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.
The EMVCo link is actually more interesting. The payment tokenization scheme means that the merchant never gets your card number (the PAN), they get a token.
> EMV Payment Tokenisation enhances transaction security by removing the most
valuable data to a fraudster within a transaction, the primary account number (PAN), and replacing it with a unique alternative value, a payment token.
> This reduces the value of payments information stolen in the event of a data
compromise, as a payment token should not be able to be used beyond the
environment in which it was intended. Payment tokens support both face-to-face
(F2F) and remote payment transactions.
Basically, if Amazon leaks my credit card data, thieves can’t use it because the number is associated with my Amazon account only. That one token can be cancelled and the next time I buy something a new one is issued and I don’t have to replace my credit card just because one merchant leaked my info.
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?
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.
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.
Yup. you can use any name and address you want. Excellent for increasing online shopping security. (Parent company of the three companies you bought stuff from got big hacked? Who cares; all they're getting from you is fake data.)
I was looking for this comment.
Sometimes the only way to cancel is to make a telephone call (to a number that may not be easy to find)
and wait on hold to talk to a person,
who will then do everything they can to convince you to stay.
Companies put a lot of effort into making signup frictionless, I don't buy an excuses that say cancelling is intrinsically harder than signup and can't be streamlined.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm not around or just forget to pay something. For its potential downsides, the fact that I basically don't have to think about a bunch of my ongoing billing (including essential stuff like electricity) is an admittedly first world but nonetheless big improvement over weekly write checks/mail envelopes ritual as I did for years. (Certainly there are incremental levels but I carefully evaluate new subscriptions and don't really have an issue with automatic billing.)
You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.
I sort of have a compromise solution for this. I use my banks autopay whenever possible which is a push instead of a pull. That way I can just shut it off instead of finding some weird website I haven't used in a million years or call and wait on hold for 20 minutes. I started using it mostly so I didn't have to buy checks but I saw it had some advantages beyond that.
It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.
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.
I'll be another vote for ynab. It takes some getting used to, but it makes it very easy to see where things are, save for specific targets, verify bills are getting paid, etc.
$100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of friends who also use it and swear by it.
I used YNAB 4, but gave them up for ethical reasons when they started charging yearly for their web app that was worse than the stand alone app (and the stand alone app was a cheaper one time payment). I just didn't want to see a company succeed by purposely switching to a worse but more expensive offering.
Yeah, I wound up on Monarch since it was founded by the former product manager at Mint and has a similar modern consumer look.
It's whitespace heavy though -- for people who like something that looks more like an enterprise software dashboard, there's Simplifi.
It seems like Monarch and Simplifi are where the most Mint users have wound up, judging from various forum posts. And they have an extremely similar feature set and interface. But they are both paid.
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.
> 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
This is something I'd like to have, but I don't want to use Quicken. Partially because I pretty much exclusively use Linux at home, and I don't want to have something as important as financials reliant on a maybe-it-will-work WINE translation layer. And partially because Quicken is now owned by Intuit, which is a corporation I'm particularly disinclined to reward with my patronage.
Unfortunately, every time I've looked at ways to get statements delivered to me electronically from my various financial institutions, it seems that the available options are "don't" and "something that only works in Quicken." (There used to be some open file formats for exchanging information here, but it seems that institutions have started dropping support for them in favor of proprietary protocols, from what I can tell.) I'd be happy with something as meek as "email me a PDF statement"!
I don't believe you are actually "handing over the credentials" to Intuit or any other 3rd party (unless you consider your computer the third party). When you use Direct Connect, they're stored locally (for example, Keychain on Mac), and when you use Quicken Connect (aka EWC or EWC+), it's more like oauth where you authorize through the financial institution website, and they issue a token to Quicken. What you want to avoid is their "Quicken Sync" which stores credentials in their cloud (yikes!).
It is confusing as an end user, and they don't really do much to explain it. You have to do some digging to understand how it works.
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).
Yeah, even when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, I used auto-pay.
I'd just had a post-it note stuck to my monitor of the dates and usual amounts for the auto-pays, so I was never caught off guard or surprised amount money moving.
I have a bank account that all incoming money goes into and another that's just for autopay. I transfer the sum of the costs of my recurring expenses into the autopay account from the incoming account, and that's it. Literally set it and forget it. This combined with using Privacy disposable cards for 90% of these transactions and setting hard spend limits on them has allowed me to never look at a bill.
I _used to_ have autopay deduct from a single account. Yeah, that's scary as hell and has caused heaps of problems. Not doing that again.
Ha! I was literally dealing with that exact issue last week as I was doing my Mint to Monarch migration.
And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs streaming, for budgeting purposes.
And then just kind of gave up. Apple seriously needs to put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess they can't always when they combine things in a single charge. But even just different merchants would help between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services. Or something.
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).
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.
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.
I'm like you in that I hate notifications, but I love this idea at the same time, so I think I'll set up an email filter that sends them all past the inbox, right to a dedicated folder, where I can periodically review them all together. Sounds much better than logging into each CC provider separately, finding the statement area, downloading a clunky PDF, after probably having to change a password and confirm contact info is still the same, etc etc etc.
A CLI to parse all the emails and roll them up into a nice summary would be a neat little project as well!
Actually this is not a bad idea. I was thinking phone notifications, but emails are much easier to control. Though I find filtering often not that great. I've been using Thunderbird, but if you have a suggested CLI email client that can "easily" (I live in the terminal, so that's the bar) integrate gmail and my work/school emails, allow me to hack on it, and __most importantly__ has decent documentation, then I'd love to hear about it. I tried Mutt many years ago but experienced too much friction, but things change and I haven't revisited the topic.
I use the stock macOS Mail app to pull down Gmail etc, and its backing data store should be hackable, it’s all in sqlite3 DBs (although I just tried and I get authorization errors trying to work with them! Bet it’s SIP). I was thinking either a standalone CLI or something in emacs.
That's the point. Try it out for a month, get overwhelmed by your expenses, then cut back as you learn about them. After that month, turn the email notifications off and make a habit of checking the website every day or every so often.
This sounds better in theory than practice. When it comes to apps, I'm a privacy maximalist, turning off all the ad tracking and that I can, and a notification minimalist, turning off every notification that is not something that needs immediate attention or at least action within a short timeframe.
But my settings are changed out from under me constantly. So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets categorized differently in my brain where I think we are naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a false sense of security and the friction is sometimes purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how the same explanation and justification can be used in the opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal thing.
I do still believe that there should be a __legal__ requirement that users must verify and approve any price change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer protection. I do not think it is in the public interest for companies to be able to employ strategies which are intentionally designed to trick the public and/or customers. While I appreciate you laying our your strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions to problematic behaviors.
Alarm fatigue [0] is a very real phenomenon that I am sure (potentially, depending) translates to people in their everyday lives somehow, too. I personally disable notifications for practically everything except messages and weather on my phone. Anything else, I have to check it manually. I do get email notifications about charges to my CC, though, and I tend to review them fairly quickly because I check my email a few times a day.
Indeed, I wouldn't want that but glad it's an option.
There's no need to review transactions the moment they happen to catch any fraud. It is fine to wait for the statement and review it once a month. You're still not liable, so there's no rush to do it immediately.
> I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality.
Some do, although for some reason it has never worked for me (but also have not tried debugging the process too much).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not that much younger than you but I think you need to look at average income and expenses for young people these days. Look at what it cost to attend college if you graduated around 2018.
We missed the period of time where you could "work your way through college" and have it paid off by the time you graduated, but we were able to graduate with reasonable levels of debt. I think I had $20k in debt when I graduated in 2008. My first apartment was a $450/mo room in someone's house then a $500/mo studio.
It's not possible to graduate college today only $20k in debt and they're going to make $10k/yr more than I did but have to pay for a $1800/mo studio (the median rent in the same town I got that $500/mo studio in 15 years ago). So it's great that you were disciplined but that's not the only thing that matters and each year things are a little worse for those just starting out.
>it's great that you were disciplined but that's not the only thing that matters and each year things are a little worse for those just starting out
The only thing you can control is yourself. There's really nothing anyone can do about conditions. I do believe that no one and nothing has more control over your life, than yourself.
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).
>You can easily say the same thing about someone who does work a high-tech job
No you F-ing can't, and if you even remotely think that, you have never experienced poverty. Life's a lot different when your bills are $X this month and working 60 hours only makes you $X-$1000. "Change your expenses" Oh yeah? Am I supposed to WILL cheaper apartments into existence? Am I supposed to magically reduce the cost of my groceries? Am I supposed to pray away the late fee on my cell phone plan because I literally had $10 in my bank account and couldn't pay it?
It is expensive to be poor, intentionally so. It is a huge source of profit for numerous companies to make poor people pay more for the same service and access.
I'm sick and tired of privileged jerks saying "Just be better with your money" as if you can magically stretch your $15 and hour job to cover $1500 a month in rent, or that you should have no problem scheduling things when you can't even know your work schedule the week before.
What part of "personal responsibility" changes that your rent goes up %5 every single damn year, and your pay check does not?
I grew up in poverty. I only escaped it through sheer luck that I am above average intelligence and my hyperfixation was computers and computing history and programming, and despite a literal full ride scholarship to a second rate state college, I still couldn't afford it without my jackass Rich Uncle, who is exactly the type to complain about "personal responsibility", writing a $10K check. Now I pay $20k or more in taxes every year, for the rest of my life, which clearly offsets the 16 years times $10k a year "tuition" it costs to put someone through public school.
But notably, that doesn't undo the actual, physiological changes in my brain that come from growing up in poverty. These changes cause you to make less rational and less value-positive decisions. But no, definitely my fault that my brain broke when my mom spent most nights screaming and crying and trying to not starve to death.
Meanwhile she has literally won awards in the state for being one of the best teachers. For 30 years. She still cries about the suffering we experienced. But no, better that poor people get screwed over if they don't make perfect decisions, that they are empirically wired to not be able to do as easily as someone who grew up in a not financially stressed household.
Not only that, but people really underestimate how locked into a difficult financial situation you can get. Yeah, you can just get a better job or just move where there are more opportunities, except you need time to make all of that happen; if you're working dogshit hours just to keep the lights on and you have a family to feed, finding the time to go to interviews or to figure out where to live may not be on the table, at least not immediately. Especially if one can't even afford the move itself.
Those whom have reached financial escape velocity, or never had to reach it because of good fortune, often are biased towards believing that their current lifestyle is entirely the result of their own decisions and didn't involve luck.
People should act with personal responsibility, but all the personal responsibility in the world won't make a winner in a losing situation. Anyone can do what Warren Buffet does, but Buffet doesn't risk starvation or having his children live on the street when things don't work out.
My dad was a part-time janitor at my high school and I was in my teens before I realized that sometimes people got more than a single gift for Christmas, but I'm also able to talking about this without resorting to ad hominem and calling people privileged jerks for having a different opinion or calling wealthy family members jackasses while simultaneously taking their money.
Is it a human right to live in a $1500/mo apartment? Is it a human right to live within a short commute of your workplace? Is it a human right to have your salary increase commensurate with inflation or your increase in costs when you're doing the same job from 5 years ago?
When someone says "be better with your money" they're not telling you that your $15/hr job should cover your $1500/mo rent, they're telling you that you shouldn't be living in a $1500/mo apartment on $15/hr. I'm willing to bet a lot of them have no idea just how little $15/hr is, though.
> they're telling you that you shouldn't be living in a $1500/mo apartment on $15/hr.
This is directly saying that janitors, coffee pourers, cashiers, etc shouldn't be able to live where they work. This is explicitly saying that people who can't get a valuable job should be expected to commute farther, longer, less reliably, etc than anyone else.
Why? Does SV not buy coffee? Does NYC not need to be cleaned? These jobs need to be done, and it isn't the janitor's fault nobody built a damn apartment complex in the city to house them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s how I feel about non-Tesla EVs. Well Rivian is good, other than lack of charging network; I’d never get one due to that gap. But legacy manufacturers have burned their bridges.
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.
"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.)
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.
It goes both ways, a couple years ago I had to deal with a scammer who the bank kept "helping" with each new card they issued me. It happened like 5 times before it stopped, nothing I could do.
You issue a chargeback. It's been a while since I've worked on these systems, but IIRC back in the day you would get a refund and they would be penalized an extra $25 or so on top of it. If they get too many they can loose their merchant account.
We always made cancels easy in our system, and if someone issued a chargeback we would ban their email from signing up again.
I did, the charge back process wasn't the issue. Each time I would call, they would give me a new card and number, I'd go update everywhere. Then a few days later there would be a new fraud charge on the new card.
If you use the iOS app for Bank of America, there's a "dispute this transaction" button for every charge. If you click on that, you'll be informed that your card will be cancelled immediately for your own protection, and a new one issued. When what I want is to charge back to a vendor who never shipped and won't refund when contacted. You have to get on the phone, wait for half an hour, and then be very nice about the whole thing, while trying to avoid a card replacement, which is easy and safe for them and very hard for you.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy using PayPal and Google Pay. Because my payment card details simply aren't on file with any vendors anymore. And I get a dashboard full of recurring payments where I can unilaterally cut anyone off. And I can modify which payment card they're using for each.
Yes, miraculously my EZ-Pass bill is still being paid perfectly successfully even after two replacements for the *original* card expired since, and one was canceled due to theft. Magic!
That happens in case an existing card renews (or is replaced after getting lost etc.) If you get a net new card then retailers aren't getting that info.
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.
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.
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.
It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12 month spend by merchant and merchant category.
Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.
Similarly, it sucks that banks don't allow you to unilaterally stop recurring payments on your credit card. Some companies make cancelling a subscription like getting out of a Saw trap.
Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
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.
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.
I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods.
After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them.
Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill because it was on autopay. Turns out now after 4 years I'm paying more than double the published rate. Called the storage facility and they said the only way around it is to rent a new unit at the new rate and move my things there to start the process all over again.
Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.
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.
When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.
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).
> 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.
I get exactly these types of notifications from both Discover and Citi.
This is something my central bank has forced on all banks. If I want auto pay, then my bank notifies me a day or two before, and after the mandate is executed. I also have a single place where all my auto pay mandates can be managed from
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.
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.
In general, based on various family/partner-related experiences, is that you either have a specific I need more room for a specific set of activities that I have a concrete plan to use OR I have a specific plan to have more space for this crap--which I want to keep. A lot of people pay for storage space with no real plan which is just going to be tossed at some point anyway.
A while ago I read something along the lines of, clutter is a delayed decision. That's what most storage units are. People don't want to make a decision today, so they stick it in a storage unit and pay on it monthly so they can make the decision later... or the decision gets made for them.
I think that's about right and it's even OK to a point. Sometimes I do come back to hobbies, etc. Or it takes that 5 years to be confident I'm really not going to wear this clothing again. But keeping stuff "just in case" is definitely a tendency to keep under control or it gets to a point where dealing with clutter is such a chore that many people lie down until the impulse to deal with it goes away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.
"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.
This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.
(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
We have different mental models, that's all. Is that incredible? No, we just have different life experiences that have led us to this point and how we think.
People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you to connect with a representative over chat or phone and having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the product. Almost every subscription I have right now was started with a free trial with a few buttons, but canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+ minute task of sitting somewhere on a computer or on a phone (or worse, both) when it could be EXACTLY as many buttons.
And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it.
The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
I basically only ever sign up for subscriptions that I can cancel from either App Store or through the national system where subscriptions are listed and cancelable in my bank statement these days.
My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.
That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.
It's a perfectly reasonable point that the company has all the information necessary and has the ability to automate a system which charges you only when you actually use the service, or hell, even just a system that emails you a reminder for not using the service you're paying for (Amazon kind of does this regarding their Music service as part of Prime, and I love them for it, even though I still don't use it). They don't actually have to burden society with the expectation of monitoring subscriptions.
You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).
This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.
The average burden of the 1040 C-EZ is 1 hour 40 minutes.
If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review.
There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data.
However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.
> If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.
A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes.
So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?
Of course not. He's saying that the cumulative mental effects of grinding precarity means that beep-boop rational actor theory doesn't survive contact with the pavement.
> A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes.
That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.
It’s really not though. Seeing all these comments concerned me a bit. So, I opened up my credit card apps and scrolled through the last six months of transactions to make sure there was nothing unexpected. It took 5 minutes while I was sitting on the toilet. And that 5 minutes normally would’ve been spent browsing instagram or hacker news, so it’s not like it’s 5 minutes that I lost.
You already had the apps installed... already had the passwords loaded... had zero transactions that you had to recall who the vendor was? really?... and you recognized all of your spouse's transactions? and all of your kids?... and you also checked ACH payments?... every ATM withdrawal accounted for?... not concerned with any gradually increasing amounts?... why did you wait 6 months to do this if it's so simple?
I pay through the apps. I have a password manager. There were a couple transactions that took me a couple seconds to recall. I’m single, but this whole thread is about _personal_ responsibility. I would trust my spouse to also keep up with her expenses. I also wouldn’t give my kids credit cards. Cash works fine when it’s needed, that’s what my parents did and I was just fine.
I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.
The point is, not everyone's situation is the same as yours, lots of people have a whole lot more going on. You sound like a tool by insisting that 5 minutes (while taking a shit, no less) is universally sufficient for a comprehensive financial review.
I understand everyone has a different situation. OP literally said that it’s impossible for anyone to review their finances in 10 minutes, and I provided a counterclaim. Additionally, my point was that in this day and age, the majority of people that are able to subscribe to these things have the tools at their disposal to find and cancel the subscriptions while taking a shit. Just hop on your phone, it really is that easy.
You calling me names because you can’t formulate a valid argument does not dispute that fact. It weakens your argument and goes against the nature of this site.
> I opened up my credit card apps and scrolled through the last six months of transactions to make sure there was nothing unexpected. It took 5 minutes while I was sitting on the toilet.
Six months in five minutes? How many transactions? (and did you remember them all?) How many different credit cards? How about your bank statements, other accounts, etc?
I still stand by the statement that 10 minutes is an absurdly small amount of time for a meaningful review of anyone's finances, and find your claim that you did it in 5 minutes very surprising. I would ask you to show me, but not interested in watching you take a dump :)
You can check to see if thousands of customers actually used a subscription service last month in less than one second, and automate it
Why not point this logic to companies and ask them to do this for their customers? Surely you can see the value in saving every one of your customers 10 minutes.
But then how do they end up with the subscriptions in the first place?
I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.
Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.
These patterns work on adults and are economic inefficiencies whether you subscribe to strict personal accountability or not. Good policy improves individual and social outcomes.
Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
Who cares about responsibility? I want more efficient price signaling. Bringing spending more in line with intent improves price signaling, so, gives us more utility from this whole capitalism thing. Doing this also happens to benefit and strengthen the weakest actors in the economy, and to make them more-confident economic actors.
It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?
[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?
What’s wrong with people who have no legs, can’t they just put their adulting pants and start walking?
Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well.
But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.
If you think that services should start unsubscribing people just in case they have ADHD, that seems a very odd way round to think. They're just businesses. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can know what you want or intend.
They're not playing dumb, just as a magazine subscription isn't playing dumb by not phoning you up to see if you want every magazine. If you sign up to a subscription, you are saying you want it until it's cancelled. If you just want them one at a time, go buy each one in a shop.
A magazine subscription is entirely different. With online services the company can trivially monitor your usage (and likely already do to sell your data / make UX decisions)
They don’t have to unsubscribe automatically, they could refund the money but keep subscription if someone wasn’t even opening their page in like 3 months.
I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely.
But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
> But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.
15 years ago I remember a colleague who'd bought a TV a month earlier get a refund for the difference from Amazon because the TV had recently come down in price. That's great service, don't get me wrong. I just don't think this sort of thing should be expected, particularly when it's not about a price drop you couldn't know about, and it's just not clicking an unsubscribe link.
Thing with returning tv would be more “I did not watch 10 days this month, reimburse these for me.”.
I don’t agree it should go this direction.
If someone did not even open list of movies for whole month or two that is a reasonable question to ask - should they get money back or at least a question via email if they really want any to keep the subscription.
About every week there is an article on HN about dark patterns. It's always fun to say "personal responsibility" but that tends to neglect quite often there is a billion dollar entity spending vast amounts of time and money in finding ways to screw you over. It is not about the $10 per individual, it's the fact they may be spreading that behavior across a million people or more that makes that company a danger to the public.
Personal responsibility only works if parties are roughly equal in terms if power. This is not the case in corporation-consumer relationships. Corporations can employ hundreds or thousands of people whose sole goal is to employ the forefront of scientific psychological knowledge to design dark patterns to make end users not cancel their subscriptions.
I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.
> and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are
For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.
If personal responsibility requires a roughly even power balance, does that mean we have almost no personal responsibility today?
Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."
> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible?
What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?
Does this analogy actually explain or clarify anything, or is it just an attempt to raise the stakes for rhetorical effect?
Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.
It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.
Not my intent to claim equivalence. The comparison just shows that it's possible and in fact very reasonable for a company to take some level of responsibility on behalf of their customers. I guess the difference in stakes do factor in somewhat: If car companies can do it when it's life or death and requires tons of R&D and manufacturing, why can't Netflix do it for something as mundane as charging their users that can be done with only software?
Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.
> What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service
Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others.
To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.
> Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.
It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.
I have no idea what you want to say. Is this what you mean when you talk about riding the personal responsibility bicycle, only this time it is the jargon bicycle?
It’s asymmetrical. On one side you have the consumer who wants to save $10 by canceling a service they don’t use. On the other side you have highly paid software engineers, data scientists, and product managers who have tens of thousands of dollars riding on meeting their metrics for subscriber retention. For example, Amazon implemented their “Iliad flow” to make it hard to cancel Prime.
I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel.
This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.
This is one asymmetry which can and should be corrected by legal means; markets which require unsubscribing to be as easy as subscribing get a bit more 'healthy' for subscriptions than those that don't.
Because with great power should come great responsibility, yet for some reason we allow giant companies who literally study your behaviors to exploit them to get away with charging you for services you didn't use, when it's trivially easy for them to know when you didn't use them.
Do you have a family, with 2-3 adult users of credit cards?
We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends.
I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.
this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if they still do). they only charge you for employees that have used slack during the month. though I don't know what "use" entails.
Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? Slack was bought by Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise pricing, annual contracts with user counts and “true-ups” (never “true-downs”).
It screws over other use cases because it changes the economics of these streaming services. Monthly subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix, account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will break that amortization and the monthly price increases as a result.
If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't.
I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for that viewpoint. Instead you got on that bicycle, just like the other person, and doubled down on the Fun At Parties thing. "I don't want to pay more because I practice Personal Responsibility, please bask in my my perceived moral value."
And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized.
It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner.
It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context: the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it was edited) because you've already made up your mind about the malicious intent of companies who use this model. The reality is that companies can't know if they're "bleeding people for no services rendered" because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then staying off for a few months is difficult to distinguish from someone who has forgotten about their subscription for a few months.
The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it.
> You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even.
I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.
Not signing in to a service you have a subscription to is a pretty clear signal that it is not being used. I'm not aware of any streaming service that automatically pauses a subscription if you don't sign in for a full month.
I strongly disagree, I have media subscriptions right now that I won't sign into for a month or even multiple months but I don't intend on giving it up. This is especially true for niche streaming content where production costs aren't exactly cheap but their niche nature means not everyone is consistently in the mood for that content.
I described the reason in more detail in my previous comments up-thread: because I understand the cost is amortized and it's an intuitive billing system that supports two different watching habits: consistent watching as well as bingeing. Refusing to pay because I binge means prices increase for people who don't binge. Pricing issues like this are really killer for niche streaming sites that I want to support.
I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.
I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.
Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.
All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.
(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)
The problem in question is really a problem with the subscription model that charges you a flat rate regardless of usage. The ostensible selling point is that what you pay does not depend on how much you use, and that you can use as much of a service as you want, such that the price is significantly below what you'd pay if you were using the service maximally. This is similar to dial-up internet in the old days, where you used to be charged per hour, before flat rates became common.
But here's the rub. While it is true that any given person in practice might benefit from such a pricing scheme, it isn't true that everyone could in principle benefit from such a pricing scheme. The model depends intrinsically on uneven and non-maximal usage of the service, which is what the aforementioned subsidizing is doing. For it to work, it requires that a large share of people overpay for the service, where overpaying means paying more than the value of what you receive (by definition, if you don't use a service, then you are overpaying). If everyone were using the service maximally, there would be no difference between paying for how much you use and paying a flat rate, because you can be sure that the service provider would raise prices to cover costs and reap profits.
So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.
So two natural questions to ask are:
1. What could a pay-as-you-go model look like in such cases? Could it cover the expenses of the service? Arguably, no. Those who don't use much would probably continue not to use much. Those who do might reduce consumption, because now you must pay for what you use.
2. Is there a morally sound justification for paying at least a base rate for an unused or underutilized utility to keep it afloat (perhaps charging additionally according to usage)? Putting aside all utilitarian arguments, which I take to be unacceptable, we can find a number of cases that seem to operate similarly that we do not appear to object to. Take the salary, for example. One is not payed strictly according to the value one provides, though you could argue that salary is, ideally, a method of paying for the value provided in a diffuse way (value provided previous year reflected in the following year, esp. bonuses, or upfront payment with expectation of value). So salary doesn't seem quite the same. What about the fact that you can use the service on demand? This is like having a driver who gets payed for being on-call. It seems like this may be a good analogue to begin with to try to grasp the ethical and economic reality of the subscription model in question.
> So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.
Firstly, I wasn't talking about under-utilization, I was comparing equivalent usage but one person watches most of their media consistently week by week while others binge a lot of content in a month and then take a break. They are not subsidizing each other in a normal monthly subscription model, they are just using the service in different patterns. But if the binger only paid for the month he binges, he's paying less but still consuming the same bandwidth.
Secondly, personal responsibility means different things to different people. It's absurd to suggest that if everyone was "personally responsible" they'd all be spending as much time as possible streaming TV shows to maximally utilize their media subscription. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do with health insurance is be as sick as possible so you get the most amount of medical care for your buck. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do in a buffet is to eat as much as humanly possible.
Most people are not hellbent on squeezing the last drop of value out every service, they accept the simplicity of a consistent monthly price so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume. If you want to financially evaluate everything, you can go to a digital or retail store and buy one movie or TV season at a time, that way no one is subsidizing anyone else, but a lot of people think that kind of sucks.
The benefit you get in return is variety. In a buffet, it's easy to try small bites that you would otherwise be hesitant to pay full price for and you don't have to financially regret every bad bite of food.
Yeah, some people get less bang for their buck than others but not everyone is obsessed with coming out ahead.
>so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume
This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.
Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.
> Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.
I am actually talking about this here. It sounds like you understood my point but also think this is not what I'm talking about? I'm not saying I underutilize my service, I am actually talking about equivalent usage except concentrated rather than diffuse. When you ask companies to automatically omit fees for months of inactivity, you are punishing users who diffuse their use while rewarding users who concentrate their use.
> I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.
Literally false. Netflix did this because they're not trying to build a business on tricking people who don't want their product. But it's a fairly long period of inactivity because anything less and it's not clear if they actually forgot or not https://about.netflix.com/en/news/helping-members-who-havent...
> People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
> Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly
Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
> People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
But, by that same logic, they should just be charging you by how much you watch. So it's no longer "don't charge them for the month they didn't view" but, instead, "charge them $X/minute watched". If you're going to go with usage based billing, go with usage based billing.
I know you're being somewhat flippant with this question, buy I'll bite.
So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.
Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.
Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.
I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.
The deal they offer is basically unmetered use for subscribers. Why arbitrarily pick 0 for the metering unit? If I watch half as much TV as the average user, why don’t I get a discount?
If you use 480 hours of Netflix per month it costs the same as 10 minutes per month. S3 does not allow you to multiply your usage by 3000x with the same charge.
Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.
This would invariably be followed up with a price increase if any meaningful number of customers have months with no use.
The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase.
If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.
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).
Go into your banking/credit card app and enable purchase notifications. Now, every time your card is charged, you get a notification directly on your phone.
Don't recognize the charge? Deal with it immediately. Get a charge for something you need to cancel? Deal with it immediately.
ADHD is not an excuse to hold zero personal responsibility. Find a way to manage your life that works for you. You're not the only person with ADHD... don't let it be a crutch for mismanaging/neglecting your life.
>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.)
> Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity.
Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.
I have heard of this, but was always unsure if it happened in real life. An account with $100 in it has 7 checks against it come in the same day (six for $15 each, and one for $90). If they processed all the smaller ones first only the larger check would incur the overdraft fee. But if they processed the largest one first, all the smaller ones would trigger a separate fee.
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 ...
You really think it's responsible to knowingly take people's money for nothing? I think that's textbook irresponsibility - it's an assertion of irresponsibility as ok.
Well, you'd have to put work in to know. If I get a physical magazine subscription, the magazine doesn't know if I read it, unless they put in the work to phone me and ask. They aren't being irresponsible at all.
The responsibility shouldn't change just because it's easier. Should businesses track you (whether that's easy or difficult) and auto-unsubscribe you, or should you decide when to cancel?
If it shouldn't change because it's easier, why did you make a point about it requiring work? Just admit your argument made no sense, instead of pretending your argument was just an irrelevant aside.
It does matter that it's easier. In fact it can be automated. If a user is inactive for 30 days, the subscription could be disabled and automatically reenabled if and when they decide to use it. You wanna argue that would be a lot of work to implement?
And yes, I think this would be reasonable for someone like Netflix, and unreasonable for a paper magazine. What's so hard to understand about that? they're just not comparable.
> why did you make a point about it requiring work?
Because a previous comment said it wouldn't require work. Now you also are saying they'd need to implement it. So we agree it needs work.
> Just admit your argument made no sense
Framing this as "admit" might make it seem like a fait accomplis, but I need a higher bar than that to be persuaded. Biased language only fools very basic readers.
Sigh. If you're not capable of admitting when you're wrong I feel bad for you. There's no shame in it you know. I'm wrong about stuff frequently, but at least I'll happily admit it.
Life is too short to waste energy clinging onto bad arguments simply out of spite or poor self-esteem. Embrace cummingham's law.
Your sighing, nonspecific berating of me that I'm wrong, and assuming I must be spiteful or have poor self esteem are all nonsense, I'm afraid. Make an argument, and stop the ad hominem.
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)?
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.
But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you.
Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice.
I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion.
But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children.
There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.
Difficulty in unsubscribing sure, but that's a totally separate issue. That has nothing to do with not being aware of your subscriptions.
But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed.
That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.
The premise of this discussion is that another HN user has observed that companies routinely rely on people forgetting to unsubscribe. Again, the idea is that this is part of the core business model.
As I've already mentioned, we agree that personal responsibility is important. I believe we can also agree that some people are unable to be fully responsible for reasons that escape them (depression, severe ADHD, other more pressing responsibilities like children who aren't doing well, etc.)
I think it takes a special kind of misanthropy to suggest that it's fine for companies to base their business model on the fact that such people will pay for a service they aren't using. I am not arguing for legislature or anything of the sort, but I still think it's unambiguously unethical.
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?
>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?
taking free money is in this case like your grandma living on a fixed government pension giving you 50 dollars even though you're 35 making 100 grand a year and keeping it because fuck her.
We might need nuance, but dignity doesn't pay the bills.
It reminds me of the donation drives of Wikipedia who are a microcosm of all this tension. Wikipedia is a genuinely important service that needs to keep going, but boy their marketing manipulative and cringy as hell.
> If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go out of your way to say no?
Because I don't want to take people's money that I haven't earned. Why do I want to scam people? Blaming them doesn't make it less of a scam.
> unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe otherwise
Here we agree. You need a concrete reason. For example, if your service streams movies and they haven't streamed one in a year, that might be a concrete reason. Sometimes it's ambiguous, and then send them an email.
> You know they don't want the service or to pay for it; you are just taking advantage of their mistake.
Get this: In this jurisdiction, as an employer I have to legally continue to pay for the services of labor for another two weeks (at minimum, more if the worker has been around for a while) after I no longer want the service. That's thousands of dollars, possibly even tens of thousands of dollars, for a service I don't want.
Curiously, I have never yet met anyone who has politely declined or offered to pay it back. I suppose all workers are scammers by nature.
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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.
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.
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.
You can get pay go phone contracts. They charge more on a per unit basis than unmetered of course.
And then we are talking about video services mostly here. In a perfect world, we'd have on demand streaming on a per piece of content basis that cost about what they can generate from showing ads on that content. A few cents for an episode of whatever.
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.
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.
Talking about Netflix specifically: if I don't log in and watch something for a week they will start spamming me with emails like: "Here's a show we think you'd like", "Continue watching show X", "New season of show Y is coming to Netflix next Tuesday".
They really seem hell-bent of making me watch something, just in case I was considering cancelling my subscription.
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.
"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.
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.
Sony and Nintendo are doing this for their online services. I had yearly subscriptions to both PSN and Switch Online and just before New Years I got emails from both reminding me about the yearly sub.
I couldn't remember using PSN once last year so I cancelled it.
I've actually created a business model based on it.
The vhs rental stores were dying left and right. The one i looked into got most of its money from snacks and drinks. The subscription moddel was 75 cent, renting a movie would drop from 3-4 euro to 75 cent. (only 1 at a time) You could keep it for a week, then you would get a call if you could please return it.
The existing customers knew vhs rental was not really a thing anymore. Many visited just for a chat.
I figured one could guilt people into keeping the sub. I wasnt looking to make a profit, just curuous about the puzzle.
> I’m demanding the NFL and NBC stop the BS and offer fans the service they already pay for, or we’re coming for your antitrust exemption,...The NFL raked in $12 billion in 2022; NBCUniversal made almost $40 billion. They now have a choice, either fix this problem, or we’ll fix it for them.”
Yeah I'm extremely critical of big tech in general, but calling tech companies criminal because people subscribe for stuff then don't use it sounds like a double standard to me. This is the way we are able to have nice gyms at reasonable prices. It probably contributes to making other subscriptions cheaper too.
If you want to make the world better you have to focus on the correct things. One of those is that deceptively advertised, difficult to cancel subscriptions should not be allowed. Another is that monopoly/oligopoly leads to price hikes and should also not be allowed. But people remaining in voluntary transactions which don't make sense to your personal sense of frugality? Honestly not the right bone to pick.
With the state of the world - climate change, dictatorship, warfare, corporate power, AI, mass surveillance - none of these issues is the right bone to pick.
But I agree there's a matter of degree: If people get renewal warnings and can easily cancel ('Reply with the word 'Cancel''), that's different.
> which don't make sense to your personal sense of frugality?
Why attribute stuff to people who disagree with you, in order to dismiss them? Why is it important to dismiss them? Maybe just believe they have some reasons and try to learn what they are.
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."
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.
It's pretty common on the Internet and on HN too, and in public debate. Aggressive, confident assertions deny others the power to disagree.
Contempt and shame - super-popular rhetoric these days - achieve the same thing, and they are related (both kinds of rhetoric are an aggressive display of arrogance). They assert, implicitly, that there's no way to debate this person.
Anger is another similar tactic.
Then if you don't understand that it's tactical, you give up. So far, to my amazement, very few people seem to understand it; almost all take it at face value.
Perhaps, but all I'm doing is reversing the equally unjustified claims in the parent. Ironically they've lamented unjustified claims in the sibling comment to this one, but their post is chock full of them.
How are you supposed to know that they're unjustified when the (at that time) top comment is just "no"? Are you supposed to accept the superiority of some anonymous commenter, or is the fact that they just "need to" post "no" and therefore show that their opinion must be superior?
I was that commenter who said no. I was replying to equally unjustified assertions. Just because my reply was shorter, does mean it contained fewer justifications.
Not the op, but, if you pay me $5/month for a VPS, and you never do anything but let it sit idle because you forgot about it, and you don’t notice that you’re still paying me $5 / month… how exactly does that make me evil?
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.
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.
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.
Because accurately pricing sales around intended purchases makes the economy better
And it's more efficient for a company managing subscriptions to automate accurate pricing the right way than it is for each and every customer to sift through their payment history for anomalies
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
We also don't know that it closed because it failed. Small businesses like that can end up closing just because the owner moves away or something like that, if the owner is highly involved in operating the place.
I’m highly suspicious that the whole 90% of restaurants fail thing is largely because small business owners don’t know how to manage their finances and maintain adequate buffers for lean months. I expect even the highest revenue places to just fall over suddenly because of it
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds pretty awesome albeit vastly more complicated than what I had imagined. The idea of customers collective bargaining to force competition is neat.
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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadIgnore 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.
It’s not unique to Apple though. I think it’s this standard from EMVCo
https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/
> EMV Payment Tokenisation enhances transaction security by removing the most valuable data to a fraudster within a transaction, the primary account number (PAN), and replacing it with a unique alternative value, a payment token.
> This reduces the value of payments information stolen in the event of a data compromise, as a payment token should not be able to be used beyond the environment in which it was intended. Payment tokens support both face-to-face (F2F) and remote payment transactions.
Basically, if Amazon leaks my credit card data, thieves can’t use it because the number is associated with my Amazon account only. That one token can be cancelled and the next time I buy something a new one is issued and I don’t have to replace my credit card just because one merchant leaked my info.
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.
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.
To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.
I have virtual cards through capital one but they seem much less feature rich.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.
I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!
It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.
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.
$100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of friends who also use it and swear by it.
https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
It's whitespace heavy though -- for people who like something that looks more like an enterprise software dashboard, there's Simplifi.
It seems like Monarch and Simplifi are where the most Mint users have wound up, judging from various forum posts. And they have an extremely similar feature set and interface. But they are both paid.
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.
Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll be down to one bank account, one credit card, and that's it.
This is something I'd like to have, but I don't want to use Quicken. Partially because I pretty much exclusively use Linux at home, and I don't want to have something as important as financials reliant on a maybe-it-will-work WINE translation layer. And partially because Quicken is now owned by Intuit, which is a corporation I'm particularly disinclined to reward with my patronage.
Unfortunately, every time I've looked at ways to get statements delivered to me electronically from my various financial institutions, it seems that the available options are "don't" and "something that only works in Quicken." (There used to be some open file formats for exchanging information here, but it seems that institutions have started dropping support for them in favor of proprietary protocols, from what I can tell.) I'd be happy with something as meek as "email me a PDF statement"!
It is confusing as an end user, and they don't really do much to explain it. You have to do some digging to understand how it works.
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).
It may be evil for you, but for me, it's an absolute lifesaver.
I'd just had a post-it note stuck to my monitor of the dates and usual amounts for the auto-pays, so I was never caught off guard or surprised amount money moving.
I have a bank account that all incoming money goes into and another that's just for autopay. I transfer the sum of the costs of my recurring expenses into the autopay account from the incoming account, and that's it. Literally set it and forget it. This combined with using Privacy disposable cards for 90% of these transactions and setting hard spend limits on them has allowed me to never look at a bill.
I _used to_ have autopay deduct from a single account. Yeah, that's scary as hell and has caused heaps of problems. Not doing that again.
Apple $4.99
Apple $1.99
Apple $14.99
Apple $4.99
Apple $2.99
Apple $9.99
good luck!
And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs streaming, for budgeting purposes.
And then just kind of gave up. Apple seriously needs to put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess they can't always when they combine things in a single charge. But even just different merchants would help between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services. Or something.
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.
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.
A CLI to parse all the emails and roll them up into a nice summary would be a neat little project as well!
But my settings are changed out from under me constantly. So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets categorized differently in my brain where I think we are naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a false sense of security and the friction is sometimes purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how the same explanation and justification can be used in the opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal thing.
I do still believe that there should be a __legal__ requirement that users must verify and approve any price change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer protection. I do not think it is in the public interest for companies to be able to employ strategies which are intentionally designed to trick the public and/or customers. While I appreciate you laying our your strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions to problematic behaviors.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
Indeed, I wouldn't want that but glad it's an option.
There's no need to review transactions the moment they happen to catch any fraud. It is fine to wait for the statement and review it once a month. You're still not liable, so there's no rush to do it immediately.
> I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality.
Some do, although for some reason it has never worked for me (but also have not tried debugging the process too much).
Having it go ping every time like that is definitely a way to have good knowledge of what recurring payments you are making.
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.
It can be nice, but you might miss the nighttime ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
We missed the period of time where you could "work your way through college" and have it paid off by the time you graduated, but we were able to graduate with reasonable levels of debt. I think I had $20k in debt when I graduated in 2008. My first apartment was a $450/mo room in someone's house then a $500/mo studio.
It's not possible to graduate college today only $20k in debt and they're going to make $10k/yr more than I did but have to pay for a $1800/mo studio (the median rent in the same town I got that $500/mo studio in 15 years ago). So it's great that you were disciplined but that's not the only thing that matters and each year things are a little worse for those just starting out.
The only thing you can control is yourself. There's really nothing anyone can do about conditions. I do believe that no one and nothing has more control over your life, than yourself.
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).
No you F-ing can't, and if you even remotely think that, you have never experienced poverty. Life's a lot different when your bills are $X this month and working 60 hours only makes you $X-$1000. "Change your expenses" Oh yeah? Am I supposed to WILL cheaper apartments into existence? Am I supposed to magically reduce the cost of my groceries? Am I supposed to pray away the late fee on my cell phone plan because I literally had $10 in my bank account and couldn't pay it?
It is expensive to be poor, intentionally so. It is a huge source of profit for numerous companies to make poor people pay more for the same service and access.
I'm sick and tired of privileged jerks saying "Just be better with your money" as if you can magically stretch your $15 and hour job to cover $1500 a month in rent, or that you should have no problem scheduling things when you can't even know your work schedule the week before.
What part of "personal responsibility" changes that your rent goes up %5 every single damn year, and your pay check does not?
I grew up in poverty. I only escaped it through sheer luck that I am above average intelligence and my hyperfixation was computers and computing history and programming, and despite a literal full ride scholarship to a second rate state college, I still couldn't afford it without my jackass Rich Uncle, who is exactly the type to complain about "personal responsibility", writing a $10K check. Now I pay $20k or more in taxes every year, for the rest of my life, which clearly offsets the 16 years times $10k a year "tuition" it costs to put someone through public school.
But notably, that doesn't undo the actual, physiological changes in my brain that come from growing up in poverty. These changes cause you to make less rational and less value-positive decisions. But no, definitely my fault that my brain broke when my mom spent most nights screaming and crying and trying to not starve to death.
Meanwhile she has literally won awards in the state for being one of the best teachers. For 30 years. She still cries about the suffering we experienced. But no, better that poor people get screwed over if they don't make perfect decisions, that they are empirically wired to not be able to do as easily as someone who grew up in a not financially stressed household.
Those whom have reached financial escape velocity, or never had to reach it because of good fortune, often are biased towards believing that their current lifestyle is entirely the result of their own decisions and didn't involve luck.
People should act with personal responsibility, but all the personal responsibility in the world won't make a winner in a losing situation. Anyone can do what Warren Buffet does, but Buffet doesn't risk starvation or having his children live on the street when things don't work out.
Is it a human right to live in a $1500/mo apartment? Is it a human right to live within a short commute of your workplace? Is it a human right to have your salary increase commensurate with inflation or your increase in costs when you're doing the same job from 5 years ago?
When someone says "be better with your money" they're not telling you that your $15/hr job should cover your $1500/mo rent, they're telling you that you shouldn't be living in a $1500/mo apartment on $15/hr. I'm willing to bet a lot of them have no idea just how little $15/hr is, though.
This is directly saying that janitors, coffee pourers, cashiers, etc shouldn't be able to live where they work. This is explicitly saying that people who can't get a valuable job should be expected to commute farther, longer, less reliably, etc than anyone else.
Why? Does SV not buy coffee? Does NYC not need to be cleaned? These jobs need to be done, and it isn't the janitor's fault nobody built a damn apartment complex in the city to house them.
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.
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.
Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1].
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
That's right, SiriusXM can't even give us their service, that's much they poisoned that water well.
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.
Probably not beyond the next quarterly results.
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.)
We always made cancels easy in our system, and if someone issued a chargeback we would ban their email from signing up again.
[1] https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau/overview
Even incurred some chargeback fees in the process because I forgot to update a few vendors.
Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...
I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.
Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
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.
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.
I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel after a trial.
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).
I get exactly these types of notifications from both Discover and Citi.
Rinse and repeat every now and then.
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.
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.
I also set the credit cards to send me an email for any transaction over $1.
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.
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.
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.
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!
If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.
Myself would like to know how that works in detail.
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.
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.
"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.
(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it.
The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.
That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.
You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).
This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.
If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review.
There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data.
However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.
Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.
So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?
That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.
I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.
You calling me names because you can’t formulate a valid argument does not dispute that fact. It weakens your argument and goes against the nature of this site.
Six months in five minutes? How many transactions? (and did you remember them all?) How many different credit cards? How about your bank statements, other accounts, etc?
I still stand by the statement that 10 minutes is an absurdly small amount of time for a meaningful review of anyone's finances, and find your claim that you did it in 5 minutes very surprising. I would ask you to show me, but not interested in watching you take a dump :)
Why not point this logic to companies and ask them to do this for their customers? Surely you can see the value in saving every one of your customers 10 minutes.
I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.
Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.
If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.
Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?
[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?
Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well.
But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.
That businesses and advocates play dumb when it comes to this basic fact is no longer astonishing to me, sadly
I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely.
But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.
Proposing that they refund money would be realistic if they would at least agree to send out email - which I do believe will never happen.
So refunding money is fantasy, sending out emails is realistic but since they won’t do it, that makes refunds even more unlikely.
Thing with returning tv would be more “I did not watch 10 days this month, reimburse these for me.”.
I don’t agree it should go this direction.
If someone did not even open list of movies for whole month or two that is a reasonable question to ask - should they get money back or at least a question via email if they really want any to keep the subscription.
I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.
For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.
Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."
What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?
Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.
It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.
Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.
They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.
Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others. To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.
If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.
It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...
I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel.
This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.
We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends.
I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.
If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't.
I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized.
It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner.
Isn't that nice?
The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it.
> You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even.
I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.
The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.
I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.
Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.
All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.
(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)
But here's the rub. While it is true that any given person in practice might benefit from such a pricing scheme, it isn't true that everyone could in principle benefit from such a pricing scheme. The model depends intrinsically on uneven and non-maximal usage of the service, which is what the aforementioned subsidizing is doing. For it to work, it requires that a large share of people overpay for the service, where overpaying means paying more than the value of what you receive (by definition, if you don't use a service, then you are overpaying). If everyone were using the service maximally, there would be no difference between paying for how much you use and paying a flat rate, because you can be sure that the service provider would raise prices to cover costs and reap profits.
So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.
So two natural questions to ask are:
1. What could a pay-as-you-go model look like in such cases? Could it cover the expenses of the service? Arguably, no. Those who don't use much would probably continue not to use much. Those who do might reduce consumption, because now you must pay for what you use.
2. Is there a morally sound justification for paying at least a base rate for an unused or underutilized utility to keep it afloat (perhaps charging additionally according to usage)? Putting aside all utilitarian arguments, which I take to be unacceptable, we can find a number of cases that seem to operate similarly that we do not appear to object to. Take the salary, for example. One is not payed strictly according to the value one provides, though you could argue that salary is, ideally, a method of paying for the value provided in a diffuse way (value provided previous year reflected in the following year, esp. bonuses, or upfront payment with expectation of value). So salary doesn't seem quite the same. What about the fact that you can use the service on demand? This is like having a driver who gets payed for being on-call. It seems like this may be a good analogue to begin with to try to grasp the ethical and economic reality of the subscription model in question.
Firstly, I wasn't talking about under-utilization, I was comparing equivalent usage but one person watches most of their media consistently week by week while others binge a lot of content in a month and then take a break. They are not subsidizing each other in a normal monthly subscription model, they are just using the service in different patterns. But if the binger only paid for the month he binges, he's paying less but still consuming the same bandwidth.
Secondly, personal responsibility means different things to different people. It's absurd to suggest that if everyone was "personally responsible" they'd all be spending as much time as possible streaming TV shows to maximally utilize their media subscription. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do with health insurance is be as sick as possible so you get the most amount of medical care for your buck. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do in a buffet is to eat as much as humanly possible.
Most people are not hellbent on squeezing the last drop of value out every service, they accept the simplicity of a consistent monthly price so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume. If you want to financially evaluate everything, you can go to a digital or retail store and buy one movie or TV season at a time, that way no one is subsidizing anyone else, but a lot of people think that kind of sucks.
The benefit you get in return is variety. In a buffet, it's easy to try small bites that you would otherwise be hesitant to pay full price for and you don't have to financially regret every bad bite of food.
Yeah, some people get less bang for their buck than others but not everyone is obsessed with coming out ahead.
This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.
Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.
I am actually talking about this here. It sounds like you understood my point but also think this is not what I'm talking about? I'm not saying I underutilize my service, I am actually talking about equivalent usage except concentrated rather than diffuse. When you ask companies to automatically omit fees for months of inactivity, you are punishing users who diffuse their use while rewarding users who concentrate their use.
> I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.
Literally false. Netflix did this because they're not trying to build a business on tricking people who don't want their product. But it's a fairly long period of inactivity because anything less and it's not clear if they actually forgot or not https://about.netflix.com/en/news/helping-members-who-havent...
No I get that, my point is that the usage pattern you’re describing isn’t really relevant here.
> Literally false. Netflix did this…
Great!
People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
> Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly
Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.
But, by that same logic, they should just be charging you by how much you watch. So it's no longer "don't charge them for the month they didn't view" but, instead, "charge them $X/minute watched". If you're going to go with usage based billing, go with usage based billing.
So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.
Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.
Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.
I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.
Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.
The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase.
If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.
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).
Don't recognize the charge? Deal with it immediately. Get a charge for something you need to cancel? Deal with it immediately.
ADHD is not an excuse to hold zero personal responsibility. Find a way to manage your life that works for you. You're not the only person with ADHD... don't let it be a crutch for mismanaging/neglecting your life.
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.)
Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.
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 ...
It's not. They should be ensuring the service being paid for is available. That's their responsibility.
It's trivial for someone like Netflix to know, and they probably already track it.
It does matter that it's easier. In fact it can be automated. If a user is inactive for 30 days, the subscription could be disabled and automatically reenabled if and when they decide to use it. You wanna argue that would be a lot of work to implement?
And yes, I think this would be reasonable for someone like Netflix, and unreasonable for a paper magazine. What's so hard to understand about that? they're just not comparable.
Because a previous comment said it wouldn't require work. Now you also are saying they'd need to implement it. So we agree it needs work.
> Just admit your argument made no sense
Framing this as "admit" might make it seem like a fait accomplis, but I need a higher bar than that to be persuaded. Biased language only fools very basic readers.
> they're just not comparable.
Why not?
Life is too short to waste energy clinging onto bad arguments simply out of spite or poor self-esteem. Embrace cummingham's law.
Have a good life.
> 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)?
It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.
Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice.
I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion.
But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children.
There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.
But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed.
That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.
As I've already mentioned, we agree that personal responsibility is important. I believe we can also agree that some people are unable to be fully responsible for reasons that escape them (depression, severe ADHD, other more pressing responsibilities like children who aren't doing well, etc.)
I think it takes a special kind of misanthropy to suggest that it's fine for companies to base their business model on the fact that such people will pay for a service they aren't using. I am not arguing for legislature or anything of the sort, but I still think it's unambiguously unethical.
It is, in the most literal sense, exploitative.
So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?
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?
Don't expect the police to track the guy down
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?
Or do you also ask for handouts everywhere you go?
Taking free money is (in this case) someone you know handing you $100 and saying ‘merry Christmas’ or whatever.
Sure, you could throw it on the ground and say ‘f you’.
But these are existing customers who already give you money and are presumably happy with your service.
The OP is about billions being spent by people who are not happy but haven't unsubscribed, so that seems like a bad presumption.
Or is taking the standard deduction morally reprehensible too?
The OP says they forgot to unsubscribe, which certainly implies they aren't 'happy' with it.
The article is a typical editorial. And behind a paywall, near as I can tell.
In this case it’s more like taking the standard deduction.
It reminds me of the donation drives of Wikipedia who are a microcosm of all this tension. Wikipedia is a genuinely important service that needs to keep going, but boy their marketing manipulative and cringy as hell.
unless there is a specific reason you think they screwed up - like they say they want to cancel, but hit the wrong button or something.
Or you know they’re dead and can’t cancel.
Otherwise it just inconveniences them if they want it, since you cancelled it out from under them.
Bad business, and probably rude unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe otherwise.
Because I don't want to take people's money that I haven't earned. Why do I want to scam people? Blaming them doesn't make it less of a scam.
> unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe otherwise
Here we agree. You need a concrete reason. For example, if your service streams movies and they haven't streamed one in a year, that might be a concrete reason. Sometimes it's ambiguous, and then send them an email.
Assuming you aren’t making it hard to cancel or anything.
And doing all this work in the middle of a high inflation environment…. Do you have a death wish?
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Get this: In this jurisdiction, as an employer I have to legally continue to pay for the services of labor for another two weeks (at minimum, more if the worker has been around for a while) after I no longer want the service. That's thousands of dollars, possibly even tens of thousands of dollars, for a service I don't want.
Curiously, I have never yet met anyone who has politely declined or offered to pay it back. I suppose all workers are scammers by nature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
And then we are talking about video services mostly here. In a perfect world, we'd have on demand streaming on a per piece of content basis that cost about what they can generate from showing ads on that content. A few cents for an episode of whatever.
Would you put up a sign reminding them to stop stop dropping $5 bills?
They really seem hell-bent of making me watch something, just in case I was considering cancelling my subscription.
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.
But an easy way to relieve that capacity problem is to stop fleecing people for something they forgot to cancel.
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.
I couldn't remember using PSN once last year so I cancelled it.
My assumption was that they would bank on guilt or forgetfulness to keep the cash flowing in.
The vhs rental stores were dying left and right. The one i looked into got most of its money from snacks and drinks. The subscription moddel was 75 cent, renting a movie would drop from 3-4 euro to 75 cent. (only 1 at a time) You could keep it for a week, then you would get a call if you could please return it.
The existing customers knew vhs rental was not really a thing anymore. Many visited just for a chat.
I figured one could guilt people into keeping the sub. I wasnt looking to make a profit, just curuous about the puzzle.
Im not even ashamed. haha
None. That was a slap in the face to football fans.
I hope Pat Ryan makes good on his threats.
> I’m demanding the NFL and NBC stop the BS and offer fans the service they already pay for, or we’re coming for your antitrust exemption,...The NFL raked in $12 billion in 2022; NBCUniversal made almost $40 billion. They now have a choice, either fix this problem, or we’ll fix it for them.”
If you want to make the world better you have to focus on the correct things. One of those is that deceptively advertised, difficult to cancel subscriptions should not be allowed. Another is that monopoly/oligopoly leads to price hikes and should also not be allowed. But people remaining in voluntary transactions which don't make sense to your personal sense of frugality? Honestly not the right bone to pick.
In the European Union, you can cancel any subscription by email.
But I agree there's a matter of degree: If people get renewal warnings and can easily cancel ('Reply with the word 'Cancel''), that's different.
> which don't make sense to your personal sense of frugality?
Why attribute stuff to people who disagree with you, in order to dismiss them? Why is it important to dismiss them? Maybe just believe they have some reasons and try to learn what they are.
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.
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.
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.
It is lazy, doesn't provide any additional explanation for their reasoning. It is useless and basically just says "no".
Contempt and shame - super-popular rhetoric these days - achieve the same thing, and they are related (both kinds of rhetoric are an aggressive display of arrogance). They assert, implicitly, that there's no way to debate this person.
Anger is another similar tactic.
Then if you don't understand that it's tactical, you give up. So far, to my amazement, very few people seem to understand it; almost all take it at face value.
> evil
A bit of a strawperson
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.
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.
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.
And it's more efficient for a company managing subscriptions to automate accurate pricing the right way than it is for each and every customer to sift through their payment history for anomalies
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.
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).
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.
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.
Let’s chuck this one on the bin of “who knows? Who cares?” Mistery Bin.
Clearly you were their most important customer, eh?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.