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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.
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.
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.
They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.
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 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.
It's pretty **** easy to infer that a customer wants to save money when possible
That businesses and advocates play dumb when it comes to this basic fact is no longer astonishing to me, sadly
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.
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."
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.
In the European Union, you can cancel any subscription by email. There is no need to make a phone call or visit a scummy website.
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 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.
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.
It's also asymmetrical because most often than not, subscribing is one click whereas unsubscribing is an obstacle course.
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.
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.
Personal responsibility. The idea is those 2-3 adult users should all be monitoring their own statements. Not you monitoring everything for them.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that nice?
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.
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.
Ok so why do you want to pay for that time? Why not have payments paused during the period of inactivity, and resume when you want to use it?
The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.
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.
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.
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 fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
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.
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.
Should I get a refund for not using my insurance?
Everyone uses their insurance - an insurance claim denotes when you get snake-eyes, not when you roll the dice.
No, I don’t use it when I’m not driving.
What if someone does a hit and run against your unattended car?
Similar, though not quite the same. With insurance, I would rather not have to use it. With Netflix, I would rather use it.
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.
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”).
Use means account is in an "active" state, so no, not really what parent is talking about.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's a strawman. It is indeed hard for a magazine to know.
It's trivial for someone like Netflix to know, and they probably already track it.
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.
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.
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.
Why not?
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.
Have a good life.
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.
Knowingly optimizing your business to maximize my chances of forgetting, or making it difficult to unsubscribe, is absolutely unethical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I expect you to take personal responsibility for your belongings while you're at the office and someone wants to rob your house
Don't expect the police to track the guy down
So why not also enjoy the convenience of only paying for what you actually use?
It should be reasonable to give customers the choice to opt into a setting that auto-cancels if they do not use the service.
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?
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.
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)?
What kind of idiot doesn’t take (legal) free money?
This with dignity?
Or do you also ask for handouts everywhere you go?
Taking free money isn’t asking for handouts.
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.
Seems like a bad presumption to assume they aren’t happy with the service.
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.
By OP you mean the article? Or someone else?
The article is a typical editorial. And behind a paywall, near as I can tell.
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.
So everyone paying for a subscription is a poor pensioner?
In this case it’s more like taking the standard deduction.
yes, compared to any CEO of these massive conglomerates, absolutely yes.
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.
Taking all legal free money is wise, or even just non-idiotic?
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?
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.
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.
Good luck with that. Continuing to provide someone a service isn’t scamming them, even if they aren’t using it.
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?
Clearly it's a scam. You know they don't want the service or to pay for it; you are just taking advantage of their mistake. You can try to justify it, but really, you can do a lot better. You can make money by earning it, by providing people with something valuable, by making the economy more productive.
Huh? I've never needed to scam people to earn a living. I bet you don't need to either.
Maybe where you live?
> 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.
Bwaha. Wow.
So someone paying for a service they signed up for, even if they aren't using it is being scammed.
And we aren't ALL in a high inflation environment compared to a few years ago?
Beautiful.
Tell you what. I’ll let my customers decide when they want to stop paying me money, and I’ll focus on producing a more valuable product for them in the mean time.
And you can tell your customers (you have some right?) to stop paying you all you want for whatever reason you want to.
"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.
This is not something new.
Gym membership model is the power of SaaS.
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.
In the European Union, you can cancel any subscription by email.
I'm sure there are some out there that remember 10.. 15.. 20 CDs for 1¢ mail order.
My assumption was that they would bank on guilt or forgetfulness to keep the cash flowing in.
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.
Im not even ashamed. haha
I wonder how many people bought a peacock subscription last weekend for the nfl wild card game then forgot to cancel it after.
None. That was a slap in the face to football fans.
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.
They are delivering a service.
No it's not.
No, they don't.
I see that you disagree with the parent comment. I would like to know why. Could you provide some details as well?
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?
Because you are taking money for nothing? How is that the right thing to do?
A bit of a strawperson
How do you know its doing nothing? I have a couple VPSes I have sitting idle for my disaster recovery scenario.
It is quite concerning that this comment is so high up.
It is lazy, doesn't provide any additional explanation for their reasoning. It is useless and basically just says "no".
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.
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.
Imagine someone walked by your house every month and dropped a $5 bill on your lawn. The 1st of every month ... there it was.
Would you put up a sign reminding them to stop stop dropping $5 bills?
No, which is why I think the government should force companies remind people they took out subscriptions, and make it easy to cancel them.
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.
OP doesn't say remove subscription, just charge $0 for months where users don't use the service.
And charge more than agreed bill if you use more ? This is not how pricing work
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
Or would have created negative backlash with initial clients while still open, accelerating its demise?
Let’s chuck this one on the bin of “who knows? Who cares?” Mistery Bin.
Clearly you were their most important customer, eh?
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.
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.
Internet and phone services are subscription based and going "pay what you use" would probably not go too well
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.
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.
Yes, sometimes you purchase capacity to be able to use something. The provider has to reserve that capacity.
Usually capacity is allocated based on past usage, either by the individual or by some group. It depends on what they are selling, of course.
But an easy way to relieve that capacity problem is to stop fleecing people for something they forgot to cancel.
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.
Gyms everywhere would go belly-up!
Why should it be illegal?
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.
Interested in filing public comments on this if the FTC asks for them?
This is what Credit Cards do. They're shady AF but have no problem cancelling your card due to inactivity.
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."
I guess I see the point, but feels unethical.
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.
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.
Its the workout gym model of the 90s.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That's not fair.
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.
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.
Sounds just like gyms!
This is one thing slack does right, if an account doesn’t post for a month you don’t get charges for 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.