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Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

And there is a negative option $1 trial, $79 monthly rebill: stay classy SEOmoz.

Did you read the article in detail? It's clearly and unambiguously communicated as a $1, one month trial, as a way of offering a minimal risk option to people who might like to try but are unwilling to risk the $80 they charge upfront.

Yes. The $1 one month trial is automatically followed (the negative option part) by a monthly $79 charge (the rebill part) unless the user cancels by the 29th day of the trial.

A (usually large) proportion of customers will be confused and unintentionally pay for at least one month of full priced service: perhaps they don't understand they need to cancel before the 30th day, perhaps they forget to cancel, perhaps they try to cancel and fail.

There is a more honest alternative. Amazon Prime requires user input after the trial before their first $79 subscription charge is made. This is called positive option billing.

There is absolutely nothing dishonest about clearly communicating to the customer what you're going to do, then doing it. You may run your business differently and wish others did the same, but that doesn't make intro pricing dishonest. This is doubly true when you're marketing to internet marketers.

There's more to "communicating to the customer" than just putting it out there. Maybe a wall of text is just as bad as traditional "fine-print".

If you think you made the conditions clear but you get unhappy customers anyway, you've failed to communicate.

To me, if the intent and main effect are to basically trick people into paying for something they don't really want, it's at least sleazy, if not outright dishonest. There are legitimate uses for trial offers, so it's a bit of a judgment case, and I think depends to a large extent on just how clearly the terms are communicated. In particular, it should be very clear to customers of average sophistication exactly what will be rebilled, and exactly what they need to do to avoid the rebill if they'd like to cancel--- and the cancelling should be easy.

I agree. If you genuinely feel that your product is worth the $80/month and that your customer will feel the same way, why not send them a reminder a few days before the trial stops to let them know? Maybe give them a freebie if they continue the membership.

I used to have a subscription to a UK magazine where apparently automatic subscriptions are not legal, so they have to sell you the magazine again, every year. I thought this was great, as opposed to the situation in the Netherlands where you have to cancel at the right time, or else you are stuck with another year. (There are laws in progress to change this, so clearly many people are annoyed by it)

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