What are your thoughts about those ‘sign up for our service. The first 30 days is FREE. You can cancel any time afterwards’?
I remember as a kid signing up for Columbia Record Club where they offered the first six or so records for a penny but then you were obligated to purchase a bunch of other records at what seemed like an inflated ‘regular price’? Yeah, that was a rip-off. More recently, though, I find myself running into this with various streaming service offers where you get the first month for free and then pay the regular monthly price thereafter. The ads claim you can cancel at any time, but color me skeptical, as I have the feeling they will do everything in their power to make the act of discontinuing their service complicated and lengthy.
I’m sure the companies making these offers are banking on the fact that most consumers will simply forget to cancel, even if customers don’t find their service to be a great value, or even make regular use of it. Kinda like how the rebate marketing strategy was popular in the late 70’s and 80’s for a while.
Anyone here have experience with trying those 30 day free offers and successfully cancelling afterwards? How difficult did they make it?
I was a member of both Columbia Record Club & BMG another CD buying like service. Both were simple to cancel when it was time. Mid 80s into the early 90s.
Earlier I was a member of the SciFi book club and they made it hard to cancel. They also had that terrible auto-send book policy for a while. This would have been around 1980 I think.
If you’re talking about mainstream providers, there’s never any problem canceling. I’ve never encountered the nonsense that used to be common where you have to phone customer service to cancel, and you are forced to wait forever. It’s always a simple online process. If you use Prime, it’s even easier - most of the services are offered as add-ons, with the same free promo, and you manage/cancel the subscription via Prime.
I’m not sure why it’s better these days. Maybe the competitive market for streaming, maybe because it’s very easy to dispute CC charges online. A lot of people probably just forget to cancel, perhaps that’s more lucrative for them than annoying people who might then never come back?
If the vast quantity of free porn is insufficient and you subscribe to some sketchy porn site, then I might anticipate problems.
I am sure that you are right, the services hope that people will sign up and not bother to cancel. However I have done it with several services. Here in Australia the streaming services happily allow you to create an account and then stop and start it at will. I do it with my sports streaming account each year. In fact I recommend that people get accounts and just use them when the cold months hit, or you are on holidays, or there are a few things that you are keen to see.
I cancel all the time with streaming services - both the “one month free” and there’s been a service or two where I only watch one show, and I pay for a month every year to watch new episodes. Never had a problem cancelling - although I’m sure they are counting on people forgetting to cancel almost as much as they are counting on people deciding it’s worth the $5 a month or whatever.
I recall that Columbia Record club would send me tapes of their selection every month and I was supposed to send them back or get charged for them. I had to send them $10 or so in the end to cancel because of tapes I didn’t send back. They are all designed to keep you using the service, not to make easy to stop, but the details will be laid out before you sign up.
There was a way to switch off the auto-send for the CD version of the clubs. I think it took a phone call to do it, but so long ago that I can’t be sure. It was not something obvious either, I’m pretty sure I learned it through one via retentions.
Retentions was the Fairy Godmother Department. You called to cancel and got shuttled over to Retentions, suddenly all kinds of deals are available. I was cancelling as I didn’t want to deal with the auto send CDs and learned that feature could be turned off and I was signed up for some sort of bonus CD program where for every 4 I bought, I got a free one or something like that.
Once I learned this, I did it with the other club and even with Cable Providers later on.
Yeah, I was just an irresponsible teenager and after getting the only 10 tapes for $1 (was it even less?) that I thought were worth getting I mostly forgot about it. I send the automatic tapes back a couple of times, bought some more, and then I don’t recall just what I did but eventually it was over after paying for those extra tapes I didn’t send back. I could have just forgotten about it and it would have disappeared when I turned 18 (or maybe 21, I forget when exactly PA raised majority age) but my parents insisted I do the responsible thing and pay the company because it reflected badly on them for their son to have a bad debt.
I think it’s true that any subscription service is going to hope you don’t cancel - regardless whether there is an introductory free period or not. Some of the surprise box subscription services (you know, where you subscribe and they send you a box of food from a different country each time, or some other collection of marked up tat) make it very difficult to end your subscription - for example: SnackSurprise Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of snacksurprise.com
I’ve been hearing a lot of ads on SiriusXM for Truebill, an app to manage your subscriptions. Supposedly you can cancel with a click and the app will take care of it for you. I’m sure there are lots of folks who could use it.
My method when I subscribe to any free trial is to flag a reminder on my calendar so I can cancel a few days before the renewal comes up. Either that or cancel right away and avoid having to remember the date at all. (AFAIK most trial periods will still run until expiration vs cutting off right away when you cancel early)
There was some subscription service I had, a few years ago (my apologies, I’m not remembering exactly what it was), where you could manage every aspect of your subscription on their website – except for cancelling. The only way to cancel it entirely was to call them.
When I was a kid, one of my siblings (in his early teens at the time) had a thing going where he would sign up for one of those “10 books for a penny” clubs. After getting his first shipment of books, he would call up and say “hey, I’m dead broke, and if you send me any further books I am not going to be able to pay anything for them”. At that point, the bookseller could either cut their losses and let him off the hook, or send him more books and then risk further losses. They always chose the first option, and he walked away with his free books.
This was the beginning of his long and successful career as a wheeler-dealer.
I sign up for free or very discounted trials for stuff all the time and cancel almost immediately. I’ve never had a problem that prevented me from cancelling, although there are occasionally a few hoops to jump through like calling on the phone or going through a 17-step webpage where it’s easy to accidentally click the “nevermind, keep me subscribed” button. Most of the time it’s as simple as a few clicks to cancel and confirm.
Columbia House had a late '70s promotion in which you’d get 13 albums for a penny, then have to buy nine more albums at “regular club prices” (which were about what non-discounted albums were selling for then) over the next two or so years. Even figuring in shipping and handling charges it wasn’t a bad deal for those who escaped as soon as their obligation was satisfied (or flimflammed the company by signing up with inventive fake names like Marvin Rypoff).
As I recall, the problem with these record clubs was that the selection of albums out of which you were supposed to pick 13 or however many for a penny wasn’t all that great, and the catalog out of which to pick your remaining nine albums was heavily weighted toward artists under contract to the company.
So it wasn’t really a scam run by these companies, just less of a good deal than it appeared at first glance.
The streaming services don’t appear to be suffering this anymore, or at least the major ones. A couple of months ago I signed up for a Showtime trial (can’t remember if it was 7 or 30 days) to watch a specific show and was actually able to cancel immediately after signing up. I was still able to use the service for the entirety of the advertised trial period despite having cancelled.
I think I signed up through an intermediary (Amazon Prime? Roku?) which don’t seem to be in the business of playing those games anymore. My intuition is that these companies have target demographics that are largely intolerant of that “old school” BS from another era where you have to phone in to cancel your cable or whatever. Also, companies like Amazon seem to prefer to gnaw off their own limbs rather than do something that would encourage people to actually phone them.
If Truebill has a button that cancels your subscription to Truebill and unstalls the app, I will send them money for the next 6 months out of respect for their sheer style.
It’s so easy to dispute credit card charges online that on general principles if they don’t answer the phone within a few minutes I would just leave it and keep disputing the charge every month, stating (truthfully) “vendor does not answer phone”. It’s been years, but I’ve done this in the past. You’ll get refunded every time, and it costs them money - the credit card companies take a dim view if they think a vendor is generating an unreasonable number of chargebacks. Eventually the charges stop.
I’ve always felt there should be a law requiring companies selling subscription based services (however you want to define that) to allow members to cancel their subscription the same way it can be enrolled in. That is, if you can enroll online, they can’t force you to call to cancel.
If you can become a member at the gym, you must be allowed to cancel your membership at the gym (no BS games about mailing something to their corporate office etc).
There’s reputable services online that allow you to create a “burner” credit card number to be used once or in some very limited fashion (like max $15/mth). Privacy.com is the biggest name, I think, and some credit card issuers might offer the service as well. I don’t worry so much that Netflix or Spotify or some other big company is going to jerk me around if I want to cancel but, for anything remotely sketchy sounding, I’ll just make a single use card when it invariably wants a CC number as part of my “free trial” and then if they try to keep hitting it each month, the number is already dead and the trial account just effectively cancels itself. Don’t need to fight to cancel if they have no route to get money from me. If I want to continue the service, I can always just my standard CC number.
Back in the day when you’d get sent a physical product first and billed afterward, that wouldn’t work. These days, even for monthly physical services, I assume few places will mail out your stuff on the 20th if the auto-billing on the 15th failed.
Back in the early 90s in college, I did the Colombia thing with predictable results – a large bill and a ding on my credit. You had to buy X many albums over the next year and their selection was awful and new CDs would show up on it months after release (and you probably bought if you were interested in).