Go to Privacy.com. Register and give your real credit card. Don't get the $10/month subscription for "real" privacy, unless you really don't want a record of your purchases.
Now when you "subscribe" to WhizBang online, go to Privacy and create a special credit card just for WhizBang. Give WhizBang a fake name and address as well, and don't use your "regular" email. Create some spares on ProtonMail or some other low-friction service.
When WhizBang goes to verify your credit card, your fake name & address are not checked. You can give them whatever you want.
Your purchase will appear on your regular credit card records. If you want Privacy to use a fake seller, you have to pay for that.
When you want to cancel WhizBang, you just close their credit card. They will get a Decline when they go to charge it, and they'll eventually cancel you. You can go through their official cancellation process, if you want to.
To those arguing that legions of lawyers are going to track you down and sue you:
Yes, in many jurisdictions, including the US, canceling your credit card does not change your obligation to pay. (Imagine buying a $10,000 physical product and the seller forgets to charge until the day after delivery, and you've canceled the card. You're not getting out of that.)
However, there is substantial friction in the American legal system. Of course, if they can find you, they will send a threatening form letter from a lawyer. If you're not experienced with the legal system, this seems scary. But: big whoop.
It costs $5k-20k to fully pursue a contractual claim. Nobody does this for small consumer purchases. (They will send you to collections, if they know your identity, though. But if they don't have good ID, they can't even attach to your credit score.)
Nobody is going to send a subpoena for your $15/mo subscription on a dead credit card.
These concerns are all frivolous and irrelevant for 99% of consumer purchases that charge in the tens of dollars per month.
In the American legal system, it is important to distinguish between what is possible versus what is practical. And exploit that difference whenever you can.
This entire comment is waxing poetic about an imagined loophole that almost no one is actually relying on. If your credit card charge doesn’t go through, nearly every consumer oriented digital subscription simply revokes your access to the product. Neither side has any obligation to continue doing anything. There is no debt to collect on because nothing was delivered. There is no contract that was breached because the purchaser is not obligated to subscribe to future services.
It would make logical sense for it to function like that, but go ahead and test your theory. You will quickly find most places happily continue service for a while while sending bills and threatening collections.
This is especially true of those services that are difficult to cancel.
The grandparent was not just about subscriptions, but about a solution to the privacy and easy to cancel issue ("just close"), with the parent comment being about issues with payments missed in that case, going beyond subscriptions alone.
And you'd be surprised how some services continue to charge you (and give you the service) if your card stops working. I've had it happen several times when cards expire (due to messy post office service, it's a mess to renew here, plus I often forget to actively go and personally get the new one in time).
it seems kinda unfair to look at cases where companies pull shady shit around preventing cancellation, hiding the options, making people spend an hour on the phone then blame the consumer for a "race to the bottom" when they use a workaround to make cancelling the flip of a switch (like it should be).
No one is saying Privacy.com like methods are, for lack of a better word, wrong. Go ahead and fight unethical behavior with your own unethical behavior. The concern is that, despite unethical behavior being legal, you being unethical back doesn’t void the contract.
There is absolutely no way cancelling a credit card is evil or immoral. All they had to do was make it easy for us to cancel the subscriptions but no, gotta retain the consumer at all costs even if it means making their life hell until they'd rather keep paying than deal with the cancellation process.
They're the ones exploiting our "contractual obligation" to keep paying them despite no longer wanting the service. They deserve absolutely everything that happens as a result of their abuse. We won't apologize.
Presumably privacy.com knows your real identity, and presumably the privacy.com credit card number you give to the merchant can be traced back to privacy.com. From there the merchant is just a court order away from getting your contact info, and if you actually do owe them money, I don't think a judge would balk at that, at least not after the merchant has filed suit against you (as John/Jane Doe).
But of course no merchant is going to go through the effort and expense to do all this, unless you owe them a decent chunk of change. A couple months of a $15/mo subscription likely doesn't clear that bar.
How does a lawyer know who to send the threatening letters to? This whole conversation exists on the assumption that you're not fully anonymous in this relationship.
You aren't fully anonymous. Privacy.com has your info. The vendor, or their bank, can easily determine you gave them a privacy.com number. A court will happily compel privacy.com to turn over your info if the vendor can show the most basics of an agreement between you and them.
It doesn't guarantee the vendor will win a final judgement but no court is going to prevent them from tracking you down.
I don't buy it. What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.
Also, this sounds like a great opportunity for privacy.com to have a lucrative side business of bulk-selling the real customer data to collections agencies - or maybe just open up a collections agency themselves. How much do you trust them?
>What you say may be true if some small percentage of customers do it, however if this advice would start to become common knowledge, the amounts on the table change and so probably does the willingness to go after the customers.
So? As long as this doesn't happen, it's still practical.
Might as well say "this would stop working if credit services cease following a societal collapse". Sure, but it's not an actual issue for the foreseeable future.
The second paragraph is silly. Their business would collapse in a heartbeat.
If a large percentage of customers did this, then there would be pressure on legislators to crack down on it, but the compromise to emerge would be that online services ALSO have to make it as easy to cancel as it was to join.
Yes. Apparently this works differently in the US, but in any European country the ability to deduct currency is not governing the existence of an obligation of payment. That is determined by the (implicit) contract you agree to when subscribing to the service/product.
In most cases, since these sorts of subscriptions are pre-paid (that is, you pay for the month of service at the beginning of the month, before the service has been rendered), you can truthfully answer "I had no contractual obligation to pay".
And no, the judge is not going to say "you must only answer the question" if you answer that way; "when did you stop beating your wife?" doesn't actually work in a court of law.
Regardless, even if you did have a contractual obligation to pay, but found it impossible to cancel (assuming you're allowed to cancel without penalty), you could pretty safely answer "Yes" to that last question, and then your own lawyer would then expose the whole impossible-to-cancel situation when it's their turn to question you. Court of law isn't this "haha, gotcha!" thing.
If there's an issue about whether a question is admissible, the lawyers argue it. If the judge decides it is, they just say "Overruled; answer the question."
That's why your lawyer will tell you to look at them before answering.
Usually at this point I believe the correct procedure is that someone shouts “I’m putting the whole system on trial” and then everyone is forced to acquiesce.
I've been to actual trials, and yes it does happen.
You're right about one thing, though; it's much briefer. All the lawyer says is "Objection. Leading." They do it so much that they don't waste words like on TV.
I'm not saying that's wrong, but I know that many or most patent infringement cases are tried in front of a jury. There are no criminal charges in those.
So in at least some civil cases, one side can request a jury trial. I'm not sure in which ones.
Yes. A jury trial can always be requested by either side. However, it’s up to the judge (or appeals courts) if the request is granted. The high stakes ones (that you hear about on the news) tend to have the request granted. My point was that they are only guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment for criminal trials. My wording wasn’t particularly clear about that.
Shouldn’t it be more like “it was my understanding that going through the process that took place constitutes a lawful cancellation of the service provided” or something like that? “Yes, but I thought it’s okay” sounds like a bit self incriminating.
Agreed, someone would have to be egregious to attract prosecutorial attention. But for a civil judgement, using a temporary card with a fake name that is cancelled without notice (particularly if a discount was offered up front in exchange for commitment) is going to weigh in the plaintiff's favor. That, in turn, factors into e.g. credit agencies when considering taking such items off a report after the debt collector who bought it begins collections.
TL; DR This is a fine strategy. But try to cancel using the service's means. If they force you through loopholes, fire off an email and carry on. None of this is legal advice. But it does seem like the courteous thing to do.
Prior to this year, German consumer contracts were even worse than American ones. Three years was the normal, with three month notice periods, limited cancellation windows, no prorated refunds, and just as many dark patterns.
Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed? Here in NL the law requires that cancellation must always be possible through the same channels as signup, and I assumed this was due to a EU directive implemented everywhere.
I was flabbergasted that even NS (Dutch railway) tries this shit. I subscribed to one of their products through a simple webform, and to cancel I had to contact their webcare people in some kind of webchat. No thanks.
> Hadn't expected that from Germany! What changed?
I didn't see anything about EU compliance in the relevant news (and it was relatively big news for such a quotidian change). Possibly the number of people with useless gym etc. memberships after corona was the last straw - these were often 2-3y autorenewing contracts, for fairly large amounts.
I have sometimes seen shitty things from insurance companies. Such as: "Your insurance is renewing on August 1st and you need to send us a filled 3-page PDF to this address in order to cancel it 30 days prior"
My strategy: Fire off an email to whatever billing email is on there, say "I will not be renewing this insurance", and cancel the direct debit. They will try to charge, send a couple letters, and it's all safe to ignore because I've stated my intent to cancel in time.
If only those businesses weren't trying to start off a relationship by acting in bad faith (eg, making it incredibly difficult to cancel your subscription)...
If privacy.com gets a subpoena from a court, do you think they would just ignore it, or would they dutifully hand over any details of whoever owned that credit card?
That is illegal and depending on the type of service not possible. A delivered and received email constitutes due notice in many European countries (perhaps not all, not sure), which is likely to reach you. But if it is possible, I guess they couldn't, unless they are very determined and manage to force your VPN or CC issuer to disclose.
To note, in EU most sites will have strong verification of your credit cards (at least since last year)
Looking at their site, privacy.com doesn't seem to handle 3DSecure or any other DSP2 level of authentication. Has anyone recently succeeded making payments with that in the EU ?
Of course if you give your actual credit card number/CVV etc. but with a fake name it will get refused by your issuer.
One great feature of Privacy.com is that you can use pseudonyms rather than your legal name for making purchases. One "failure" mode I've encountered (twice!) is that if you accidentally reuse an old credit card account with a second service (eg. if you accidentally created a card for "donations" and use it at two different websites, or you create one for Ko-Fi or similar and it gets charged by multiple different "merchants" under the same service), the second transaction will fail. You'll get an email telling you the transaction was declined, but if you don't have email notifications enabled, it can get quite confusing why the payment isn't going through.
I generate free virtual cards with the Capital One Eno chrome browser extension
Works great and you can set a date for it to lock itself after to block charges, they even suggest it as a use case for stopping trials from charging you, etc. It generates a card per website and you can replace it as many times as you want all for free.
it doesn't always work though. Some companies can detect if you're using temporary credit cards and won't let the txn go through. Frustratingly it's often the ones that I would like to use it with the most.
I am curious if the card #s I can get directly from Citi might work but haven't tested it out. Those are a pain to generate compared to privacy.com though.
The first 6–8 digits of a credit card number represent the issuer (IIN, see [0]). Merchants can perform a lookup of those first few digits to their own denylist. Citi’s IIN for temporary cards should (in theory) be the same IIN used to issue non-temporary ones.
Chewy does this really well, and follows this same advice.
I get pet food on subscription. Chewy sends me a notice my order is about to ship. I can skip or cancel if I want.
Shopify on the other hand is hostile. I have a small store there I've deprioritized. They have a $9 / mo inactive plan, where they keep your stuff but customers can't buy. If you want to stop paying, they delete all of your stuff & domain: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/pause-deacti...
I've certainly done it both ways. Pushing a shipment back or outright canceling it. I've also added a whole bunch of additional things. In the long run, they still get most of my pet food/toy money.
I’m really reluctant to have a subscription for items where you can’t exactly predict the usage - it’s either too little or accumulates. Having the option to skip deliveries is a must.
Yeah. Chewy's autoship is pretty nice. We have two cats and we've got the quantities and timing to where just as they're going through the last of their current food, the next shipment arrives.
That and we have a subscription box from Meowbox for them as well. We used to get treats, but they didn't like the majority of them so it's just toys now.
This is why I recommend Woocommerce over Shopify, I already have hosting, if I'm gonna try and make some money in ecommerce, might as well try it without having limits. I can have unlimited products/choices on WooCommerce. WP is a shit show, but so is Shopify's subscription model.
Personally, I'd like to see them move to a model where it's completely free until you have 100 sales, then you have to upgrade or something. That would encourage more people to use/try it, plus give them a chance to actually see success and start their small business, rather than fail because they're running out of money for their business.
Yeah that would just encourage the scammers out there. Atomic Shrimp on youtube covers a lot of these scammers. I would say 100 views of the cart by distinct ip addresses to cover people just randomly opening shopify accounts.
Why should Shopify store all your information if you stop paying them? You can export everything you need from your Shopify account. They never offer a free tier to anyone, so it's not like they trick with you a free service and then force you to keep paying to store stuff you created while it was free. The $9/month is a very small amount and a meaningful discount from their cheapest option at $29/month. How is that hostile?
They could store it on aws glacier or something and it would cost them cents per month. They probably do something like that anyway when you cancel as someone said they could restore their shop after having cancelled two years before that. $9 is quite a lot for something that does nothing. I often have side projects ‘I need to come back to some day’ and then 3 years later I think ah… not good if that was 3x12x9. Export is great if you are guaranteed to be able to just import and it will work as before. I don’t see that much; usually exports from years back give a nice ‘your export was done with an older version, sorry’. How does that work with shopify export/import?
None of this is really relevant - Shopify is a paid service, has always been a paid service, and clearly markets itself as a paid service. Just because it's cheap for them to store information doesn't mean you should expect them to do it for you. They only want to deal with paying customers, so when you elect to stop being a paying customer, they get rid of your information. That is a perfectly reasonable business practice - not "hostile" as the comment I was responding to called it.
It is relevant, but as it happens these days, you read only the first line of my comment. I was agreeing with you (I can read longer comments) and was thinking of ways how to resolve it if you want to pay nothing or much less. I never said they have to store anything for free (no one has to) but you can imagine some kind of glacier storage for $9/year or something; it seems they already do that but don't tell you about it anyway considering comments from others.
Actually they retain store data for years. I shut my store down and didn’t pay for a year or two, as I had too much other work on. I later re-opened my account and voila my entire store and data appeared. I was rather grateful.
I use it for toiletries and other routine consumables at home. Amazon trucks are going to be on the road anyway; may as well save my car trips for actually interesting trips.
I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of Amazon's dynamic pricing. The discount doesn't matter if the base piece tripled because of Amazon pricing shenanigans.
That's a totally valid concern, but Amazon gives you a bunch of opportunity to avoid surprises. They send an email a few days before finalizing your upcoming deliveries, and you can review the price to see if it changed, and either skip a delivery, skip a single product in a delivery, or cancel a subscription entirely.
As a real example: my subscriptions are on a 2 month cycle, and get delivered roughly on the 3rd, which gives me until the 26th of the preceding month to make changes. On the 24th they send an email with all the prices that will be charged if I don't change anything. With almost no friction, I can change or cancel anything up until the 26th.
I have had the price change between the review day and the shipment day. It was less than $2, so I never bothered trying to get the old price. I've since canceled my Prime for a number of reasons, so it's all irrelevant now
I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of how they've tried to dupe me into it for products that clearly aren't subscription-worthy, and how it's pre-selected on items. I can't recall what I was purchasing one time that had "subscribe & save" preselected, but it was something absurd like a dog bed or a nose-hair clipper.
What? Amazon changing prices? It happens every single day. I had something like 25 items in my Saved for Later and every time I logged in at least one and usually 3 or 4 of them had changed price.
No, I'm asking about the situation you described: Do you know of a situation where somebody started a subscription and had the base price triple. I'm not talking about the price of a box of tide pods going up by $1, I mean the situation you're describing where somebody effectively gets bait-and-switched with a 3x price increase.
I have 6 neighbors in my cul-de-sac. The Amazon truck probably visits 5 out of 7 days a week. I never worried about whether my Amazon purchases were wasteful based on trucks and fuel. They were quite wasteful in the sense that I bought a lot of cheap crap I didn't actually need.
This is the worst thing about it. Holding something and deciding if it's worth your money is a much longer process than clicking "buy now", and you've probably don't even remember doing it when the goods show up in front of your door.
Amazon day is probably similar. There's a designated day of the week where they deliver everything I've ordered that week.
I don't have hard data, but it makes sense that if more than one person in my building/block/etc does the same (thus sharing the same delivery vehicle), it's probably less driving/gas overall.
It makes sense, it could look really bad for Chewy. Say your cat got eaten by a pit bull, and then a week later you're reminded what happened by a box of cat food they automatically shipped to your door.
> Some of them will make you literally call them up to cancel.
In France, a new law was just passed to fight against unsubscribing hell, called "3-click unsubscribe". It is due to come in effect at the beginning of 2023.
It basically says that if the business offers an "easy online subscription", then it has to offer an "easy online unsubscription" option. This doesn't apply to companies who only take subscriptions by some other means. However, it does apply to a subscription taken by other means if it's also possible to subscribe online.
Yeah, a few months ago I subscribed to Le Figaro (French newspaper). I hadn't heard anything about cancelling the subscription for this particular newspaper, but I had heard horror stories about Le Monde (yup, the famous one).
Just to be extra sure, I subscribed through Apple. The "cancel subscription" always worked and I never had to send any letter or spend any amount of time on the phone.
If I hadn't been aware of the Apple loophole, they wouldn't have gained my as a subscriber.
I'm not sure of the status of any current rulemaking, though. The current chair of the FTC has made it clear she is willing to take on "dark pattern" practices such as this.
The Blink Fitness example is telling in so many ways. It's not just that it's evil in the sense of mischievous, it reveals a sense of entitlement. I think this sense of entitlement to customer money underlies many problems in contemporary commerce.
Gyms are notorious for this. I won’t sign up for a gym membership unless they accept checks or cash. Most accept checks, I’ve found. Could also try a virtual credit card I suppose. Citi offers those with their Visa card.
Unfortunately, the Y is probably the only option for an indoor pool in most places, but I wouldn't recommend them in general if you're worried about scummy practices. They wanted me to come in-person to sign a form in order to unsubscribe, after I'd moved. I finally got them to relent, but still had to send a digitally-signed pdf to the manager. Of course, signing up was a simple web form.
Climbing gyms kind of run the gamut. I was actually pretty delighted to find that the one I had been a member of, when I moved during Covid, actually never reactivated by subscription when they reopened, so when I nervously called to cancel, expecting them to have some ridiculous requirement, I didn't even have to cancel at all. They hadn't been billing me in the first place.
If you want to run, go outside. Even in fairly unpleasant weather, I think that's generally a better experience than a treadmill. And if you want strict measurements and not to worry about being hit by cars, go find a local high school or college and they almost certainly have a track that is sitting unused often enough for community members to run at. That's how I used to do it when I still ran.
And even if you don't have a Y nearby, check out community centers and other such things. The main thing is finding something that's not part of a massive chain, and they'll usually be pretty reasonable.
That true. I’m just playing devils advocate. I use community services when I want to do anything gym like . The only reason for a gym membership is if your community provides nothing or the hours just don’t work for you (e.g. you like early morning or very late at night)
I always hear horror stories about gym memberships, but have never had a bad experience there.
Many years ago I was a YMCA gym member, and I canceled without any fuss. More recently I was a member of the boxing gym around the corner, and I needed to cancel due to an injury (not sustained at the gym!), and they even waived their policy of requiring 30 days notice to cancel. (I also just realized I wasn't going often enough to justify the membership, and could save money by just paying the drop-in fee whenever I wanted to go.)
I do wonder if COVID has made this a bit less bad; my partner was a member of a different gym for a while, and they were good about keeping her membership paused, even after they reopened for in-person classes, and then weren't sketchy about her eventually canceling.
Perhaps the local boxing gym derives significant social capital from being decent beyond a contract. I'd count YMCAs in this too, at least where I'm from.
A brand name gym may offer a competitive and value added service at branch via equipment offered or rent bargaining, or financing of such, or network effects or being part of a larger organisationIt is simply a rent seeker that happens to be a gym. Some may seek to be this and the above, with varying degrees of flexibility in having both cakes and eating them.
I would never sign up for anything that's a recurring charge (including utilities and such) without using a virtual credit card. It makes any shenanigans the company might pull impossible.
You are only legally liable if you sign a contract that says you are. They can send a collections agency after you, but if you have proof that you notified them before the X days required in the contract that you're ending it, you're not legally liable.
Sure, of course. My point was you can't necessarily just turn off/delete a virtual card to "cancel" anything. It may end up working out that way, or as you say it may end up going to a collections agency.
Maybe you can't. I do it all the time. Credit cards become invalid in the normal course of human activity, esp. because of their expiration date. Their software handles it routinely.
I usually attempt to cancel the "legitimate" way as well. No collection agency has ever called me. But hey, do what makes you comfortable.
When did I say it can't work? I said you're still on the hook for charges to your card. Specifically, if a service is provided, even if you cancel your card.
It doesn't come up often, because most places charge you before providing a service. For example, if you have a NYT subscription, and it goes to renew and your credit card has been turned off, you don't actually get your NYT subscription. No services rendered, no accrued charges.
However, if your gym bills your credit card at the end of the month of your membership, then you are still obligated to pay it, even if your credit card has been disabled, because the service has been provided.
> if your gym bills your credit card at the end of the month
does that actually happen? Most places make you pay up front, at least one month's worth, even if they subsequently bill at the end of the month.
In any case "No services rendered, no accrued charges." is actually the case I'm talking about. You pay a month's worth, then forget about the monthly renewals, and they love to keep billing you anyway, but surprise, surprise: the CC declines. At that point, you can decide if you want to keep paying or not. Which is how it should work.
I think we agree then. If you owe money, and your card is charged but declined, you still owe money. But, if you don't owe money and you only owe money contingent on your card being charged, then you owe nothing.
With all due respect your tone made it hard for me to deal directly with your point. But, maybe you only had that tone because I poorly expressed my understanding.
> However, if your gym bills your credit card at the end of the month of your membership, then you are still obligated to pay it, even if your credit card has been disabled, because the service has been provided.
Are gyms usually post-paid? Every one I've been a member of (admittedly only 3) has been pre-paid.
As much of a pain as that is, that would solve a lot of these nightmare gym stories. Try to cancel the convenient way. If that fails, cancel in writing in a way you can prove. After that, it's their problem.
I've gotten around the bank account requirements by simply filling in bogus numbers for the account number and routing info, then asking them to bill my credit card first.
If you signed a contract for a year with a clause that you could cancel before then if you move to an area without one of their gyms then this seems reasonable.
I've had my own experiences with gyms being hard to cancel. But in principle if I want an easy cancellation then I'll go month to month. If I have a 12 month contract I'm not going to cry if they resist when I want to cancel early...
Many gym’s business models don’t work without subscriptions. Should they simply cease to exist or is it maybe a decent thing that customers subsidize each other?
This makes a ton of sense for B2C contexts, but my gut reaction is that the conversational approach might be too high friction in B2B contexts. To be clear, the friction I'm thinking of is this constant cadence of stealing/borrowing attention.
Perhaps this needs to be thought of as part of a larger communications strategy - who here is part of a SaaS that sends regular 'marketing' emails to existing customers? :)
Maybe the defaults (boiled down, the provided examples appear to be "opt-in" if you're not in, and "opt-out" if you are in) are designed to streamline the process so conversations are ignorable so that's okay?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something! I definitely want to hear stories of this model working in the B2B space.
I got this email for a charge of $50 on K-Mart, 20 years ago! Incredible. There actually still are K-Marts, but the closest one to me is 60 miles away.
Anyhow, they said "it's too late for us to garnish or do anything else with this, but here's how you can clear it up." So no threats.
First of all, I was pretty sure I didn't have a $50 charge with K-Mart 20 years ago, and in any case... 20 years!! They didn't offer any data on what it was. So I sent them all to the Spam folder.
Amazingly, they sent one every day for two months. When I finally looked in the Spam folder, there they all were. They just wouldn't give up.
Finally, I figured out that they were assuming I was someone else with a similar name. I answered the email and said "I'm not him." The emails stopped.
When I was a grad student, my roommate had a name which didn't sound super common, but there were actually at least three grad students with the same first and last name at the same time; and two in the same department (let's call it Underwater Basket Weaving). My roommate (let's call him John A. Smith) kept getting in trouble because of this other person (let's call him John T. Smith). Once was when John T. Smith helped make an Onion-style parody paper that included sexual innuendo from a bunch of professors (including one on my roommate's thesis panel). Another was when John T. Smith ran up some sort of debt and didn't pay it, and the collections agency managed to find my roommate's information. He had a hard time convincing them that yes, there were indeed two John Smiths getting their PhD in Underwater Basket Weaving at the same time, and he was the wrong John Smith.
It’s also possible to… “move” to California for long enough that a “Cancel” button magically appears in your account setting a page. This was true for WSJ who otherwise wanted a phone call with hold times.
It's the problem of a two-party system. Apparently wanting easy online cancellation means you need to support an entire debt-ridden, tax-heavy, welfare state that encourages high crime rates, violent criminal releases, and penalizes self-defense.
Well, there's a mechanism for that. I believe other states' residents don't care as much about these things, though. For instance, the amount of work required to make this law in North Dakota is pretty low, but I don't think it's going to happen.
The blink fitness example has to be the result of a bad business model.
How long can gyms, cable companies, cell providers etc keep customers hostage with cancellation policies like this? I mean it has been forever but c'mon!
If your business doesn't provide value to your customers then you should not milk them like this... you should start providing value or cut your losses and treat them well so they will still hopefully recommend you to a friend that actually needs whatever you are selling.
Maybe there needs to be a webpage called "beforeyousubscribe.com" or something, which has a point system for unsubscription requirements, where people can go look before they subscribe. Right now there's a sort of "market for lemons" effect, where you can't tell when you're subscribing the good guys from the bad guys.
I'm very into this. A while back, I was working on a product that unfortunately folded in the live streaming content creation space, and we wanted to treat our subscriptions like refills, but we really didn't have the language around it like this. Giving users agency on the renewal process rather than hostile subscription practices is a breath of fresh air, and a surefire way I personally would feel more comfortable using a product.
I like how Rinse does this, a laundry service that charges roughly by weight of laundry. They text me if a driver is in my area and they subtract the weight from my account's total. If I don't use it, the excess weight carries over to the next month. It reminds me of how cell phone plans used to 'roll over' unused minutes to the next payment cycle.
This isn’t perfect either. Now they have pre sold weight to you. Will they offer a full refund of unused weight? If so, why did they charge you for it ahead of time instead of a per usage?
They are hoping you have some excess weight you never use and it’s free profit for them
They have a Pay-As-You-Go ($2.25/lb + $12.95*/order, $30 minimum) and the subscription offering ("Rinse Repeat"). They make it impossible to price compare these offerings, as the subscription offering is charged per "bag" not by pound weight, but they do give you a guesstimate figure: $1.39/lb based on their most expensive subscription tier (very YMMV, as the "bags" hold different weight based on the clothing materials).
* The website misleadingly lists the Service Fee as $7.95, and then throws in the "Health & Safety Fee" into a list of other optional fees while making it non-optional in the small print. Essentially making the Service Fee $12.95 with deceptive dark patterns for good measure.
This is the second time it's happened, so I gave up and kept it. I do order from Amazon enough that it matters, I guess. It's scummy as hell, but effective. I'd much prefer a model like the one mentioned in this article.
Yeah, with Amazon, it's always a step during the checkout, with a very small opt-out button. And it often advertizes itself as being more about free shipping than setting up a prime subscription. Pretty easy to miss!
You know, I've seen that, but I guess I didn't pay much attention and assumed it was opt-in. Silly me for thinking Amazon would have the tiniest shred of ethics in their functional design.
There are two buttons, and the huge bright one is "Yes" or something (constantly changing), referring to whatever crap (Prime, credit card, rush shipping) thet are pushing in the big interstitial ads you are ignoring.
Amazon isn't worth the bother anymore. You can almost anything worthwhile somewhere else better.
Amazon was founded and run by proud Objectivists, so the ethics they have might not match yours.
Most big-box stores have horrible stock and their online systems are pretty lackluster, including shipping times.
I don't use Amazon to find what I want to buy - I know what I want to buy (for the most part) before I even begin to look at Amazon. Too many crap brands to rely on Amazon's search features.
I don’t use Prime’s content features and the handful of Amazon orders I make a year usually get free shipping anyway.
I’ve definitely accidentally signed up for Prime and the confusing screen is always a reminder that I should try buying my [whatever] elsewhere. Sometimes it works and I find an alternative, sometimes I find the opt out button and finish my purchase. But their scummy tactics have probably pushed a few $k in annual purchases off Amazon for me.
I mean, if you use all that, sure. I don't do Prime books, the only media I watch on Prime is Legend of Vox Machina, I don't use Prime music, etc. So I'm really just paying $14.99/month for one TV show and faster shipping when I do order a package. I guess that's still not too bad, but it still feels gross that I was tricked into signing up for it, twice.
They raised the price earlier this year. I cancelled immediately upon receiving the email about that raise, but I hear they didn't lose a lot of clients that way
You can still get free shipping if you spend $35 (sometimes $25). I've found that I've really cut back on the number of stupid purchases I used to make because "it's only $5 and it'll be here tomorrow".
I do quite like their "subscribe and save" system though.
Sign up for the costco-sized packs of stuff you get through, and guess how often you want to receive it. Then once a month it tells you to check - and you see what they're planning on shipping, and can skip stuff you've got and pull forward stuff you're running out of.
Always thought it would be quite nifty if you could make a site like this for third-party services. I might see my 2 audible credits on there, and decide I've got enough, or need more. Or maybe apple could offer a free month - so I might pause my netflix.
Could even combine stuff (free $10 Dominos credit added for each month of Netflix after month 12 etc).
Whole current system of every service having their own UI, is just a pain.
Worked out paying for stuff works better then you can just stick it all on the same card - so why not manage it all from one place as well?
I like Subscribe & Save with two major exceptions, which stops me from using it:
1) Things go out of stock too much if it's a little more specific.
2) Prices are very sporadic and unstable. A subscription should be relatively predictable - with the exception of the obvious price inflation over time, but I'm talking month-to-month.
When you subscribe to something it doesn't "lock in the price" - prices go up and down month-to-month.
On the amazon side, there seems to be a bit of flex built in, when they'll still tell you the item is in stock, and tell you the price before the re-buy kicks in.
A lot of the items I "get told are unavailable, would I like to go with the alternative?" are still available, just for a higher price.
i.e. I think a lot of the "annoyance" is actually amazon bulk negotiating on your behalf. If say P&G decide to raise their price on their detergent, amazon has the power to decide whether 90% of their customers swallow the increase, or they all find an alternate brand.
My guess is that amazon decides not to provide P&G detergent to a few hundred thousand subscribers in a month, that helps 'focus' the P&G rep in getting the price back down the next month.
I'm happy to pay the $15/month just to have the capability to have stuff shipped to my door overnight for free. There are months where I don't order anything at all. Compared to rent or food it's a drop in the bucket.
I'm saying I'm personally happy to pay for the subscription if I don't use it, and don't care if they move to a "refill" model. So my take is that not all the prime customers are scammed.
That being said it's been a while since I did the signup flow, maybe it's gotten way worse, do you have an example?
Amazon chooses shipping defaults to benefit themselves.
With prime I have to manually select the shipping speed to get it the fastest.
Without prime, it defaults to faster shipping that you pay for. You have to manually select slower shipping to get the advertised "free super-saver shipping"
For me, most products get delivered in 6 days with Prime. It has stopped making sense to pay for the Prime subscription. It's cheaper to pay for faster shipping, given that I only order 1-2 items monthly.
One nice part of shopping on eBay is their proximity sort. IME this tends to minimize shipping time (and, of course, carbon footprint). When I order something locally from the LA area, it’s usually there the next day or two even with free shipping.
I've had this happen too many times to count. Just delete all payment methods on file in your account settings. Youll get warnings out the wazoo that your benefits are expiring cause they dont have a way to charge you, so if you really want to renew later you can.
Bitwarden can store and autofill payment info. Also, you'll find that a lot of those little purchases really aren't necessary when you have to either get to $35 for free shipping or pay as much as the item is worth to have it shipped. I'm saving $15 a month and at least another $50 a month just from not buying crap I didn't really need.
Agreed. Similarly, if DoorDash could stop automatically setting a high tip on all my orders, that'd be great, thanks. I always give a tip, but it's rarely as high as the app auto-suggests, unless I have a tiny order.
Tips are a living wage for drivers. If you don't want to pay the recommended tip, either you are a charity case (no shame, everyone deserves help when they are down), or you shouldn't purchase the service.
On the one hand, yes, this is why I tip every time. On the other hand, if I'm already paying basically twice as much as the food order in delivery fees and service fees, DoorDash should be able to afford to pay its employees a living wage without me dropping yet an extra $7 in tips.
I've done the math before and it's ridiculous that a tipped employee, due to a lower minimum wage, can literally be starving in poverty while employed, with no regulations preventing that. Our country needs to fix its regulations in this area, but until it does, employers should be offsetting the problem, not customers. Or, hell, if they really can't bring themselves to pay their employees fairly, they should at least offset the tip amount by lowering the service fees. The other day, I ordered two subs. Two sandwiches, nothing more, not even any sides or drinks. It was $40 with a $3 tip. Literally more than double the price of the food.
What I'm saying is, I tip because I understand there's a problem, but I don't overtip because I also understand it's the employers' responsibility (if the government won't handle it) to deal with the problem on behalf of their employees, not the customers'.
Yep. Unfortunately, government regulations here in the US explicitly make the minimum wage for a "tipped job" much lower than the minimum wage for any other job, and the amount is not high enough for the tips to necessarily offset that difference. An employee can be getting paid the legal minimum wage, making the amount in tips every month that the law requires for that lower wage, and still end up unable to afford rent. The obligation really should be with the employer, but since capitalism breeds greedy assholes and the government regulations aren't well-designed, they mistreat their employees on the assumption they can just pass off their responsibilities to customers.
It's awful. A good rule of thumb for waiters/waitresses is 15% minimum tip unless they're awful, 18% if they're good, 20% if they're amazing. The idea being that larger bills usually mean more food and/or more work for them. But for delivery drivers, in my opinion, it's the same amount of work whether I order $10 or $40 in food, especially if that amount is artificially inflated by app service fees, so I give all my app delivery drivers the same tip.
This occurred a few years (and wrinkles) ago, and since then, the idea of replenishing has begun to catch on. Although it's still a bit of a novelty and is more common in cities like London, you can now refill your plastic containers rather than throwing them away and buying a brand-new replacement. The circular economy, which is the theory of avoiding waste by keeping things in use for as long as possible, is being developed by a wave of enterprises in this area.
I fix this by using a one-time card number for any subscription or recurring purchase. Citi and Capital One offer them for free (the latter has a much better UI), or a lot of people use Privacy.com. Even a Visa/MC gift card works well if you happen to get one for a rebate or something. It would be great if merchants all abided by #2 and gave notice of impending charges, but ultimately I prefer to shut off the taps on my timeline rather than theirs.
I used this tactic to break up with WSJ. However, I think they technically reserve the right to try to collect fees if you don't cancel through their system.
Another time, I had a service continue to try to bill me monthly for 2 years. I just let it keep saying "your order is about to ship" and "there was a problem with your card". Eventually, they found a way to charge me (I'm really not sure how) and had an order go through, after which I cancelled through an option buried in their website.
I’ve heard that even if the charge doesn’t go through, some companies don’t cancel your plan. They keep the plan active with an outstanding balance that keeps growing.
Yup. I've heard of gyms trying to send people through hoops to cancel, so they just call their bank and tell them to block charges in the future from the gym.
So the gym just lets them collect a balance and then threatens to send the bill to collections if it's unpaid.
Interesting. My climbing gym accepts credit cards. It also allows me to cancel or freeze my membership online, though.
If I were in that situation, I suppose I would open a new account just for that purpose, turn off overdraft, and transfer money into the account as needed.
From the headline I guessed they were planning to sell tokens, but instead it seems to be a slightly more humane version of subscriptions.
So I will (again?) remind people that there are lots of services that would make a lot more sense to pay for in the form of usage tokens instead of in the form om monthly payments.
But I guess that would mean missing out on sweet sweet revenue from forgetful customers.
Now when you "subscribe" to WhizBang online, go to Privacy and create a special credit card just for WhizBang. Give WhizBang a fake name and address as well, and don't use your "regular" email. Create some spares on ProtonMail or some other low-friction service.
When WhizBang goes to verify your credit card, your fake name & address are not checked. You can give them whatever you want.
Your purchase will appear on your regular credit card records. If you want Privacy to use a fake seller, you have to pay for that.
When you want to cancel WhizBang, you just close their credit card. They will get a Decline when they go to charge it, and they'll eventually cancel you. You can go through their official cancellation process, if you want to.
This works. It's what I do.