> If someone offered you a magic button that gave you ten dollars now, but carried a high probability of altering your tastes, your routines, and the way you think, would you press it?
This is actually a very interesting question, because I can see someone's answer being different between this question as stated, and the same question but where you would be paying the $10 instead of the button giving you $10:
> If someone offered you a magic button that carried a high probability of altering your tastes, your routines, and the way you think, but it cost $10 to press, would you press it?
Specifically (and somewhat paradoxically), I think more people would say yes to the second question than to the first, because people would start thinking about it as a transaction where the purpose of pressing the button has changed from "receiving money" to "changing myself", even though in both cases it's stated upfront.
Of course, in the context of subscriptions, the purpose is neither of these things (it's to receive the content that subscription is offering), so the first question is definitely more relevant in this situation than the second. It's still interesting to me, though.
Companies who wish for more casual subscribers should support services (such as Apple App Store subscriptions) and anti-dark-pattern laws which reassure the public that unsubscribing will be easy.
Then the complacency and other psychological effects that this article seeks to inoculate users against will be maximized.
Recently cancelled something early so I won’t forget, they didn’t send my shipment even though I paid for it. They said I cancelled, tried to work with support but given after a point.
The one time I thought it would not work it did. Home depot rental generator that failed to run under load; store manager refused to test the unit under load as it was against store policy. Refused refund and instead gave me a $50 off coupon. I then called Chase, explained the situation and charges reversed on the spot. I took the coupon and bought a nice corded Milwaukee sawzall.
Also a common practice for free trials. Adobe does that if I'm not mistaken.
Love seeing companies worth tens or hundreds of billions acting like they couldn't spare a cent from underhanded shit like that. Scrooge McDuck type of behavior, except he also had some redeeming qualities.
With free trials, I can understand revoking the benefits once the subscription has been canceled. While I can understand the consumer's perspective of not wanting to be billed for future months (say if they forgot to cancel), free trials are intended to attract future customers. If a person signals that they are not going to be a future customer, why should the business offer the free service?
Are they signaling that they're not going to be a future customer? Or are they just signaling that they want to take positive action if they make the decision to subscribe?
And what about signaling in the other direction? Canceling the trial immediately signals that they have no confidence in the product itself to sell you on it, that the company itself believes that if you use their product for another few days, you still won't want to give them any money for it. If the company has so little confidence in their own product then why would I pay for it?
Sorry, but they set their signaling mechanisms so that that signal is worthless. How many people who don't cancel want to signal they are going to be a future customer, as opposed to it being an accident? How many people who do cancel do it to signal they don't want to be a customer, and not because they don't want to be automatically billed? I believe the answer for both is "not many".
I think the companies do it because it benefits them, and because they can.
Apple TV free trials due to new hardware (e.g. new iPhone) is like this too, I just set a reminder on my phone and cancel it one day before they’ll start billing me. The UI for cancelling is also painless.
Somewhat tangential, but I am reminded of a quote about an adjacent problem with analogous flavor from the pen of the venerable G. K. Chesterton...
'It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.'
A nice summary, he would get quite a shock from seeing how advertisement business ended up. I wonder what addendum would he have to the oft-repeated claims of "we're genuinely helping people meet their needs", too.
When I actually use a service, it's more work to resubscribe. But money is also tight enough for me that I'm on top of my subscriptions and don't have any I don't need (and when I'm unsure, I set reminders to cancel)
But the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't.
If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than the old cable model. If you're not looking, they can really bleed you out and be much more expensive than the old model.
You can also pay ~$20/month for an online locker that'll pull the torrent for you and serve to your devices, if that's within your philosophical tolerances. People need to get paid, but I do not much care of the enterprise value of media conglomerates and the resulting enshittification. I don't mind paying for Nebula.tv (~$36/year) and PBS Passport (~$60/year), for example, to directly support those media creators, as well as sending creators fiat directly or via Patreon (Coffeezilla and Peter Santenello, for example).
I have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for considering whether or not you need something like Disney+ continuously or if you can rotate between it and other services.
I canceled a Disney Plus subscription recently (after ordering it largely to watch a specific show), because when I purchased their "ad-free" tier, I found that after paying they just replace their generic ads with their own in-house ads, which they then pretend are different from ads because they're "trailers".
Yet another example of a media company making the paid service a worse viewing experience. (For me, the money isn't the point. My time is limited. I'd happily pay more for the handful of things I have both time and desire to watch. But charging me extra for no ads, and then shoving stuff in my brain anyway, is simultaneously both petty and beyond the pale.)
I saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.
Buy a domain. Get Proton, or Apple, or any other custom-domain email service.
Setup catch-all incoming mail.
Every merchant receives an email like merchantname@donotwriteto.me
Then you can either sort those out, or if they are malicious and not deleting you from your email lists, you can block the incoming traffic on that email.
This way you still can verify your email, comm stays private and you can have your own peace of mind, but you don't have to keep the spam in your primary inbox.
Highly recommend this, I no longer need any spam filtering following this approach.
My old Gmail would be loaded with spam and the filter would screw up and mislabel legitimate mail. Now, no spam at all.
It also helps when your email is involved in a data breach which is becoming the norm now.
Although be prepared for awkward in person interactions when a business wants your email. Everything from "no, your email silly not mine" to "I own this business name you can't have it in your email address"
I've been doing something similar with Firefox relay to have proxy emails that I can regenerate if needed, it worked well but not for every site. Recently I've been testing SimpleLogin and it worked every time, it's by Proton.
Privacy.com solved this problem for me. I just sign up for trials with a $1 card, and I sign up for memberships with a unique card number and a “use once” flag.
Over here in The Netherlands, with a bit of hacking, sailing the seas and maxing out Revolut virtual cards I managed to trip my subscriptions down to ChatGPT, rent and a phone (only 2.5 Euro/month). Currently thinking of the ways of pushing this down even further by living in an anti-squat. Hacking is the only pathway to inner independence.
It's the most HN technology there is: "Has technology caused problems in your life? Well good news, this additional technology sits at the top layer to protect you from the prior technology."
One way I've "reset" my subscriptions is by invalidating the credit card they're on so most of them just stop billing. YMMV it's a bit of a blunt tool and not always foolproof, but it's worked for me before.
I'm pretty sure you can harm your credit and have the debt get sent to collections by doing this, at least it's common for gym subscribers not paying their fees.
Agreed, I have a few hundred subscriptions and now use PocketTube to manage them into categories but I should probably cull a lot of them. It's a shame as many channels make some great one-off videos and I subscribe for hoping for the next one but it seems like they never come.
I think generally people have trouble not subscribing casually which could be why so many services are setup the way they are. In US society we give people the Freedom of choice with all of the beautiful and ugly side-effects that comes along for the ride.
I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.
But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.
> If someone offered you a magic button that gave you ten dollars now, but carried a high probability of altering your tastes, your routines, and the way you think, would you press it?
This is actually a very interesting question, because I can see someone's answer being different between this question as stated, and the same question but where you would be paying the $10 instead of the button giving you $10:
> If someone offered you a magic button that carried a high probability of altering your tastes, your routines, and the way you think, but it cost $10 to press, would you press it?
Specifically (and somewhat paradoxically), I think more people would say yes to the second question than to the first, because people would start thinking about it as a transaction where the purpose of pressing the button has changed from "receiving money" to "changing myself", even though in both cases it's stated upfront.
Of course, in the context of subscriptions, the purpose is neither of these things (it's to receive the content that subscription is offering), so the first question is definitely more relevant in this situation than the second. It's still interesting to me, though.
Companies who wish for more casual subscribers should support services (such as Apple App Store subscriptions) and anti-dark-pattern laws which reassure the public that unsubscribing will be easy.
Then the complacency and other psychological effects that this article seeks to inoculate users against will be maximized.
I think costco membership has two reasons...
Yes, the people who "subscribe" to costco are more loyal, etc.
But it also excludes. The general public is probably a lot more labor-intensive for costco, and they eliminate that.
Their "shrink rate" is low. Members are less likely to steal.
Plus, how are you going to sleep 300LBs of mayo without someone noticing?!
I would go a step further, cancel as soon as you subscribe. It's still valid for a month because you've paid for it!
If you ever need to use the service again just re-subscribe (and re-cancel)
In fact, what is stopping you from cancelling all your subscriptions right now? You can always buy back in when you like
Recently cancelled something early so I won’t forget, they didn’t send my shipment even though I paid for it. They said I cancelled, tried to work with support but given after a point.
So yeah, not all companies do that.
Did you receive your money back?
If not, time for a charge back with your card provider.
Charge back usually never works… at least in my case the provider never actually did it because the seller was in good standing.
Counterpoint: I've done 3 and all went through without drama.
You’re not providing adequate documentation then. I’ve charged back major companies before without issue when they were at fault and refused to help.
With what credit card provider?
I've done it multiple times when a vendor wasn't behaving fairly and it always went through.
I don't recommend doing it to a vendor you plan to have business with again in the future as they might ban you (eg food delivery apps)
I’ve never had an issue with charging back when they fail to deliver the product
Get a credit card that isn't dogshit then. You can absolutely charge back.
Maybe you should try Paypal next time, if allowed by the seller
The one time I thought it would not work it did. Home depot rental generator that failed to run under load; store manager refused to test the unit under load as it was against store policy. Refused refund and instead gave me a $50 off coupon. I then called Chase, explained the situation and charges reversed on the spot. I took the coupon and bought a nice corded Milwaukee sawzall.
Some don't treat months as discrete units. Uber revokes your membership immediately.
>Uber revokes your membership immediately.
Sounds like a great object lesson -- this a service that is will to take your money. Better to cancel now and not look back.
> this a service that is will to take your money
rephrase?
Also a common practice for free trials. Adobe does that if I'm not mistaken.
Love seeing companies worth tens or hundreds of billions acting like they couldn't spare a cent from underhanded shit like that. Scrooge McDuck type of behavior, except he also had some redeeming qualities.
With free trials, I can understand revoking the benefits once the subscription has been canceled. While I can understand the consumer's perspective of not wanting to be billed for future months (say if they forgot to cancel), free trials are intended to attract future customers. If a person signals that they are not going to be a future customer, why should the business offer the free service?
Are they signaling that they're not going to be a future customer? Or are they just signaling that they want to take positive action if they make the decision to subscribe?
And what about signaling in the other direction? Canceling the trial immediately signals that they have no confidence in the product itself to sell you on it, that the company itself believes that if you use their product for another few days, you still won't want to give them any money for it. If the company has so little confidence in their own product then why would I pay for it?
Sorry, but they set their signaling mechanisms so that that signal is worthless. How many people who don't cancel want to signal they are going to be a future customer, as opposed to it being an accident? How many people who do cancel do it to signal they don't want to be a customer, and not because they don't want to be automatically billed? I believe the answer for both is "not many".
I think the companies do it because it benefits them, and because they can.
Apple TV free trials due to new hardware (e.g. new iPhone) is like this too, I just set a reminder on my phone and cancel it one day before they’ll start billing me. The UI for cancelling is also painless.
Uber is ahead of you. You need to cancel two days prior, or something on that note (I don't remember the exact timing).
Somewhat tangential, but I am reminded of a quote about an adjacent problem with analogous flavor from the pen of the venerable G. K. Chesterton...
'It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.'
A nice summary, he would get quite a shock from seeing how advertisement business ended up. I wonder what addendum would he have to the oft-repeated claims of "we're genuinely helping people meet their needs", too.
Do they also give a prorated refund? Otherwise that seems to be blatant theft
Uber would never take any immoral action like that. They've always been upstanding citizens.
What money did you give Uber in advance? Why would you have a balance needing to be refunded if you have not taken a ride?
Uber one exists as a subscription you pay with certain benefits for frequent users.
I currently do this with language models subscriptions.
When I actually use a service, it's more work to resubscribe. But money is also tight enough for me that I'm on top of my subscriptions and don't have any I don't need (and when I'm unsure, I set reminders to cancel)
Wouldn't this be a good use of a 1 time credit card number?
This is indeed my standard practice. In my head, I just tell myself "I'm buying a month."
The Playstation store subscriptions have different tiers and within each tier different prices depending on the number of months.
These psychological tricks don't need to work every time (or on everyone) to be effective.
Because for some subscriptions the price goes up.
But the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't.
If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than the old cable model. If you're not looking, they can really bleed you out and be much more expensive than the old model.
You can also pay ~$20/month for an online locker that'll pull the torrent for you and serve to your devices, if that's within your philosophical tolerances. People need to get paid, but I do not much care of the enterprise value of media conglomerates and the resulting enshittification. I don't mind paying for Nebula.tv (~$36/year) and PBS Passport (~$60/year), for example, to directly support those media creators, as well as sending creators fiat directly or via Patreon (Coffeezilla and Peter Santenello, for example).
I have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for considering whether or not you need something like Disney+ continuously or if you can rotate between it and other services.
I canceled a Disney Plus subscription recently (after ordering it largely to watch a specific show), because when I purchased their "ad-free" tier, I found that after paying they just replace their generic ads with their own in-house ads, which they then pretend are different from ads because they're "trailers".
Yet another example of a media company making the paid service a worse viewing experience. (For me, the money isn't the point. My time is limited. I'd happily pay more for the handful of things I have both time and desire to watch. But charging me extra for no ads, and then shoving stuff in my brain anyway, is simultaneously both petty and beyond the pale.)
The core value for most subscription services is their convenience. There's usually another less convenient way to get the same thing cheaper or free.
Most people are literally paying so they don't have to set all that shit up again and the cost is trivial to them.
If that's not you, fine, but my point is that nobody is "right" about this topic. Services exist because they make money.
I saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.
Why would they salt their own field it's hard to understand
A very simple handling:
Buy a domain. Get Proton, or Apple, or any other custom-domain email service.
Setup catch-all incoming mail.
Every merchant receives an email like merchantname@donotwriteto.me
Then you can either sort those out, or if they are malicious and not deleting you from your email lists, you can block the incoming traffic on that email.
This way you still can verify your email, comm stays private and you can have your own peace of mind, but you don't have to keep the spam in your primary inbox.
This is good advice for email/newsletter subscriptions, but that isn't what the article is about.
Highly recommend this, I no longer need any spam filtering following this approach.
My old Gmail would be loaded with spam and the filter would screw up and mislabel legitimate mail. Now, no spam at all.
It also helps when your email is involved in a data breach which is becoming the norm now.
Although be prepared for awkward in person interactions when a business wants your email. Everything from "no, your email silly not mine" to "I own this business name you can't have it in your email address"
It's def good advice.
I've been doing something similar with Firefox relay to have proxy emails that I can regenerate if needed, it worked well but not for every site. Recently I've been testing SimpleLogin and it worked every time, it's by Proton.
You obviously didn't read the article at all since it's about paying for subscriptions.
Privacy.com solved this problem for me. I just sign up for trials with a $1 card, and I sign up for memberships with a unique card number and a “use once” flag.
Over here in The Netherlands, with a bit of hacking, sailing the seas and maxing out Revolut virtual cards I managed to trip my subscriptions down to ChatGPT, rent and a phone (only 2.5 Euro/month). Currently thinking of the ways of pushing this down even further by living in an anti-squat. Hacking is the only pathway to inner independence.
same. It's brilliant and I pay them nothing.
I tell friends and family about it all the time, but I can't seem to convince anyone to use for it every subscription like I do.
Kinda' ironic posting a service that promotes two types of casual subscriptions, inbox clutter, and "micro transactions"
It's the most HN technology there is: "Has technology caused problems in your life? Well good news, this additional technology sits at the top layer to protect you from the prior technology."
Especially when one considers how friggin difficult this service makes it to cancel a (paid) subscription.
yeah. would love other recommendations for similar services that handle it better if you have any
One way I've "reset" my subscriptions is by invalidating the credit card they're on so most of them just stop billing. YMMV it's a bit of a blunt tool and not always foolproof, but it's worked for me before.
I'm pretty sure you can harm your credit and have the debt get sent to collections by doing this, at least it's common for gym subscribers not paying their fees.
Same for online feeds like YouTube. Good to occasionally clear out anything that hasn’t delivered good vids in a while
Agreed, I have a few hundred subscriptions and now use PocketTube to manage them into categories but I should probably cull a lot of them. It's a shame as many channels make some great one-off videos and I subscribe for hoping for the next one but it seems like they never come.
I never saw the point of subscribing. The home page will show you videos from channels you've watched whether or not you've subscribed.
I want to see a chronological list of videos of channels I liked and subscribed to as my feed, not whatever garbage is on the home page.
I think generally people have trouble not subscribing casually which could be why so many services are setup the way they are. In US society we give people the Freedom of choice with all of the beautiful and ugly side-effects that comes along for the ride.
Can be extended to social media accounts as well.
The post makes some really great points.
Nowadays I am adopting the "Mom Strategy for Subscriptions (TM)": Eat what is in your plate before asking for more stuff.
I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.
But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.