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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

There's one more: Suggesting that you lose benefits in a subscription business right away, when in reality, they run until the "contract" ends. Culprit: Amazon Prime. I just checked and they're still doing it (on Amazon.de).

If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose all benefits right away, even though I pre-paid for the entire year and my membership will end with the billing period and not before.

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>If you try to cancel your Prime Membership, they make it sound as if you lose all benefits right away

This method of obfuscation is also prevalent on most music services I have subscribed to ie. Spotify, Deezer, Tidal et al., which also make it harder to access the option to cancel in the first place. If you use PayPal for the afore-mentioned services, an entry for recurring charges also gets placed on the account and once you cancel, it sits there dormant. Although, it can be marked as inactive manually, however, the process is not intuitive and hidden away in settings, where direct debits are labelled as pre-approved payments.

If you want to get really evil, combine this with "you need to tell us you want to cancel in advance or we'll charge you a termination fee". People will put it off thinking they will lose the benefits, then find themselves on the line for a fee because they didn't do it earlier (often giving up and continuing instead).

My old ISP had me mail them a copy of my new lease to prove that they could no longer service my area (let alone my state) to avoid a termination fee. Shit is byzantine.

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