You can check in any time you want…
…but they sure make it hard to leave.
That’s a slight variation on one of my favorite lines from the song “Hotel California.” What am I talking about? Oh, lots of companies that offer something free as long as you cancel before automatic payments kick in. And they are betting that you’ll either love their service so much that you’ll want it to continue and be willing to pay, or – and this is key – that you’ll forget to cancel.
Get enough people who forget, and you’ve got quite a tidy little sum of money.
Or if you do remember to cancel in time – and I write down the cancellation date on my calendar so I won’t forget – they make the process so confusing that you might just slip up and not accomplish it.
Recently it was the day before my one-month free Amazon Prime membership would stop being free. I had used it for a number of things that are hard to obtain elsewhere, but had no intention of continuing with it. But when I went to the cancel page and started the process of cancelling, an interesting thing happened.
First off, I found that when I checked off the first box saying I wanted to cancel, it led me to some other prompt (easily missed, I might add) where I had to reiterate that intent. Then on another page I had to do it again. And then again. I believe there was a total of four or five times that I had to click on boxes in order to actually accomplish the cancellation. Even then, I wasn’t 100% sure I had made it all the way to the end until I got an email confirming that I had opted out.
It’s not just Amazon Prime that does it this way, of course. There are plenty of other sites that do the same or worse. Sometimes they write things so confusingly that people probably often say they want to continue when in fact they don’t; something like “Yes, I want to stop cancelling” or some other slightly-convoluted construction. And unsubscribing from an email list is more of the same.
They are clever, no mistake about it.
I have become very diligent with this I keep track of the renewal date for just about everything I subscribe to and I also subscribe to things for a month or two then unsubscribe and move on. Also a lot of places allow you to unsubscribe but keep it until your month is up.
I’m basically down to just Amazon Prime and Sirius/XM that I always keep and Sirius/XM is teetering as I have been driving less and that is where I almost always listen.
The tricky ones are when they make you sign like a one year contract at a special price and then after that year they jack up your price automatically. Sirius does that and I have to call them and give them my whole ‘I don’t know if I can afford this’ spiel until they magically give me my same rate.
This is what keeps me from subscribing to websites like substack They require a credit card and it is almost impossible to cancel. And trying to dispute charges with the credit card company after cancelling is almost impossible. I try to get around the problem by paying with a gift card but many of them are on to that and refuse to accept them.
It looks like somebody did not pay attention to the lesson from WarGames. “The only way to win is not to play. “
I’ve never subscribed to anything with that setup because it was obvious to me that the company or service was counting on my forgetting to cancel.
Amazon is bad about this, got charge after that grace period and called right away that I never used it at all, now no matter how free the shipping is I’ll just pay for it the slow way thank you.
I loved Sirius but pad a couple months ( auto payment) I didn’t have it and no satisfaction to correct so walked away.
Cleverness in pursuit of deceitful gain makes perfect sense if one believes or has no reason to disbelieve, that this is all there is and life’s most basic parameter is to get all you can for you and yours, while ye yet may do so.
It’s also indicative of a society in decline because the more widespread and accepted the pursuit of gain achieved through deceit, the deeper and greater the loss of societal cohesion. How much trust can one extend to the cheater?
Civilizations can only tolerate so much of, “its every man for himself”.
The ones that really annoy me are the ones that don’t send an email to say my subscription renewal date is coming up. Those I put on my calendar; one of them will be cancelled this fall a full two months before the renewal date, and I’ll save a screenshot.
I dont short stock, but if I did, Amazon would be a prime contender. Pun intended.
These free trials are offered so one can try the service without obligation. To sign up with the intention of using their product without any intention of paying regardless of your level of satisfaction seems very dishonest. I’m surprised that you would do this and even more surprised that you would complain that Amazon made your theft more difficult.
Dave Sylvester:
What a deeply bizarre way of looking at it.
The customer doesn’t ask for it and there isn’t an ounce of duplicity on the customer’s part. It is the company that makes the customer an offer, out of the blue: Would you like thirty days of Amazon Prime? Just click on this. Cancel any time you want before such and such a date and there will be no charge. No obligations, explicit or even implicit, that you will continue unless you feel like it. My complaint is about when they make the process of cancelling – a process they said was fully available to you and part of the original agreement – needlessly complicated and involving many many steps, some of them confusing.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have simply been forced to cancel the bank card used to bill me just to cancel some subscription service.
Neo, This is from your original post: “ And they are betting that you’ll either love their service so much that you’ll want it to continue and be willing to pay, or – and this is key – that you’ll forget to cancel.”
You acknowledge they are offering you a trial. They don’t intend for you to use their service in bad faith. If you never intend to subscribe but are only doing this to use their service without paying, you are breaking what you acknowledge is the implied understanding and that is what’s dishonest.
Dave Sylvester:
Your reasoning is extremely flawed.
Let me try again. They are betting those things; they are not contracting for those things. And the consumer isnot agreeing that he or she will either love their service or forget to cancel.
What is actually happening is this: Amazon has figured out that offering free and completely cancellable Prime subscriptions is in their interest. Why? Because of four possible outcomes: (1) either the consumer will like it enough to continue, or (2) the consumer will forget to cancel, or (3) the consumer won’t even use the service, or – and this is what I did – (4) the consumer will use the service and order a bunch of goods from Amazon that he or she might not otherwise have bought. Amazon gets extra business from option #4 as well, and I would wager they’ve crunched the numbers and know exactly how many people will take that option, and Amazon has decided the whole operation is a good deal for Amazon that earns them money.
A free, no-obligation offer is just that. There is no dishonesty involved in taking it exactly as offered and canceling. And Amazon knows exactly how to come out ahead in the transaction. If it didn’t, it would stop offering the service, because it’s Amazon’s business to know what offers make sense for its bottom line and what offers don’t make sense. I bet they could say exactly what percentage of people take each one of the four options, and how much money Amazon makes from the entire thing. I virtually guarantee it’s profitable or it wouldn’t be happening, and they have factored in people who will cancel after a month.
That’s capitalism for you, and Amazon is highly successful at it.
At the very least can’t one expect Amazon (et al.) to say something along the lines of:
“Don’t forget: we GUARANTEE that you can cancel any time…but we also guarantee that we will make it as HARD AS HELL for you to do see—ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE, in fact. Needless to say we highly value ALL our customers. Thanks for your interest in our products. We look forward to working with you!!”
No?….
(Hmmm. Didn’t think so…)
We had the experience from hell with Brinks in Texas a few years ago. We had changed over to using a Ring system, and called their customer service to cancel the service, and arrange to quit their monitoring. A month later, we get a charge to our card (we had auto billing, which I despise, but had no choice when we set it up). We call to dispute the charge with them, and lo and behold, they state you have to fill out some form and return it to cancel the service. My wife, who you do not want to mess with, went ballistic on them, letting them know we had called, and stated quite clearly we didn’t want the service, and no one had told us about any form. After being passed up the chain to various supervisors, she was told it was taken care of, and we wouldn’t be billed again.
Except we were. Next month, another auto debit. More angry calls. More “you didn’t do it right” BS. This time we got hold of our bank and told them to no longer allow them to debit our account, and contacted the BBB to complain. Again, we were told that we would not be charged again.
But guess what? The very next month, they attempted to withdraw again, but got thwarted by our bank. They then had the audacity to send a nasty letter threatening legal action if we didn’t pay up.
Did I mention you don’t mess with my wife? I wish I could have been there to see her tearing them a new one. We had documented who we had talked to and when, and what was said. I think their phones had smoke pouring out of them by the time she got done with them.
About a week later, we got a letter from them, stating that they were dismissing the charges as a “courtesy” and our account was closed. And this time, it was, as we haven’t gotten any other charges.
The thing that irritates me most is that this seems to have been their normal business practice, from complaints I saw on websites. How companies can be allowed to continue to do this just boggles my mind!
To augment neo’s comments to Dave Sylvester,
I worked for a not for profit that offered many services and encouraged people to become members and pay a monthly fee. It was all on the up and up. The vast majority of people got a lot out of their memberships and were very happy to aid in helping the community in the many ways we helped the community. And we made it easy for people to unjoin, if they so chose.
However, we spent a not insignificant amount of money on software that allowed us to keep billing people when the credit card we had on-file expired and they were issued a new one. Before we had this software we would have to contact the member and ask them to rejoin with the newly issued credit card, as we could no longer bill to the expired card. When contacted in this manner about 10% would simply decide not to “rejoin.” They had forgotten they had a membership, their life had changed and it was no longer where they wanted to donate, etc…
So we used automation to avoid those calls, which helped us not lose 10% of our members when their credit cards expired. Most businesses with recurring charges try to make the billing as surreptitious as possible, so the consumer doesn’t think much about that part of the relationship.
In other words, neo is precisely correct. Businesses spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to get, and retain customers, and they are 110% aware that “free” trials are a great way to ensnare people into monthly, recurring charges. They may “hope” you like the service and choose to keep using it, but, even more importantly, whether you like the service or not, they “hope” you forget they are ding’ing your card every month.
I knew I was in the heart of Beach music country when I spied the actual Hotel California on the beach in Santa Monica.
My personal favorite is the sign up online/cancel by phone situation. I am currently paying for Verizon Device Care that I don’t want precisely because there is no way to cancel it online and I haven’t mustered the energy to call them and wade through the “Yes, I want to cancel, yes, I want to cancel, no, I don’t want to keep the service at a discount, yes, I want to cancel” BS.
Amazon certainly tries to dissuade you from cancelling: The multi-step process includes numerous “Hey, if you cancel, you’ll miss out on these benefits” messages, as well as offers to just “pause” your Prime membership. But, in the end, and after a few confirmations, you can successfully cancel your service. But it does require paying attention.
However, crucially, Amazon does allow you to cancel *after* you’ve actually been billed for Prime. As long as you haven’t used any of the benefits after the billing date, you can cancel any time during the current membership period. That’s pretty generous, and better than most subscription services:
“End Your Amazon Prime Membership
You can end your Prime membership by selecting the End Membership button on this page.
Paid members who haven’t used their benefits are eligible for a full refund of the current membership period. We’ll process the refund in three to five business days.”
But crucially