The streaming services all seem to have it together, as others have noted.
Newspapers, not so much. My wife signed up for a bunch of the $1-a-month-for-n-months deals, and most of them required phoning to get it cancelled: NO way to do it online. After the first one, I knew better, and the remaining phone calls mostly went like this:
Me: Need to cancel.
Rep: OK, but first…
Me: No, just cancel.
Rep: But…
Me: CANCEL.
Rep: If…
Me: CANCEL. NOW.
One of the papers–the Boston Globe–did NOT cancel, but instead started charging me $27/month for online access. My bad, I didn’t notice this for a couple of months. I called them; they said they’d “pull the tapes” to verify that I had indeed asked to cancel, of course never followed up. Right, like they’re going to pull tapes over $100. So I opened four disputes with my card. So far one of those was resolved in my favor, and the rest are grinding through.
My wife has been instructed to please NOT do this again. If she really wants to, I will use a $10 prepaid card.
Curiously, I had a card number breached recently. Two weeks later it was breached again. In both cases, the New York Times–where we DO pay for online access–had to be given the new number, unlike every other recurring charge. The card brands offer a service that lets merchants get updated card numbers in cases like this; I have to wonder if the newspaper industry has been blacklisted from using it because of their abusive policies–people getting a new card and then being furious that the charges continued. It’s a stretch but not impossible.
(And if you’re wondering, I did the analysis of which merchants I had used that card at in the couple of months before the first breach and between the first and second; the overlap was about eight merchants, and the only one that seemed plausible–the only one where I’m sure it was NOT an EMV transaction–does not seem to be the source, based on some other data. Weird.)
You had to be selective about what deal you took. In the early '70s one company, and I think it was Columbia, had a deal where you got a more than linear number of free or nearly free albums with the number you signed up. A bunch of people in my dorm did it. There were good albums - I got Who’s Next that way, and I don’t remember it being difficult to cancel.
You were supposed to mail in a postcard every month saying you didn’t want the monthly selection, or else it would get automatically sent. I always forgot to send in the ‘do not want’ postcard and would get an unwanted album every month. I found I could do a ‘return to sender’ at no charge, so that’s what I routinely did. Eventually Columbia House sent me a nasty letter basically saying stop it- send the postcard or pay for the damn monthly album.
I’ve done this a number of times with online subscription services, and the companies I have dealt with were easy, and even if you cancel on day 1 (which I have several times – usually because I want to use a research service like newspapers.com or some background check/public information service), they let you use it for 30 days in my experience, you don’t have to wait to cancel afterwards.
I signed up for Peacock Plus to watch the Olympics. When I cancelled, I got the “You’ll be paying for next month, but after that you’ll be free of us.” I’ve run into that with numerous magazine and streaming deals, and it’s usually just $5 or less, so I don’t mind.
Discovery Plus had a 0.99 cents a month for three months deal. I decided that there were enough good shows that the app would make sense so that I could stream any time.
When it came close to end of the three months, I cancelled, and they cancelled everything immediately and refunded me 0.10 cents for the unused days. I thought that it was strange, I thought it would go til the end of the month, not stop right away and refund the difference.
I think in the past the approach with subscription services has been to assume (probably correctly) that anyone who cancels is never coming back, so just squeeze as much revenue as you possibly can by making it a painful process to cancel.
With the competitive streaming market, not many people are going to subscribe to 10 different services constantly, so the pattern of subscribing for a while, canceling and coming back in a few months is common. I suspect that they have decided that creating goodwill in the cancellation process is the best strategy. In your example, this may have been an attempt to create goodwill that wasn’t really what you wanted - like you, I would have expected the service to just continue to the end of the month and might have been in the middle of a show.
Or maybe they are being really clever and expecting that you will expect this. If you are in the middle of a show and want to finish it maybe you will now resubscribe for a month at regular price.
The ease of canceling streaming services was a culture shock me. I agree with whoever above said it was probably because their target demo skews younger.
How easy is it to re-subscibe? Is it like starting over from scratch? I haven’t subscribed to any of the new platforms (just Netflix and Hulu (and Amazon Prime, I guess)), but one thing I’ve noticed is that Netflix as a ‘pause subscription’ feature. I haven’t used it, but my understanding is that you can, well, pause your subscription so when you come back to it, all your settings are still the same as they were before.
Do the new platforms do that? I think it would make people even more likely to come back if they knew it was just a few clicks to turn their subscription back on and the the app will still remember what you’ve already watched, what you like/dislike and, if nothing else, still have your CC on file. I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of people that would resubscribe, but their CC is all the way across their house so they’ll do it another time, which never happens.
It certainly has been easier. Perhaps just because it’s something new implemented originally with new technology, in this case a software option to allow cancelling. They really want to get everything done without human intervention and they don’t want to pay enough people to field the complaints when that doesn’t work. It’s also probably not worth the cost of cutting off introductory services right when they are cancelled just because of the added complexity. As small as that functionality may seem it would still have to justify the costs of implementing it when the potential loss is nothing.
Well, it was pretty darn easy today when I resubscribed to Paramount+, even though my only previous subscription was to CBS All Access. It did make me put in a new credit card, but even with that it was still a breeze.
ETA: The main reason it was so easy is because it remembered my username and password from last time (despite rebranding!), and since I always sign up using my computer, my browser remembers all my passwords.
Well, email address and password. Most things seem to use email address as your username nowadays.
It’s smoke and mirrors to encourage you make re-subscribing a default occurrence. I have unsubscribed / resubscribed to various services, and never found that my account details were gone. They even remember which episode you were on of the shows you didn’t finish. And I don’t believe they would delete you to “spite” you for unsubscribing rather than “pausing”. There’s a fine line between encouraging you to maintain an ongoing subscription and annoying you to the point where you just never come back.
All the streaming services I’ve cancelled and resubscribed it’s like nothing ever changed. My account history is still there, it still knows what shows I was watching, etc.
I was a member of the Columbia record club till the day it shut down vinyl sales and sold only cassettes and CD’s. That would have been about 25 years. I figured it cost me about the same or less than any record or big box stores. I hit their gold status, a free album with every one I bought. A couple times I was rewarded 10 free albums by hitting specific milestones, I believe it was for buy 50 albums. The only issue I ever had with Columbia was censorship on some albums. Columbia did not buy the albums they sold, the made the records and sleeves under license from the record companies. The first time this happened was a live album from The Rolling Stones. The song Starfucker was edited to sound like Star(mumble). I was able to cancel my Columbia membership with a 30 second phone call.
Just went to YouTube to listen to Starfucker, the first video that came up was the same edited version.
I was never that into music. As a teenager I wanted to have a some albums like everybody else. I didn’t spend much time listening to music though. It was fun to pretend I cared about music like everyone else for a little while. I imagine people who liked music built themselves a decent library of tapes or records. I knew a some people that kept listening to the same album over and over again. Side 4 of the Bangladesh album is burned into my brain because a friend had it set up on the turntable to keep repeating. I’m smiling just remembering that now, sometimes he’d put a few records on the spindle to play, with the Bangladesh record on top. When those first 2 or 3 albums were done it would fall and Leon Russel would start banging on the keyboard and it would just keep repeating after that for hours. Oh to be young and stupid again! Those really were the good old days.
I think I had the same thing at roughly the same time. I don’t remember it being difficult to cancel. I got a pile of books for penny or something, then had to buy a certain number after that. After I bought the minimum I cancelled. I do remember that they were hardcovers but the production quality of the books was poor, not what you buy in bookstores. Like the paper quality was coarse, and edges looked torn and ragged instead of cut.