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I would go a step further, cancel as soon as you subscribe. It's still valid for a month because you've paid for it! If you ever need to use the service again
by sa-code 4mo ago
I would go a step further, cancel as soon as you subscribe. It's still valid for a month because you've paid for it!
If you ever need to use the service again just re-subscribe (and re-cancel)
In fact, what is stopping you from cancelling all your subscriptions right now? You can always buy back in when you like
- orsorna 4mo agoSome don't treat months as discrete units. Uber revokes your membership immediately.
- jLaForest 4mo agoDo they also give a prorated refund? Otherwise that seems to be blatant theft
- malfist 4mo agoUber would never take any immoral action like that. They've always been upstanding citizens.
- dylan604 4mo agoWhat money did you give Uber in advance? Why would you have a balance needing to be refunded if you have not taken a ride?
- SauntSolaire 4mo agoUber one exists as a subscription you pay with certain benefits for frequent users.
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- 3form 4mo agoAlso a common practice for free trials. Adobe does that if I'm not mistaken. Love seeing companies worth tens or hundreds of billions acting like they couldn't spare a cent from underhanded shit like that. Scrooge McDuck type of behavior, except he also had some redeeming qualities.
- II2II 4mo agoWith free trials, I can understand revoking the benefits once the subscription has been canceled. While I can understand the consumer's perspective of not wanting to be billed for future months (say if they forgot to cancel), free trials are intended to attract future customers. If a person signals that they are not going to be a future customer, why should the business offer the free service?
- 3form 4mo agoSorry, but they set their signaling mechanisms so that that signal is worthless. How many people who don't cancel want to signal they are going to be a future customer, as opposed to it being an accident? How many people who do cancel do it to signal they don't want to be a customer, and not because they don't want to be automatically billed? I believe the answer for both is "not many". I think the companies do it because it benefits them, and because they can.
- wat10000 4mo agoAre they signaling that they're not going to be a future customer? Or are they just signaling that they want to take positive action if they make the decision to subscribe? And what about signaling in the other direction? Canceling the trial immediately signals that they have no confidence in the product itself to sell you on it, that the company itself believes that if you use their product for another few days, you still won't want to give them any money for it. If the company has so little confidence in their own product then why would I pay for it?
- jonathanlydall 4mo agoApple TV free trials due to new hardware (e.g. new iPhone) is like this too, I just set a reminder on my phone and cancel it one day before they’ll start billing me. The UI for cancelling is also painless.
- everdrive 4mo ago>Uber revokes your membership immediately. Sounds like a great object lesson -- this a service that is will to take your money. Better to cancel now and not look back.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo ago> this a service that is will to take your money rephrase?
- noja 4mo agoBecause for some subscriptions the price goes up.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jerf 4mo agoBut the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't. If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than the old cable model. If you're not looking, they can really bleed you out and be much more expensive than the old model.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agoYou can also pay ~$20/month for an online locker that'll pull the torrent for you and serve to your devices, if that's within your philosophical tolerances. People need to get paid, but I do not much care of the enterprise value of media conglomerates and the resulting enshittification. I don't mind paying for Nebula.tv (~$36/year) and PBS Passport (~$60/year), for example, to directly support those media creators, as well as sending creators fiat directly or via Patreon (Coffeezilla and Peter Santenello, for example).
- jerf 4mo agoI have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for considering whether or not you need something like Disney+ continuously or if you can rotate between it and other services.
- GolfPopper 4mo agoI canceled a Disney Plus subscription recently (after ordering it largely to watch a specific show), because when I purchased their "ad-free" tier, I found that after paying they just replace their generic ads with their own in-house ads, which they then pretend are different from ads because they're "trailers". Yet another example of a media company making the paid service a worse viewing experience. (For me, the money isn't the point. My time is limited. I'd happily pay more for the handful of things I have both time and desire to watch. But charging me extra for no ads, and then shoving stuff in my brain anyway, is simultaneously both petty and beyond the pale.)
- sublinear 4mo agoThe core value for most subscription services is their convenience. There's usually another less convenient way to get the same thing cheaper or free. Most people are literally paying so they don't have to set all that shit up again and the cost is trivial to them. If that's not you, fine, but my point is that nobody is "right" about this topic. Services exist because they make money.
- Semaphor 4mo agoWhen I actually use a service, it's more work to resubscribe. But money is also tight enough for me that I'm on top of my subscriptions and don't have any I don't need (and when I'm unsure, I set reminders to cancel)
- BloondAndDoom 4mo agoRecently cancelled something early so I won’t forget, they didn’t send my shipment even though I paid for it. They said I cancelled, tried to work with support but given after a point. So yeah, not all companies do that.
- mschild 4mo agoDid you receive your money back? If not, time for a charge back with your card provider.
- umpalumpaaa 4mo agoCharge back usually never works… at least in my case the provider never actually did it because the seller was in good standing.
- radlad 4mo agoCounterpoint: I've done 3 and all went through without drama.
- ndr 4mo agoWith what credit card provider? I've done it multiple times when a vendor wasn't behaving fairly and it always went through. I don't recommend doing it to a vendor you plan to have business with again in the future as they might ban you (eg food delivery apps)
- BloondAndDoom 4mo agoThis is another problem with charge back, EBay is screwing you? Do you want to be black listed from eBay all of your life or lose that $100? Can you dare to chargeback Apple or Google? It’s too risky tbh.
- iwontberude 4mo agoI’ve never had an issue with charging back when they fail to deliver the product
- throwaway2027 4mo agoI saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.
- bji9jhff 4mo agoWhy would they salt their own field it's hard to understand
- boplicity 4mo agoThis is indeed my standard practice. In my head, I just tell myself "I'm buying a month."
- dominicrose 4mo agoThe Playstation store subscriptions have different tiers and within each tier different prices depending on the number of months. These psychological tricks don't need to work every time (or on everyone) to be effective.
- radium3d 4mo ago[dead]
- amunozo 4mo agoI currently do this with language models subscriptions.
- soperj 4mo agoWouldn't this be a good use of a 1 time credit card number?
- paconbork 4mo agoYeah, this is the main thing I use privacy.com for