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Comment by tie_ | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany, physical businesses have even more egregious subscription policies than most "dark" SaaS-es. Think, you do not cancel 3 months before expiration date - congrats, you're now signed up for another year. As a result, ended up writing a small PWA to keep track of my contracts and subscriptions.

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Ah yes they call those evergreen contracts in the US. Month-to-month works for me. It gives us both an out if one of us ends up not liking the other.

> As a result, ended up writing a small PWA to keep track of my contracts and subscriptions.

You can provide this as a yearly service where if by the ninth month they don’t cancel, they must use it for another year ;)

Edit: oh you already do sans the contract terms

Whaat! This one is new. You mean subscriptions from your neighborhood store such as milk, bread, newspapers, etc?

Newspapers, fitness studios, mobile providers, railway discount ticket (Bahncard). Can't say for neighborhood stores, I haven't really used a subscription at such a shop.

More like gym, "clubs" (Verein-s), mobile phone, internet, electricity, etc. It's an established contractual practice, and e.g. Telekom are not in any way obligated to notify you when your cancellation date approaches. They can very well sue you, however, should you refuse to pay your automatically-renewed-in-advance contract.

Even in the cases where you're allowed to cancel on the last day of the subscription, we as humans are very prone to forget to do that, particularly for longer-term contracts. Tracking contracts and subscription deadlines is a damn profitable habit that I wish I had acquired much earlier.

Curious: if they sue, then the only damage is money they owe or there is more to it such as credit history, etc?

I haven't really tested it in court, though I did get the official correspondence that leads up to it. Friendly law practitioner had suggested that I really don't stand a chance.

Not sure about credit damage, but in case of a loss in such a suit, I'd also have to cover the expenses for the other side, so it's a risky proposition.

With my wife we did consider it for a while, but then decided it's better to do focus on solving that problem with software and thus started working on contrax.app (shameless plug!).

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