

JumpCrisscross3• 3 years ago

They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm

This is customer service. A written notice of termination works for any consumer contract.

but you paid for the year

Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards.

barbazoo• 3 years ago

Two of those can be fixed with a simple calendar entry. We do that with subscriptions but also with things like AirBNB bookings where you can cancel up to x weeks in advance.

tomcar288• 3 years ago

my solution to this is to not have any subscriptions except for property taxes, garbage, utilities, insurance and phone plan. and I absolutely avoid 30 day free trials (if they ask for credit card info) like the plague. the moment I see a credit card number entry field, I close the browser tab immediately.

but, I'd like to know, which companies have onerous cancellation policies?

Spivak• 3 years ago

Most of them could be solved by our CC system putting people in control. Wanna cancel NYT, stop payment and let them come to you if they want to bother. The fact that people can just take money from our accounts on a whim and we have to beg them to get it back or stop is a ridiculous system. I would much rather deal with invoices.

The only system where they just charge you I like is the usage model. I get a bill from AWS, OpenAI, and Backblaze every month for a few dollars but if I stop using them the bill drops to $0.

YeBanKo2• 3 years ago

My solution is to try to subscribe through Apple as much as possible, even if it's more expensive. Unified interface, always can cancel online and I think they are required to let you use it until the end of the billing cycle if you have been charged. Not always possible, but when it is, it's often worth it.

Algemarin• 3 years ago

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.

I think it's one of the major failures of the education system. Why is there no class in school which covers taxes, savings, budgeting, etc? People are seemingly just expected to know this on their own.

hunter2_• 3 years ago

Most subjects taught in K-12 tend to be ancient: language, math, history, science, music, etc. with occasional modern electives.

Obviously personal finance is also ancient on some level, but I wonder how long it's actually been so complicated and critical as to warrant consideration for being taught in school. I'm no expert, but I think the complexities like payment cards, insanely complex tax code, etc. are quite modern. On the other hand, the same could be said for driver's ed which is pretty common.

dvdkon3• 3 years ago

Would the kinds of people who have trouble budgeting and managing their investments be any better at it if the technique was taught at school? Judging from my own experience, I'd say willpower is the bigger barrier. Thankfully I'm not in a situation where I'd need to carefully watch my daily expenses (being semi-concious of them works well for me), but if I had to, I'd have to force myself. Maybe that's too much for some.

bluGill4• 3 years ago

IF you don't know the basics of math you won't figure out personal finance. If you do know math you can figure it out - that isn't saying you will, but you can.

earthling8118• 3 years ago

Probably because people don't pay attention. I had someone at university that asked the same question, why didn't we have these classes be required. Our school required it and they were in the same class as me. They just didn't bother to pay attention to even know they had taken it.

tshaddox• 3 years ago

Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking out for you.

This is true, but it doesn't mean that collective solutions cannot exist or should not be desired.

vdaea• 3 years 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.

I've seen it first-hand how those with the biggest financial problems earn as much money as anybody else, but they simply can't handle it. And the rest of us are supposed to bail them out of course.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

While that's true, there are multi-billion dollar industries built around exploiting financial ignorance. Payday loan companies and gambling are top of mind for me here. Who are we really bailing out, the financially unhealthy or the corporate parasites?

tehjoker• 3 years ago

Well that's a dismal way to look at it. Regulations should be in place to prevent these kinds of business practices. For example, if a user doesn't use a service, perhaps they should get a refund for those months.

paxys9• 3 years ago

This is exactly the problem I am talking about. Why is the first instinct to always externalize blame? Why is big government the default solution to everything? How about – if you are not getting value out of a subscription (that you signed up for), go and cancel it. And if you choose not to, don't blame the rest of the world for your money problems.

jimt1234• 3 years ago

I interviewed a bunch of "financial hardship" people a few years back for an app my company was working on. The lack of financial knowledge was pretty disappointing to me, but the big thing I remember is that all the people I talked to were good people. They all had decent, yet low-paying jobs (nurses, care-givers, teaching assistants, cashiers, etc.) I was expecting a bunch of jerks or bungling idiots, and there was some of that: many people don't know how interest works on a credit card until it's too late, or other people are completely apathetic to their finances. But, honestly, the thing that stuck with me the most is that most of them were very trusting people, and ultimately that's what got them to where they are (broke). They trusted blindly: "[credit card company] wouldn't double my interest rate just because I missed one payment.", "The guy who sold me the car seemed nice. Why would he give me a 29% interest rate on my car loan?", and "The credit card companies can't do that; there's got to be laws that prohibit that." Lots of statements like that really stuck with me. I felt bad. It's like I wanted to give a TED Talk that would've lasted about 30 seconds: "The banks and credit card companies are not your friend, don't trust them. Once you fall into debt with them, you're never gonna get out. The law offers very little protection for you, if any at all."

And, thankfully, the app was never released. It was basically just an app for pay-day loans.

ok_dad• 3 years ago

Yea, most people assume the best in others I think. They assume others will not break the law for personal gain. In real life, those folks get taken advantage of. I know because I used to be one but now I don’t trust anyone. The moral degradation of society isn’t in the extra drugs and sex we have, it’s in the way we accept merely to follow the letter of the law, and find as many loopholes as possible otherwise. You see that in VC funded startups constantly, in politics, and everywhere else.

dontupvoteme3• 3 years ago

It's sad but Usury/Interest is often exploiting two bifurcated groups of people -- those who are trusting and those who are desperate.

sailfast2• 3 years ago

Worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for awhile. We encountered a lot of these cases and there are a ton of dark patterns as well as just straight-up not honoring the 300 page contracts that they had written. For the most part you come to understand that people are actually trying really hard to get it right most of the time.

The lack of knowledge is quite startling (but understandable, given how complex some of these things often are and how much time it takes to figure them out that people just don't have) and the pace at which it is exploited is very disappointing but inevitable.

hartator3• 3 years ago

They all had decent, yet low-paying jobs (nurses, care-givers, teaching assistants, cashiers, etc.) I was expecting a bunch of jerks or bungling idiots, and there was some of that And, thankfully, the app was never released. It was basically just an app for pay-day loans.

Maybe next time don't work for them? It's not too late to give money to charity though.

lwhi5• 3 years ago

It's not bizarre when you consider the lengths companies go to, to try convince those who can least afford it to make a purchase.

The most vulnerable are used a fodder for a vast capitalist system.

carlosjobim4• 3 years ago

Industrialisation means that most consumer goods are mass produced. That means these companies need to make their money from wide sales instead of tall sales. Wide as in getting as many individual customers as possible, instead of tall as in selling bespoke products for an expensive price to few customers.

Very few people need more than one washing machine. Well off people already own washing machines. So if you're selling washing machines, you need to make a way for as many poor people as possible to be able to buy them, hence credit and split payments.

xkfm2• 3 years ago

A lot of it is genetic. Good luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness You have a lot of it, and so do the type A personality people on this site.

xkfm2• 3 years ago

Low conscientiousness is linked to anti-social behavior, blue-collared crimes, and crimes of passion,[3] as well as unemployment and homelessness.[19] Low conscientiousness and low agreeableness taken together are also associated with substance use disorders.[27] People low in conscientiousness have difficulty saving money and their risky borrowing practices make them fall prey to subprime and predatory lending more often than conscientious people. High conscientiousness is associated with more careful planning of shopping trips and less impulse buying of unneeded items.[19] Conscientiousness is positively correlated with business, white-collared, and premeditated criminal behavior.[28]

bjourne• 3 years ago

Same "advice" can be given to fatties too. Your health and your problem. I put advice in quotes because it doesn't work and isn't that easy in practice.

Modified30192• 3 years ago

That's a lovely and idealistic view of humans.

Unfortunately bad actors have realized that what we actually are is just meat computers with unpatchable security vulnerabilities, so demanding that people just stop having problems and fit your nebulous definition of competence with unlimited and unwavering performance, has predictably not panned out.

What is the more moral solution then? Recognizing and placing systematic limits on exploitation behaviors, or is it continuing to demand super-vigilance from the victims?

sailfast2• 3 years ago

Just wanted to say that I found this phrasing to be fantastic.

wharvle2• 3 years ago

You can have:

1) An “ethical” system in which a bunch of people are losing money and are surprised by this, unaware of it, or intend to stop it, haven’t yet, but absolutely would if it were as easy as thinking “stop that”. But they said yes somewhere along the line, so it’s all “ethical”.

2) A just-as-ethical system that… simply doesn’t do that bad stuff in 1, or at least does way less of it.

It’s weird to me that people defend situations akin to 1 when 2 is totally achievable, on the grounds that “well 1 isn’t technically unethical (as I define it)”. Ok? So what? 2 is better and isn’t less ethical. What is going through someone’s head when they defend 1 and dismiss or put down the notion of 2? If you could flip a switch to toggle between the two, would you really leave it on 1? I do not get it. Why not pick the version with better outcomes?

[edit] and, separately, I think it’s plainly unethical—to put it mildly—to add terms to a contract or steps to a process that you know with great certainty your counterparty will later regret or dislike, relying on their overlooking it or not having better options, purely for your own benefit at their expense. I don’t think their saying “yes” makes that ethically an ok thing to do—it’s straight-up predatory. But even if it does make it Ok, why prefer that over… not-that?

janalsncm2• 3 years ago

No one is looking out for you

This is literally what law enforcement and consumer protection is for. Otherwise we could make the same argument about pickpocketing victims, which is frankly what this is more akin to.

paxys9• 3 years ago

So willingly going to netflix.com, picking a plan, entering your credit card info, hitting subscribe and watching TV for the next month is the same as getting pickpocketed?

jms703• 3 years ago

Strongly disagree. You gave them the means and permission to bill you on a regular basis. These area valid and legal transactions. There are no protections from poor judgement (if you deem a subscription to be a poor choice).

m463• 3 years ago

I think it is human nature.

If someone was hired to manage your life, and they did what you did, they would be fired with contempt.

nunez6• 3 years ago

I agree. It's absolutely crazy. I think about this every time I see someone pull out their massively stacked wallet full of cards. I couldn't live like that.

However, it's not entirely the people's fault. Credit card providers make it really easy to sign up for their cards but make it really difficult to do things like "add an alert that texts me whenever a purchase above $0.01 is made" or "alert me when my 0% APR promotional period is ending" or "tell me when i'm about to pay a late fee".

All of them will make you go through a labyrinthian exercise to turn these alerts on, if they make them available (LOOKING AT YOU, CITIBANK) and many will not alert you on anything less than $50, which is crazy given how many transactions are smaller than that!

Also, in a world where everything is getting more expenses and incomes aren't keeping up, using a tool that reminds you how broke you are on a daily basis isn't fun. So I can understand why folks shy away from it. I certainly did when I was living at the edge for a few years after I graduated. (That said, having this data is essential for creating a plan to change that outcome, but thinking long-term is not fun.)

Regardless, things are getting better. Most utilities and other services accept eChecks now with Bill Pay, which allows people to pay for their recurring expenses from one place. Many restaurants and shops use Toast, Stripe, Clover or newer NCR POS's which make it easy to email your receipts. (A pet peeve of mine is restaurants that use Stripe or something like that but don't accept Apple Pay or hand you a bill instead of a mobile POS. Like, come on; you're already paying for these features!)

jjice• 3 years ago

All of them will make you go through a labyrinthian exercise to turn these alerts on, if they make them available (LOOKING AT YOU, CITIBANK)

How long ago is your experience with this from? I ask because I just got my first card from Citi within the last three weeks and was able to turn these on really easily before my card arrived. I actually have a notification for $16 sitting on my lock screen from them as I type this.

jjav11• 3 years ago

It's absolutely crazy. I think about this every time I see someone pull out their massively stacked wallet full of cards. I couldn't live like that.

If you want to maximize your credit score (and you should since it'll give you better rates, saving you money) you want to have lots of credit cards with high limits.

One of the factors that goes into your credit score your available credit. You want your available credit to be very high but your utilization to be very low (but not zero).

I keep lots of credit cards, at least one or two from every major bank and some from smaller ones. Thus my available credit is very high and so is my credit score.

seattle_spring• 3 years ago

. I think about this every time I see someone pull out their massively stacked wallet full of cards. I couldn't live like that.

Some folks in this situation are likely just optimizing for rewards / points / sign-up bonuses. I've had more than 10 cards at a time and definitely have my financial "house" in order. I get many free several-thousand-dollar trips per year to boot.

ThrowawayTestr3• 3 years ago

Whenever I get a free trial of Prime, I immediately set a reminder on my phone to cancel it in a month. It's really not that hard.

paxys9• 3 years ago

You can also immediately go to settings and choose not to renew. It'll still be active for the rest of the month.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

It's even easier to reject all free trials of everything. That's what I do.

Buttons8403• 3 years ago

You suggest that spending 30 minutes a month can improve someones financial situation.

In those 30 minutes they could cancel unused subscriptions and maybe save $50 a month. $50 a month isn't bad, but it's not going to be the difference between retiring comfortably and not retiring.

Or they could spend those 30 minutes updating their resume and applying to a job; if they apply for a better job every month they could easily find a better paying job that gives them an additional $20,000 a year, especially if they do this consistently.

Overall, I agree people would benefit from more effort put into their personal finances, but people have limited mental energy and their time can be better spent on things other than cancelling subscriptions. Indeed, if someone is willing to put effort into improving their financial situation and the best option society offers them is for them to pinch pennies and cancel their subscriptions, that is a sad situation for them and reflects poorly on society.

Unbefleckt2• 3 years ago

Luckily we have many waking hours in a month to do both.

bluGill4• 3 years ago

$50 a month won't get your retied, but it will free up some cash to use for better purposes.

neilv3• 3 years ago

(especially the ones who can least afford it)
[...] 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.

These look like things that are generally unavailable to those who can least afford not doing those things.

It's expensive to be poor.

wsatb• 3 years ago

Requiring someone to call to cancel your service is almost always a shady business practice to make it difficult enough that it's not worth their time. If it takes you less than 5 minutes to sign up, it should take you less than 5 minutes to cancel. If you can sign up without talking to someone, you should be able to cancel without talking to someone.

That type of practice could use some sort of regulation.

ianburrell• 3 years ago

There could be a rule where should be able to cancel with the same mechanism that signed up. If signed up and use the service with app or site, then should be able to cancel with them.

dontupvoteme3• 3 years ago

It's called nickel and diming and the term originated when they stopped being something you could buy a sandwich with.

I'm not surprised at all, a few billions is paltry. I think i have a few subs that i've forgotten about for months or years. I have several bank accounts and several credit cards, things become complicated.

At the time i liked what those people were making, or i wanted to watch a certain series, etc.

Loughla3• 3 years ago

I'm with you on every point except

negotiating rents

I have never, ever been in a situation where a rent negotiation would have done anything except ensure I didn't get the apartment.

Is that real? Where?

bluGill4• 3 years ago

With a small landlord it is sometimes possible. Even with the large ones if you let them know you are looking at moving you can sometimes get a discount for the year. Note that you need to be serious about moving to pull this off: you need to actively look at other places to live, and be ready/willing to follow through and move if they don't give you what you want. Apartments are competitive markets for new renters, but once someone is there the hassle of moving means people are often willing to pay more.

jjulius8• 3 years ago

Anecdotally...

I've lived throughout the US - Seattle, Atlanta, East Bay, Portland - and each time I've leased a place I've pushed back and asked for cheaper rent. Sometimes it's worked, sometimes it hasn't, but that's never ended a conversation or resulted in them walking away.

The home I'm renting now, I asked my landlord to reduce their proposed rent increase by 75% if we committed to a two-year lease, and they were fine with that. Never been an issue for me, and if a potential landlord bristles at something like that, then it's a sign that things may not be so great after I've signed the lease.

civilized• 3 years ago

There is more than one way to feel about this situation! I watch my finances, but the hours I spend on it feel wasted, and I am resentful of the people whose parasitic attitudes towards my bank account make this necessary.

It's as if, when I go to relax or exercise, my only option is hiking in a tick-infested field. I spend an extra 15 minutes prepping my clothes before going out, and an extra 15 minutes checking every inch of my body after I come back in.

It's true that all this extra work is my responsibility. It's also true that ticks suck (literally) and it would be preferable if there were a way to prevent them from parasitizing me in the first place.

CivBase• 3 years ago

The line between reasonable responsibiliy and unreasonable responsibility is subjective and blurry. We can generally agree it's my responsibility to not waste my life savings on novelty mugs, but it's not my responsibility to keep my money in an armored vault at home in case a burgler breaks in and tries to steal it.

Laws exist to protect people from bad actors so our time and efforts can be better spent on things that are valuable to us and society.

Is 30 minutes a month an unreasonable responsibility to protect against companies taking advantage of people with unutilized subscriptions? Should the law be updated to enable people to save people that time and effort? Maybe. I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to at least consider.

toastercat• 3 years ago

I don't disagree with you, but lots of people do not take charge of their financial health simply because they do not know any better, or are too trusting to entities that will loan them money. And they are that way likely because their parents were that way too.

A common thing I hear when talking about things like the student loan crisis and the housing market crash of the late 2000s is "well no one forced them to take out those loans" or "I took out a loan and I paid it off, why can't they?" But when it's as prevalent an issue that more than half of undergrad students in the U.S. are in debt, and the fact that poor people taking out subprime mortgages just so they can have somewhere to live can cause a global financial disaster, it starts making me think -- yeah maybe it is the "government's fault". Maybe us smart people on the top have to understand not everyone is as smart as us, and we have to build a system that works for all the truly clueless folk.

CogitoCogito• 3 years ago

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.

I don’t disagree, but I’d point out that this applies to basically anything in life. Relationships, exercise, health, work, etc. The fact is people prioritize and many don’t prioritize their finances. All of us drop the ball on something.

wiseowise• 3 years ago

30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.

Maybe for someone who already has good financial habits it is 30 minutes, but for people who never bother with this it will take far more time.

lacrimacida• 3 years 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.

It’s designed to be complicated, confusing or easy to forget just so it traps people at least once. It’s borderline fraud sometimes, at least it feels like that to me. The recourse is to be super vigilant but when you let guard down you fall into a trap and it’s hard to beware all traps at all times especially when they’re being constantly evolving

alfalfasprout• 3 years ago

Honestly this is a very out of touch view. And you assume people don't do these things. Of course they do. Some don't. But you're making a broad generalization.

People do check this stuff. Even then it's easy to forget about something for a few months. Or ask if your SO is using something.

There are so many charges on a typical CC statement that spending time every day going through them isn't always worth it either.

jjulius8• 3 years 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.

But, see...

No one is looking out for you.

... that's just it, isn't it?

Nobody's looking out for you. We send kids to public school from ages five to eighteen, but at a broad level, we do not have a requirement for any of that education to be about how to take charge, and stay on top of, your fiscal health. I'm not sure how you can look down on others like that when a large chunk of people are kicked into adulthood without ever having been taught how to look after themselves financially.

sahila2• 3 years ago

But you can teach yourself, like how most everyone who is looking over themselves financially did. Learning doesn't end with schooling, and for most they know that, doing dance, art, and sport classes for example all on their own. It’s just that financial literacy isn’t a priority.

jchw• 3 years ago

Note that you are currently making excuses for blatant dark patterns for some reason. I dunno why we're doing that. People should definitely push harder to not waste money, but entities should not abuse their position to try to push them into passively allowing it. There's so many things you need to take care of in life that I don't imagine most people ever really get to give as much attention to all of the facets of their lives as they need to, and finances are only one of them. The fact that someone is effectively stealing your money and forcing you to trade it for time and effort you could spend doing anything else is criminal. (I mean, literally, it should actually be criminal. If I don't want to be subscribed, fucking unsubscribe me. That means you Planet Fitness after I moved to California.)

sangnoir• 3 years 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.

They may be too exhausted from their second job - or from the one job they have to be on their feet the whole work day - and may not have the mental energy to comb through financial statements. You have the luxury of time and energy, so real reasons sound like excuses to you. I would recommend you (re)read John Scalzi's essay on Being Poor[1]. Except:

> Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

The link between stress and poor decision-making is well studied, and unfortunately poor financial health is self-reinforcing: being poor is very expensive!

1. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

petsfed2• 3 years ago

Eh, there's a pretty big difference between "I'm too lazy to solve this" and "the only reason this requires so much effort is because the business would lose a ton of revenue if people could simply stop paying for things that they don't want to have". There really is no reason why cancelling a subscription at some predefined point in the future should require any kind of business-hours-only-must-talk-to-a-physical-person approach, and if your CSR handling your cancellation is not empowered to actually process your request (which is pretty common with e.g. cable and phone companies as well as gyms), then its abuse, pure and simple. I know what my hourly equivalent is, so if the cost to my employer (or myself, if I'm an independent contractor) while I sort this out when I should be working is more than the monthly bill itself, then it becomes not worth my time to sit on the phone and deal with it.

I had a regular order with Chewy, until the dog food brand I was having drop shipped stopping selling that particular type of dog food to Chewy (but I could get it somewhere else). And I had to sit on hold for 30 fucking minutes, just so Chewy would stop charging me (considerably more) for, and shipping to me, dog food that I did not want, had never wanted, and was actually shopping elsewhere to avoid. And I didn't find out that they didn't carry that brand anymore until they shipped "what we believe is the closest match" to me. I honestly thought it was a mis-pick initially, so when I went to resolve it, I followed that customer service UI pattern, to no avail. They've changed it since then, but the fact still remains, that was not at all a scenario I should've needed to call in for. I certainly shouldn't have needed to sit on hold for it. When I finally spoke to the CSR, she was apologetic that I even had to talk to her about it.

YeBanKo2• 3 years ago

It's bizarre to me that some people think that American's are somehow more stupid or gullible than other nations. Lots and lots of capital was spent to make sure that Americans are conditioned to spend as much and as frictionless as possible. And now they do and regulation cannot catch up.

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.

Where else do people need to actively manage their pension accounts like in the US? If your employer does not provide a decent 401k they trying to create a solid retirement investment account is an uphill challenge. In most other places it's simply a tax into a pension fund.

not paying random fees There is very little price transparency. Random fees are typically not random, but hidden. You can't book a rental car online without being hit with some municipal tax or other surcharge at the counter. In SF a health surcharge often added to the bill on top tax. It makes no fucking sense that it is not a part of the price or part of the sales tax. Cellular carriers and ISPs know exactly how much you gonna be paying but will bend backwards to make sure you don't know it until very end.

You are right that basic financial discipline is a personal responsibility, but removing the asymmetry in the relationship between large businesses and consumers is on the government and legal system.

bmitc• 3 years ago

That's passing the buck. All of those suggestions you have apply to these companies as well. It's just that when they are lazy, they get to leech off of everyone else and make money from it, where they hide behind the "complexity" of their systems. It's absurd that you place the blame on the victims of this.

There's so much bullshit required a lot of the time in canceling things or even knowing that you were signed up for something in the first place. Just purchasing something these days will automatically sign up yourself up for endless emails from that and other companies, even if you unchecked the so-called newsletter option. There are so many dark patterns that sign people up for things that they didn't even they got signed up for. I have absolutely been signed up for something, either by accident or a dark pattern, that I didn't realize until latter. It wasn't due to laziness, me lamenting others, or some bad habit. It was due to being effectively tricked and legally scammed.

Companies have used software-based services as a sort of trojan horse, and they absolutely take advantage of people who don't understand technology.

snarfy• 3 years ago

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

jmyeet• 3 years 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

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

the_snooze2• 3 years 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.

cryptozeus3• 3 years ago

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

tedchs• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

standardUser2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

tppiotrowski2• 3 years 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.

paulpauper3• 3 years ago

Obviously, if Netflix adopted a pay-per-use model, earnings would crater. AOL made so much $ from ppl forgetting to cancel.

neilv3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

paulpauper3• 3 years ago

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

havblue• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

nunez6• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Like wars in the Middle East?

karaterobot• 3 years 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.

paxys9• 3 years 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.

hartator3• 3 years ago

restaurant buffets

Buffets have monthly subcriptions?

jjulius8• 3 years ago

Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model.

I'm struggling to understand how you can lambaste people by saying "jUsT cAnCeL iT"[0] when you seem to be well aware of the business model of gyms, wherein cancelling a membership is widely-known to be a purposefully cumbersome and difficult experience.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059793

snarf21• 3 years ago

Yeah, was just going to say this is Planet Fitness' whole value prop .. Cheap enough that the lie you tell yourself that you will go more next month is easily worth $10 / month.

antisthenes2• 3 years ago

Planet fitness hasn't been $10 for a while now.

Their cheapest plan is something like $12.99 and with fees it's up to $18 or so. And that was 5 years ago.

jtriangle• 3 years ago

That's part of all Gym's model really. They gleefully under-provision their facilities, knowing that on a given day, almost nobody will show up relative to the number of people who will pay.

al_borland6• 3 years ago

I keep a spreadsheet with all my recurring payments. I do this so if a credit card expires or gets compromised, I have an easy list of places I need to change it. That spreadsheet also contains the cost of each thing (monthly and yearly). The columns are the company, what it’s for, the card/account it’s using, the monthly cost, and the yearly cost. It’s very useful to have. Everything is on there, from my property tax to domain registrations, and Netflix.

In my budget I allocate $100 for subscriptions and just look to stay under that. I found giving myself allowance to spend X amount made me chill out a little, so I wasn’t always trying to cut at all costs, since they are hard to avoid now. That budget item avoids the death by 1,000 cuts, while also letting me not sweat the small stuff.

demondemidi• 3 years ago

How do people not check their credit card statements every month against their receipts? That’s insane to me.

bluedays2• 3 years ago

I just cancel my debit card instead. It’s quicker, and then when I have to add my card to sending that needs it again I have a much deeper understanding of where my money is going.

lxgr• 3 years ago

Canceling/reordering a credit or debit card is not guaranteed to actually end all subscriptions – some recurring payments can follow you across card reorders!

godisdad• 3 years ago

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

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years 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.

wolverine87611• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

dangus2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I would suggest something like [LunchMoney](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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

MisterBastahrd• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

dcotter2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Ah yes. Why do I need government help managing my subscriptions when I can checks notes literally get the content from the government?

Nition• 3 years ago

You've worded this sarcastically but it does sound like a valid question.

dcotter2• 3 years ago

Off the top of my head: Libraries already exist, and the regulatory regime to oversee subscription services doesn't.

Meaning, no one has to do all the stuff required to bring a new government agency into being (including raising taxes or borrowing money), there are no new regulations to comply with (which would cost the streaming services more, which would cost you more), you don't have an new, unnecessary agency brought into being which will literally never go away and increase the size of permanent government we all have to pay for and live with, you haven't expanded the scope of government intrusion in our lives, etc.

Slow_Hand• 3 years 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

olejorgenb• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

People who use such a service probably don't know what a spread sheet is.

kccqzy2• 3 years 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.

cwillu2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Sounds like time to consider small claims court.

cwillu2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

anthomtb2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.

ggrelet• 3 years ago

This app is only available in the US. Any other similar app you’d recommend? Maybe one you tried before using copilot?

standardUser2• 3 years 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.

weikju• 3 years ago

Too many products called Copilot these days.. Which one are you using and what does it do?

jimmydddd2• 3 years ago

Haven't used Sirius in a long time. But back in the day, if you cancelled, they would follow up quickly with a lower offer.

al_borland6• 3 years ago

If you don’t call them you’ll pay something like $20/month. Calling and threatening to cancel can get them down to $5/month.

If you actually cancel, they will mail and call you intensely to try to get you to sign back up, until you call again to give them an ultimatum to stop.

Loughla3• 3 years ago

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.

kwanbix2• 3 years ago

Any advantage over Spotify or Youtube Music that you know about?

nktrnk• 3 years ago

Try FIP radio. Free, no ads, and really good music picks to my taste. Beats Spotify and everything else I’ve tried in terms of finding new music or listening to something in the background.

TBH, I still have a Spotify subscription for listening on demand.

mFixman• 3 years ago

I just cancel most monthly subscriptions as soon as I get them so I have to consciously re-subscribe every month if I want to use them.

ahati• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_3• 3 years ago

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

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

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

thunkshift1• 3 years ago

Aholes at wsj were themselves guilty of this shit

EasyMark2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

matt3210• 3 years ago

This is the point of subscription models

srinivasan• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

madhatter999• 3 years ago

Absurdity aside, I set a reminder for any trial end, preferably a couple of days before.

redrove2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

pozol• 3 years 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.

cwbriscoe2• 3 years 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.

MenhirMike• 3 years 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• 3 years 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...

maxioatic• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

gnicholas• 3 years 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.

prossercj3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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?

Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

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