The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions

theverge.com

919 pointsbluish29382 comments

These things are insane. I tried to cancel a month-to-month gym membership from a small local gym, and they told me "cancellations become effective on the 1st of the following month" and "require two months advance notice" thereby effectively charging me for three additional months after I gave notice. Apparently, this was all in the agreement I signed, although it was written so unclear, that nobody would even suspect this is how they interpret it.

I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.

Revoking ACH authorization is an effective tactic. The CFPB dictates that if you give 3 days notice, companies are obligated to honor this. If they charge you afterwards, your bank will be more than happy to reverse the charge. To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method. If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims. Here is a sample email which I've used many times to great effect:

May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]

[Bank Name] Checking Account x** Savings Account x** and Debit Card x**

Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below

name: DOB: phone #: email:

I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.

THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.

Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.

Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.

FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment

> To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method.

It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.

That is fucking bizarre that bank personnel would even try to argue with you. Why would a bank want their customers to be ripped off by shitty subscriptions?

Unfortunately, "ACH authorization" is a collective delusion, as there is no technical mechanism in the protocol to prevent ACH pulls.

Better to use something like a Privacy card in the first place so you can revoke it on your own terms.

It's not a delusion. From a legal perspective, the bank treats actions which are authorized by you and actions which are not differently. If you enter into an agreement that says you're authorizing entity X to charge you based on a contract and they charge you, the bank is likely to side with them, and tell you to go sue them if you want your money bank. If the bank knows that you did not authorize the ACH transfer, they're supposed to reverse the transaction.

>there is no technical mechanism in the protocol to prevent ACH pull

Nothing in the protocol, but many individual banks have their own in-house ways of failing the pull.

There doesn't have to be a technical mechanism. There is a legal one.

Are there privacy cards that work? I find that once a recurring charge is established and tied to an account it's very hard to cancel, surviving expired cards or even canceled card numbers.

The mechanism is when the bank authorizes or denys the ACH pull.

It is common for gyms to only accept ACH

Some companies report this type of thing to consumer trust worthiness services (similar to credit bureaus). Other companies use these services to gage customer risk before initiating new service so you can effectively get yourself blacklisted.

Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.

Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).

> and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly

Can you expand on what you mean by this?

My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?

And people actually reply to that?

What do you do if they tell you no one got this email?

You mean what do you do if someone knowingly lies in order to continue fraudulently charging you for something? Sounds like a crime to me.

But more realistically, at that point you've already filed a claim with the CFPB so who cares what they say? It will get settled one way or the other.

This would be a super duper feature add to a company or service that learns all your subscriptions and helps you cancel them.

> If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims.

No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.

I've let a few things go to collections over the years. Comcast disputes, etc. Never really saw any impact from this. Total charge-offs probably around $1000. Not once have I had an issue getting financing or mortgage.

If you are intending to pay cash for everything, you don't even need a credit score. No one cares about who you are or what you did when you walk in the door with a bag of cash in each hand.

Ive never heard of gyms doing that. Is it real? They are not a lender and are not lending money to you, so I don’t see how they can affect your credit report. There’s no credit involved.

Anyone actually have a credit report with an unpaid gym membership in the report?

I don't think they can do this- generally credit is tracked by social security number (in the USA). If you don't provide them with one, they will not be able to report you to a credit bureau.

If you're dealing with a (normally small) company that generally takes care of their customers, an email like this as a conversation starter is just going to make the customer support reps lives miserable and make them not want to lift a finger for you. Save this for the companies that really deserve it.

This isn't about service reps, it's about you. Sometimes you have to look out for yourself. This is hardly being abusive to service reps so they can suck it up and deal with it.

Feelings do not trump laws. If those reps are miserable working at a company knowingly employing deceptive or predatory tactics, they should find employment elsewhere.

Sometimes people you talk to have powers to change the outcome in your favour, sometimes all you need to do is ask.

I had an experience like that last year. I was cancelling my broadband in UK with Virgin, and got a £280 disconnection fee. The person who informed me said I will have to pay it in my final bill. Then over a month later I got a call from someone who's task was to see if I need a new connection where I was going. I said no, I was leaving the country. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said, "you could cancel that huge penalty fee I got.." And he was just like "Sure, no problem, done."

A "disconnection fee"? This has to be the most absurd charge I have ever heard of.

What does "disconnecting" a customer involve, anyway? I recall having to return equipment or face a penalty to cover costs (high, but still somewhat understandable), but I have never had to pay to get off a broadband contract.

That's just the beginning. My favorite is the concept of the pre-payment penalty: a lender can (in some jurisdictions) charge you a fee if you attempt to pay down the principal on your loan sooner than you are required to.

Most likely an early disconnection fee during the minimum term. Nearly everyone has a minimum term with virgin media as they only apply promotional discounts if you have a 12,18 or 24 month minimum term and the price shoots up as soon as you roll over onto the monthly.

[1] https://www.virginmedia.com/legal/fibre-optic-services-terms...

Often if you sign a yearly contract that includes a discounted monthly rate, if you cancel it before the end of the year, you have to pay the remainder of the contract remaining.

I haven't heard of (or it called) a 'disconnection' fee, but 'exit' fees are common. There's no pretence with that that there's work to do in terminating your contract, it's just, oh, you signed up for 24m, you want to leave in month 18, ok no problem but we'll sting you for £X because the alternative is probably you have actually technically committed legally to 24 months so in a way although it doesn't feel like it we're doing you a favour. ... It's pretty shit I think for tenants in particular where the available service periods don't necessarily line up with the time they actually spend in the property.

It's common where there's a significant installation fee (perhaps installing a fibre thing on your house) which was waived in return for a 12 or 24 month contract.

They prey on people who don't want to rock the boat, don't know that they can try to rock the boat, or are just too busy for this absolute nonsense.

The leadership of any company that does anything like this should be very consciously aware that they're mediocre leftovers of the professional world. Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.

> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.

There's a certain toxic element of business culture that preaches dominance as a virtuous thing, ether overtly, or through dubious terminology/beliefs in ideas like "alpha males." It argues that if you aren't dominating someone, then they necessarily must be dominating you in this interaction.

It is an extremely reductionistic view that has trickled down into certain parts of Weird Internet, too.

I imagine there are consultants that go around to gyms (especially chains) and say "We've got x things that are trivial to implement and will guarantee you make $123 more per customer on average. Cost for our analysis and recommendations is $12,345 with an assurance that you will make this back in the first 6 months." And one of the things is adding a paragraph to the sign up terms.

It's a bit like the toothpaste consultant story.

It's like how bike stores and hair salons want you to set up an account.

> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory

I dont think it works as your described. Amazon is plenty predatory.

What happens is a company tries to see what it can get away with. If they don't get in legal trouble, and customers don't abandon them in droves, then other companies start doing the same. It becomes industry standard.

You might be right. Though I think this is a cousin of "I'm just following orders." Too many people don't speak up. Is there nobody who feels embarrassed that this is what they're a part of?

"Hey dad, what did you do at work today?"

"I worked with some lawyers to make an indecipherable contract so that we can extract extra money for a service someone doesn't want."

I guess the answer is some mix of "make the org structure so complex that everyone can feel innocent because no one person is pulling the trigger" (I don't buy it, that just means incompetent managers) plus a heaping scoop of cognitive dissonance.

I had a gym membership that I wanted to cancel because I had moved, and their closest location was no longer convenient.

First, they tried to tell me I had to go back to the location I had originally signed up at in order to cancel. No phone cancellation options or anything. I guess if I had moved more than a few miles away, I'd be out of luck.

After some fighting, the closer location let me fill out a paper cancellation form. The cancellation form had a very clear section that showed "paid in full" and "$0 remaining due." Despite this, I got a bill a month later for my "final month." I refused to pay it, obviously. They harassed me, calling me daily. Only once I posted a poor review online did someone finally decide the $50 (or whatever it was) wasn't worth it.

They gym itself was a fine gym, but these billing practices are scummy scummy scummy. I refuse to sign up for any other gym (except maybe a local rec center) until there's more legislation to protect my consumer rights. The cancellation nonsense isn't worth my time.

> I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback

Maybe you would since it's a local gym, but if it's a national chain credit card companies won't even let you initiate the chargeback whatsoever.

I had to go so far as to completely cancel my Amex account to get Lifestyle Fitness to stop billing me. American Express utterly refused to either chargeback, or deny future billings. To the point a new card number issued didn't even fix it. I was quite happy to sign a waiver that I'd take all liability.

This was after moving states, calling to cancel, and them saying I needed to fly in to cancel in person. Outright scam that the banks help enable.

> Outright scam that the banks help enable.

I think first logical step is to legislate banks from enabling this. That should cover most of the problem without a wide ranging laws.

I wonder why Amex plays ball with them? They are normally really firm about their chargebacks

Isn't that part of the value proposition of Amex in the first place?

my amex processed my chargeback for gold's gym just fine. They said it was a no obligation free trial I could cancel at any time and then when I called to cancel before the first bill they said no, you have to come once a week for that to be true..?

A chargeback is distinct from a "never let this company charge me again" - the latter some places can't do.

We should have a github repo for these scamming activities.

Even though they conceded, you should still follow through on all of the above. You aren't hurting a person, it's a corporation that will only change when forced financially or socially to do so.

Honestly, I was mostly bluffing... I didn't have time to do all of that, which is why I also had to quit the gym. I was planning to temporarily quit/suspend and then rejoin when I was able to, but they lost out on that possibility.

I think these kind of predatory cancellation things must be in part a generational thing, and these policies are so old they haven't responded to the times. Older people I know seem to expect it or be okay with it, but millenials and younger will tend to be outraged and refuse to do business with them on principle. America Online, Sirius XM, etc. were able to retain some customers by making it hard to quit, but I think turned away far more without realizing it.

Great example. I like broadcast radio. I don't like picking and choosing podcasts, I like to just listen to "what's on". I really like some of the live music content on SiriusXM (celebrity DJs, etc). I'm their ideal customer. And they'd have captured $300-400 of my value over the past 1.5 years, if they only had self-serve subscription and cancellation like Netflix or Disney+. But since they have decided to go the NYTimes route of "everyone pays a different price, and cancelling is next to impossible", they get nothing from me.

A small local gym is not “a corporation”.

Legally it usually is, isn't it? It would be unusual for it to be a sole proprietorship.

In any case, predatory/scammy practices are bad no matter what the ownership structure is. Being small and local doesn't excuse you from abusive behavior.

Yes, all business entities, with the loose exception of a sole-proprietorship, is a corporation under the law.

There are four general types of corporations in the United States: a sole proprietorship, a Limited Liability Company (LLC), an S-Corporation (S-Corp), and a C-Corporation (C-Corp).

People who whine about corporations fail to realize that 99% of the businesses they deal with everyday are incorporated entities under the law. Your pizza shop, tanning salon, dentist, ice cream shop, sandwich truck...

A business entity can be a good or bad actor. Their legal status as a corporation does not mean they are automatically bad, regardless of the size or public/private status. Their actions and policies define them as either good or bad.

Words have meaning and they should be used appropriately.

Except legal entities are literally manifest in order to absorb the fallout from situations like these. So don't be shy about using existing processes and tools to issue corrective action.

The "small local gym" sure was pulling some corporate B.S. on their supposed "neighbor".

As someone who used to own a couple small local gyms, they absolutely are.

Even if it is an individual, the predatory behavior deserves to be financially ruinous. If they cannot run their business without scamming people they should never have had a business.

Technically, many small companies are corporations.

If they've incorporated, they're a corporation. Being a small dick isn't per se different than being a big dick.

This is why I always prepay for my gym membership up-front and do not enter into any agreement. There are a few places that do this. Last one I went to, I prepaid for 90 days. I confirmed they weren't even storing my payment information because I had to provide it again to renew the next quarter.

The best part of this is that when you decide you are done, you simply do nothing and its all over. Sure, you will get some marketing text spam for a few weeks but that's about it.

There's also the added benefit of being able to take advantage of "new memeber" offers

I had a similar situation. During covid, a gym I was attending shut down some of their locations because of covid, forcing all those members to crowd into fewer locations. Those gyms became unusable to me because of equipment hogging and overcrowding (I typically counted on one hour to complete a full workout and was extremely pressed for time, now it would take me at least twice that). I tried to cancel, citing my reasons, but I got a similar runaround to you. I also had to submit my cancellation in writing and mail it into their corporate office. I refused to do any of this, so I called my credit card company and complained that they were fraudulently charging me and requested that they block further charges. Sure enough, a few months later I got letters and emails threatening to cancel my membership because there was an issue with my payment method. Since the membership was month-to-month, they couldn’t hold me responsible for anything beyond the month for which I had already paid.

I joined a small private gym that works on a monthly prepaid membership. Just pay for the month in advance, and you have access. Don’t pay? No access, no pressure, no worries. Leave for months at a time and come come back with no hassle.

such a depressingly common trope.

them: "Sorry, there's nothing I can do, I simply can't help you!"

customer: "I'll be really annoying."

them: "I figured out how to help you!"

This is exactly how most people operate. Reactive instead of proactive.

I'm thinking as an added protection measure we should always use a secondary phone line plus a secondary email and fake address for these types of subscriptions. You don't know what they are going to do.

When you have to utilize dark web techniques to get a gym membership, maybe it's time to do something else.

My daughter had dancing lessons in the past (never again!), we quit because she did not want to go anymore. They told us we can only quit by the end of the quarter with a month's notice - it was beginning of March, so too late to quit for end of June.

Then Covid hit, classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.

> classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.

Isn't charging people for things you don't give them supposed to be one of those things that are illegal no matter what any contracts say?

I think you should do what you told them you would do anyway - posting on each and every social network.

I’m guessing you probably won’t win a chargeback unless you can show that you sent them a letter telling them to cancel (and because of this, they actually will cancel if you send them a letter).

I think another aspect of this problem is that credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.” Of course that probably wouldn’t solve the problem. The gyms would probably just continue charging you and eventually send you to debt collection.

> credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.”

Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.

Modern banks like Revolut have this as literary part of their UI.

They use some simple ML to figure out which are you recurring payments, place them in a separate folder for you to keep tabs on and allow you to unilaterally stop any “future payments like that”.

I mean on top of tech like virtual cards and chargebacks with a few clicks.

It seems so simple to implement I have no idea how its not a standard feature for banks these days.

The opposite happened to my partner here in Portugal. She signed up to a gym ($100/month), and they literally forgot to start charging the account until 5 months later. Everything tends to be so inefficient here. I guess at least in this case the inefficiency worked in our favor. Now let's hope they won't take 5 months to stop charging when we cancel ;-)

I personally had to get cc dispute started, because, $my_local_gym_that_is_not_a_chain also uses the same scummy tactics including, but limited to starting to add more charges. They also said, I need to fax my hand written cancellation to their HQ. I did, but as you can guess there is a reason I opened a dispute with CC.

Similar. I got badly injured. Gym said I could only cancel in person. Was not possible. Played me off between gym and corporate for several days. Went ballistic on all social media, review sites etc. wrote some emails shaming them. Charged back from bank.

They finally agreed to cancel remotely.

Careful, many gyms will send you to collections for failing to pay to the terms of the contract.

Collections is mostly meaningless if you are otherwise financially responsible.

The entire system is quite abusive. You may try experimenting with "I don't give a shit", assuming your other ducks are in order. I have found it to be therapeutic.

Depending on the law though, you may be able to ignore collections, and you can dispute it if they put anything on your credit report. Just because something is in a contract that doesn't mean it is legal an enforceable. See a lawyer for details as this is different in every state and country.

You can contest being sent to collection tho (in the US: Fair Debt Collection Practices Act). It takes time and research to understand what you have to do, but being sent to collections isn't always a credit death sentence.

Just cancel the payment, I wouldn't even bother to talk to them if it's clear it'll be difficult. They'll send you a letter or something saying if you don't update the payment method your access will be cancelled. Ok?

honestly there will be a delay from the government taking action on smaller local gyms too so I feel like there should be a way to submit the businesses for inspection at least to threaten them to improve their policies

In my third world country (Brazil) we actually have strict regulations on cancellations (among other consumer focused laws):

- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. - The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once. - If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again. - Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.

I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.

Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.

I've been in Brazil recently and I was positively surprised with the great consumer protection laws.

One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.

There are many similar laws in the US, but many of them are fragmented either in different state jurisdictions or for different types of transactions.

They're called things like: "cooling-off law", "buyers remorse law", or "right to cancel"

Some examples: https://cal.lawsoup.org/legal-guides/consumer/contract-cance...

TIL but the California laws are very limited to a subset of items which are already cancellable nationwide. For example, you can always cancel your property insurance and get a prorated refund. OP was talking about hotel reservations which are not cancellable in California. I don't know the situation is in Brazil for cell phone plans but according to the link you posted, it's not cancellable.

The funny thing about this, when there is a public conversation about their practices or legislative process to stop it, companies (i.e apple, uhg, john deer, Facebook, etc) will cry floods of tears, claim they'll go out of business due, people will lose their job, to the extra cost of compliance. They'd rather keep disadvantaged customers rather than compete and deliver value.

All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.

What does Apple make hard to cancel?

If you say Louis Rossmann 3 times after saying Apple you'll get a long list of anti-consumer practices.

Most recently:

The issue with their charging ports being changed frequently and being non standard. They even tried to abuse the USBC standard just so they could get their charing cable lock in.

This is the surprising thing about Brazil, here we have the big corporations as well, and a lot (if not all) corrupt politicians. But somehow these consumer laws passed got approved and will be pretty hard to remove.

Yeah we follow a mirror concept, which is cancelling should be at least as easy as signing up, and ideally easier. We don't have 1 click cancellations because we don't have 1 click sign ups. It requires an hour onboarding to use our service so they have to send us an email or a message in our chat bat to trigger a cancellation so we can sure they understand all the consequences.

Well yeah you live in a first world country. This is America.

Tangential to this - no small part of the reason why I like subscriptions in the iPhone App Store is because Apple doesn't let billers fuck around like this. There's one place to see everything, and you can cancel anything in a couple clicks. It's part of why I'd probably never use an alternative app store.

Also they force subscriptions to make the actual price you pay the most prominent. Common dark pattern is to put "8.99" a month, then under it in tiny text "Billed immediately as 107.88, renews annually". To pass Apple's approval, they would have to write "107.88" in large text, as that is what you are actually going to be charged.

1Password got me with this. I was getting it for free because my work used it, but when I left, write/autofill was suspended. I had planned to move to a different service as I dislike 1P8, but I was in a hurry to just get things working again, and $2.99 a month is cheap enough to get me by for a few months. I enter my CC details. Get charged $39.47 (10% for GST). I go back and look at the site and realise the monthly price is billed annually. I don’t recall being quoted this price when I entered my CC details, perhaps it was displayed in a way that was easy to miss for people in a hurry. In any case there’s a dark pattern in their checkout flow. It’s disingenuous to to advertise $2.99 and bill $39.47. Imagine a cafe that advertises the price of their coffee as 40c then in smallprint “times 12 made in a single payment”. The advertised price should match the billed price for all products and services.

> advertises the price of their coffee as 40c then in smallprint “times 12 made in a single payment”.

lol, exactly like the mail-order CD club I signed up for back in high school.

It’s in the footnote hidden in the middle of 10 other footnotes after scroll a meter to the bottom screen in small grey text

Completely true. One way this has saved me in the past: Audible has an incredibly shady practice where the only way to get books is that their subscription service gives you tokens (1 a month) to redeem books with. However, if you cancel your subscription, your tokens are lost. But, if you subscribe to Audible through Apple, then because of Apple the tokens are retained, even if you cancel.

Wow, this is good to know, thanks.

I agree but interestingly had a conversation with my family and they all had the opposite impression. They were complaining about mysterious recurring apple charges on their bank cards that they had no idea what they were or how to find out. I pointed out that you could see all your subscriptions under your Apple ID on your phone and they were all amazed. Long winded way of saying, if anyone from apple is reading this, maybe make this more discoverable and if possible disambiguate the charges on the bill (maybe put the originating app name for the subscription in the charge?).

I wish Apple would just combine all my subscriptions into a single payment.

Cancelling subscriptions on apple devices is a dream, I love it

One of my friend maintains a fitness app that uses in-app subscription when subscribing through the app or subscription through the website with a credit card.

The apple subscription generate a lot more support requests because a lot of customers are confused on how to stop the in app subscription. Unfortunately, the company can't stop the subscription, it can only be done by the customer through the app store, so instead of just being able to cancel it for confused customers who request it, they have to guide them to cancel it on their side which is a lot of work.

True, but it makes auditing your bank account slightly more difficult.

Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period.

It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.

It's just as easy on Android

I tend to agree, with a caveat. If you have a family Apple account and one of your family members has a subscription, you do not have visibility even though it is your credit card getting billed. So for a complete picture you have to log into each of your kids' devices to see if they have an active subscription.

It seems to be done for privacy reasons, but I don't agree with how they handle it. I should be able to see all charges going to my Apple account credit card no matter which sub-account originated them.

You can actually see this information on reportaproblem.apple.com now. Has recent charges by each family member and tells you if a subscription will renew.

In my online credit card account, I can expand each purchase and "show digital receipt" to get information about what app/subscription it was for. For all App Store purchases, Apple will also email the account that made the purchase (even if it's me) to let them know the purchase details were requested. That seems reasonable to me--the payer knows what the payment was for, and the purchaser knows the info was accessed.

1000% - just wish they’d drop their fees so that more companies would see the benefits versus rolling their own.

Even if Apple's fees were 5%, there would be companies that would prefer a custom subscription system because they could save one cent per transaction and track the customers better.

True, but they still have the '8 day free trial then £59.99 a year billing' for some apps. My wife installed a design app she wanted to try out, forgot to cancel and was stung last week. For such a high purchase price that feels to me like there should be addition verification step before charging.

Especially since the app was terrible and the reviews were full of people who were similarly charged and unhappy.

Apple allow you to press cancel immediately after sign up and the account will remain valid until the 8th day.

Anecdotally, I had both an Apple Arcade and an Apple TV trial a few years back. I tried cancelling prematurely to avoid surprise charges and the interface told me in no uncertain terms that if I cancelled before the trial expired, I’d lose access immediately.

I think there's also a 14 day grace period after the charge to cancel and refund the subscription. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084

What is bonkers about that? Apple let 2 consenting parties enter into an agreement and provides a single interface to cancel that agreement whenever you want from their pocket without talking to anyone. I struggle to think of a better setup.

One in which no one is surprised when a free trial rolls over to a paid subscription - perhaps that shouldnt even be allowable, given that its mostly done to make money off of people not paying attention.

One of the most nefarious instances of this I have seen is a "online mental health counseling" startup that was charging a non-trivial monthly recurring fee, even though it did not have any available appointments with a professional in the coming month. I had to call and haggle for half an hour on behalf of someone who signed up for the app, and only after putting in their credit card information was shown that there are no appointments.

Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.

>Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.

The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.

That's the whole point of those kinds of mental health startups. Get the credit card information of people who don't have the energy or organisation skills to ensure that they cancel it, and charge them according to the contract. It's basically like the gym thing, except instead of hoping you are rich enough or lazy enough not to cancel, they hope you are ill enough not to cancel.

Had a similar problem with Thrive Market. Non refundable subscription unless you chose yearly instead of monthly then the very specific item I wanted was out of stock (among tons of other things).

Wouldn't happen to be Cerebral, would it?

I was in a similar situation and extremely irate at first when they said refunds were not an option, but fortunately it appeared to be an issue with their automated scheduling system. Once talking to an agent they were able to link me to a provider that same day.

On the whole, it's actually been a pretty good experience over the last year. Trying to get similar counseling/medication locally was an absolute nightmare at the time... with Cerebral, everything happened super fast and the counseling I got seemed on point (ADHD/insomnia). They quickly pause/resume for when I'm out of the country traveling, no unapproved charges so far.

I hope you aren't taking stimulants during the day and then benzos at night to sleep -- that can be a disaster long term.

Why don't you name them?

If I remembered their name I would 100% name and shame them publicly. Unfortunately it was a while ago during the peak of the pandemic, and I don't have any email records since I myself didn't sign up for them.

Chance are your mental health startup is also flogging your data for bucks as well.

uh, HIPAA???

TLDR: HIPAA doesn't apply because reasons. (I am neither a HIPAA expert nor a lawyer.).

"Who must comply with HIPAA": https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/190/who-must...

"Is a software vendor a business associate of a covered entity": https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/256/is-softw...

For example, the GoodRX [0] and BetterHelp [1] settlements were both due to alleged violations of the FTC Act and Health Breach Notification Rule, rather than a violation of HIPAA.

[0] https://www.hipaajournal.com/court-approves-ftc-settlement-g...

[1] https://www.hipaajournal.com/betterhelp-settlement-ftc-healt...

HIPAA applies if they accept insurance.

Can they loop in New York Times subscription? You have to _call_ them during business hours to cancel. When I was subscribed, I prompted myself to cancel when we had to change CC numbers (random fraud), so I finally called NYT to cancel. "You have to pay out first" -- no problem, I'll pay last bill right now and cancel. "Once you pay out, you have to wait two days before you can cancel it". WTF? Outright shady.

I've cancelled my NYT sub online, a year or two back. I keep seeing anecdotes like yours pop-up, though. I don't know if they have different policies based on billing address or something.

I remember distinctly because when I _first_ signed up, it wasn't an option. A year or two later they emailed something about "Look how cool we are, you can cancel with just a few clicks now!" as if it was something to be proud of, rather than just them finally using consumer-friendly practices.

Are you in California? They are forced by law to make it easier to cancel in California, but they don't extend that anywhere else AFAIK.

Supposedly it is doable if you sign up in California/EU and a few other states that have regulations on this.

IIRC If your billing address is in California you have the option of cancelling online.

Sometimes changing your billing address to somewhere in California can solve this. CA has a law saying that if you can sign up for a service online, you need to be able to cancel it online immediately, and be able to do so through either a “prominently located direct link or button” on the website or a preformatted email that the consumer can send to terminate the subscription without taking any further steps.

Can you just change your billing address to an arbitrary location like that? CC payments require matching address at least, or zip code. I guess if you weren't receiving any mail from the entity it might not matter in practice but it seems odd.

I feel ya, but there is worse: in France to cancel most services (mobile plan, bank accounts...) you need to send a registered mail. Suffice it to say, living abroad, there is a bunch of services I literally cannot cancel because of that. To close a mobile account, I recently had to cancel the credit card, then ignore emails from the debt collection agency they hired, for them to finally close my account.

> Suffice it to say, living abroad, there is a bunch of services I literally cannot cancel because of that.

Nonsense. Send your registered mail online with la poste. It has the same legal value. I'm not saying that requiring registered mail isn't shitty, but letting this go to debt collection is making things difficult for yourself with no good reason.

And by the way, a law has been enacted that will force business to offer online cancellation starting June 1st: https://www.tomsguide.fr/fin-des-lettres-recommandees-pour-r...

It's why I find it hard to take the "woe is me, why won't anyone pay for real journalism" pleas seriously when it feels so irresponsible to trust these companies with your credit card details. And this isn't a new problem to the internet, it was also the case with "delivered to your local store" subscriptions in the past

I sometimes feel bad for spending time searching archive links for onlinenews publications but seeing how they treat paying customers I feel better now.

Some of these services I'm interested in enough I'd be willing to pay for a few months to try them. But magazine subscriptions and comcast have trained me to avoid these kinds of relationships like the plague. They aren't usually that expensive but the potential hassle sours the whole deal.

Then you get hit with 30± minute hold times and random "accidental" hangups/disconnects

WSJ is also annoying. The phone rep tries to convince you to keep the subscription.

I literally canceled my gym membership by cancelling my credit card. It was easier to update a handful of services on autopay than go through their daedric rituals of submitting cancellations by fax 90 days in advance.

Years later my wife and I signed up for the same gym. She was later able to cancel by talking to someone in charge and crying about it.

Virtual cards FTW. Too bad they're not that common here in Canada.

easier: they'll always accept a change in card numbers.

just change it to a virtual card and then give the virtual card a budget of $1 and/or let it expire. or get a prepaid debit card with $1 left on it.

your credit (FICO) score might take a hit when you close a card, especially an old one

I did not realize this until I cancelled a card that I'd had for 15-20 years, much longer than any others, because I'd switched to another card from the same company (AMEX) and wasn't using that old card anymore. My score went down quite a bit, and I was so upset at Amex for not telling me when I was trying to cancel that old card. I would have just kept it and not used it.

If you close a particularly young card, it can also bring your score up if the others are older. Last I looked it used an average for the age of all your credit lines.

That's why I use a prepaid one. Although, that's mostly for free trials.

I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month

while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)

I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership

worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts

Contact your bank and explain what's going on. They may have a way to block Planet Fitness' auto charge. Your bank should be sympathetic and they control outflows.

After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.

I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!

They absolutely have a way to block auto-charges.

> certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)

Try small claims court in _your_ jurisdiction. You can then present this in evidence.

It won’t look good either if they charge you after they’ve been served about that legal action. That’s probably the most formal written notification!

"unless I switch bank accounts"

And if you do, they will keep your membership active (for years) before reporting debt to the credit agencies.

no because they don't require ssn to signup.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-stop-autom...

I wonder if this is a franchise thing. I've moved states more than once and Planet Fitness has been one of the easier things to deal with cancelling. Done this a few times in different states. You should be able to go into any location and make that your new home location, and then cancel there.

They also let me use a credit card for payments too.

The contract requires you to send the letter to cancel, but it doesn't prohibit you from calling to discuss the matter. You have already cancelled in compliance with the terms of the contract, you don't have to hop on a flight to do anything.

I forget which gym but I sent them an email cancellation ("in writing") and they told me I had to come in. So I cancelled the card. They had some bullshit agreement with my bank where the subscription followed to my new card. So I cancelled the bank account.

Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.

edit: It was Workout Anytime

Ballys? whatever happened to that shithole.

Nothing is tough to cancel; just nuke the credit card and tell them to pound sand.

Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.

Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.

Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.

I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.

If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)

I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.

Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.

They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it.

Man, I hate to be [citation needed] Guy, but I don’t think that’s true. A quick search only gives me this:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/postdated-check

I’d doubly-check that before relying on it.

You can't really rely on it, but if you ask your bank nicely, they might enforce it and wait to process a postdated check. My credit union says there's a $15 charge for a postdated order per check, so I'd rather save my money and provide the check later.

It's kind of like stale dated checks; the bank doesn't have to pay a check that's more than six months old; but you can't rely on it, the bank can pay that check and if they do, it will come out of your account; the bank has no duty to you to not pay stale dated checks.

I'm in Canada. (You know, that country that didn't have a banking crisis in 2008.)

Here, I'm reasonably confident that banks will not cash a cheque before the date on it, other than if it slips through by clerical error.

My government recommends this:

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

They don't say it can never happen, but if a post-dated cheque is prematurely cashed, it's a problem, and you can complain about it to have the payment reversed. You should complain before the date on the cheque (after which it is more or less moot).

Visa and MC offer a service that follows subscriptions to your new card number. They say it’s for “convenience”…

Credit card companies should have special handling for recurring billing. You should just be able to tell them “I don’t want to pay this bill anymore” and put a stop to it without having to get a new card and a new number.

The problem is that with credit cards, recurring bills aren't "special" compared to normal purchases.

This is different from digital-native payment systems like PayPal which do have (albeit also riddled with dark patterns) a way for you to de-authorize recurring bills from a vendor, at which point they need to wait for you to initiate a payment instead.

They are "special" but they also aren't.

There are numerous flags you can put on a transaction to hint things like "This is a recurring charge." "This is a merchant initiated charge." "This was placed with a card that the merchant recorded as part of transaction 123456789". Much of this is used from a fraud-management perspective (for example, a recurring transaction usually won't have a CVV or 3-D Secure information because the customer is not involved in the transaction flow), not to control recurring behaviour.

However, it's not a singular entity-- each individual payment is still a free-standing operation and could usually succeed without any of those flags.

Some countries have stronger requirements. India seems forward looking, where there are specific regulations to tie installments to an explicit confirmation on a per-installment basis.

They should change the system so it is. They introduced chip cards to improve the system and they can introduce this change too.

I'm not sure I agree. I can't recall specifics but back in the day a trick to get out of these was to report a card lost or stolen so you'd get a new number. But some banks now allow recurring charges to continue on the new number for "convenience" reasons.

Therefore you need to use a throwaway or cancel the card.

I got a card from X1 and am using it solely for my recurring services, since you can create unlimited virtual numbers and put price caps/age limits on them.

Chase Bank (in the US) will list who has stored your card data and whether it's for recurring payments but unfortunately don't offer the option to disable/remove them

I'd sign up for a new credit card just for this feature alone.

Note that this does not nullify your legal contract.

Sure, but your credit card company should be paying people who you direct them to, not paying people who claim that you owe them money.

The credit company should write it into their contract so that it does. The credit card company should send a notification that you cut them off as soon as it happens.

To preface, nothing against the poster since I know they were just copying the article title.

This article headline is a bit misleading, as the FTC is not looking to ban the subscriptions themselves. Rather, they would like to implement a rule that requires servicers that provide subscriptions to make it as easy to cancel as it is to enroll, rather than the current jumbling mess that is trying to cancel something like a gym, Amazon, news, cable, or other subscription where servicers try to maintain retention by putting in a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to cancel.

It's not a misleading title, it would be verboten to offer certain subscriptions. Which subscriptions? The tough to cancel ones. There are subscriptions offered today which would not be allowed to be offered.

Servicers could change the cancellation process without ever changing the subscription itself. The issue at hand is not the subscription, but the process with which one would cancel it.

I wonder if part of the solution here might be to put firm limits on the period over which subscriptions can auto-renew. That would limit the upside to these practices. Is there any real societal benefit to subscriptions lasting years without contact between the company and the user?

It should be simple to make it the law that people must affirmatively re-subscribe every 12 months, contracts saying otherwise are invalid, and charging someone for an expired subscription entitles them to twice the money back + $1000 (to make it worthwhile to fight illegal charges).

Germany introduced a legislation like this recently ("law for fair consumer contracts"). It mandates that there is a cancellation button (and clicking it sends you an email confirmation), offers via phone have to be sent and confirmed in writing, contracts can be canceled at any time within one month after the initially agreed runtime.

In German: https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...

I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card?

Why does my bank want me to write them some letter and create a case which they may or maynot look into.

Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.

> I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card?

No, but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider where you have promised to pay for a service, and merely 'not paying' is not sufficient to cancel that. This makes far more sense in a non-digital world though, where you might pay for expensive services after the fact, rather than in advance.

In practice, most digital services will happily cancel themselves if you do just block upfront transactions. Many modern financial services/neobanks I've used have some kind of built-in functionality for this, even paypal has a page where you can manage & cancel all current subscriptions directly, blocking all future payments: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/.

> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.

I believe it's because the 'card details' part is effectively a fiction for e-commerce. When you subscribe, the payment provider uses your card details to get a persistent token, which they can use to authorize future payments, and then they throw away the card details entirely. They just use the token alone to authorize future charges.

That token is somewhat independent of the specific card, by design, as unlike card details this means it can't really be stolen or leaked (it's only authorized for certain purchases from that one vendor) and it means all your normal ongoing payments don't break in the common case where you _do_ want payments to continue when your card is replaced. Bits About Money has some more background on this here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...

> but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider

Yes i understand my obligation to the vendor but why is the bank enforcing that ?

> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.

Do they? My bank recently decided to send me a new CC for no clear reason (old one had like two years left to expiry) and without my asking for it, and it's been a huge pain in the ass because seemingly nothing updated automatically.

> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.

They update vendors because most people who get a replacement card with a new number have way more subscriptions that they want to keep going than they have subscriptions that they want to drop but for which the procedure for cancelling was too complicated to time consumers.

Nope. Use Discovercard, I've used them to cancel services for me. All you have to do is say you tried yourself and then they'll close your account, and open a new one. It's not enough for them to change your number, as the old number will still work. Problem is it will cancel every autopay connected to that card, so it's a nuclear option.

What does that do to your credit score? I seem to recall that closing and opening cards can both lower you score..

> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.

I wish my bank had to do that. It would make my life a whole lot easier sometimes.

I want this for all subscriptions, not just gym & cable. I had to waste 15 minutes of my life a few weeks ago convincing The Economist to actually cancel my subscription. They were deceitful and tried various ways of phrasing their counter offers hoping I'd slip up and say something other than "No, just cancel."

If I can sign up on the web site, I should be able to cancel with just as many clicks.

> If I can sign up on the web site, I should be able to cancel with just as many clicks.

Fun fact! Websites actually have to support this for their California subscribers. If a website is refusing to let you do so, it's not that they haven't implemented it, it's just that they want to screw you. As a corollary, a lot of websites get a lot easier to cancel if you change your billing address to somewhere in CA.

You should read the article! You would get this in the case you'd described as well

I subscribed to the NYT a few years ago and it took a phone call and a retention pitch to finally unsubscribe. I vowed to never subscribe again as long as this was in place.

NYT problem was due in part that we had so many legacy systems related to subscriptions; there was a big push internally to solve this.

When "online cancel" finally rolled out we were all so excited there was a party with a sheetcake that had the cancellation landing page printed on it. We'd rather have users trust us than use dark patterns to "trap" them into a subscription.

I subscribe to the economist, and they automatically renew at a rate of $199 per year, I called to cancel and they drop it to $80 per year. Would save everyone the time if they started with $80

FWIW Comcast does this too. Just call them every 11 months and make them give you a better price. It’s dumb as heck and I want to live long enough to see them burn to the ground, but it’s one call I will make as it lets us give the only ISP option at our address in Silicon Valley that can actually give us gigabit download speeds (and capped 40mbit upload with a 1.2tb data cap) less money.

If the rep you talk to won’t do it, hang up and call again.

My wife subscribed to The Economist but we weren't reading it. I tried changing my address to California, which has worked for some subscriptions because of California's consumer-friendly subscription cancellation law. That didn't work.

I tried doing the chat to cancel. I said multiple times that we wanted to cancel and the person (presumably a person following a script, although they certainly seemed robotic) just kept ignoring that. Eventually I said I'm cancelling, if you charge us, I'll charge it back and took a screenshot of that.

When they charged me, I charged it back. No need for the screenshot, which was mildly disappointing because this was one time where I felt I had proof that I tried to cancel.

We'll never subscribe to The Economist again. If you make it this difficult to leave, better not to start.

My previous Internet provider Cox tried this tactic on me when I canceled. My reply to them was ok, so you're admitting to overcharging me all along. I'll agree to stay with you if you also provide a refund for all previous months I was overcharged. They finally agreed to close my account at that point :)

I've read this many times on HN, Reddit, etc. Last week I just used a VPN. Took 30 seconds to click-click unsubscribe.

PS - During the process I was offered like 60% off if I kept the subscription.

NYTimes changed their policy sometime during the Covid years. I canceled back in 2017-18 and can confirm that it took me talking over the phone rep repeatedly saying nothing but "Cancel." for them to stop the retention spiel and finally close my account.

I just interacted with the WSJ several days ago. It was extremely annoying -- and probably painful to the poor customer service rep who has to take these calls.

I don’t read any of these regularly, but the Apple One subscription includes Apple News+ or whatever it’s called and that lets you read NYT, WSJ, LA Times, and quite a few others…only works in the Apple News app though. That’s the annoying part — you don’t technically have a subscription with them, so you can’t comment (if that matters to you). It’s more comparable to RSS feed access, albeit with no ads and full fidelity articles.

Honestly, I prefer it to their own apps, and the price + cancellation policy is WAY better.

"Xperience Fitness" made me show up in person and sign a document. This needed to then be faxed to HQ. Of course, the gym didn't have a fax machine. So had to find a fax machine, send off a fax and wonder if anybody is going to look at it on the other end. This was in 2015 or so, not 1986.

Apparently, if you live in California, you have an easy online unsubscribe process.

I would support making fixed term contracts for gyms in particular (plus possibly cable) just plain illegal. There is absolutely no reason why such places can't charge month-to-month. None. Even "initiation fees" should be illegal. At least cable requires a box.

I read a story recently about Planet Fitness (IIRC). They realized that certain equipment was popular (eg free weights, racks) so they could remove that equipment and people stopped showing up but a good portion of them kept their membership. So the number of members per location is extraordinarily high. This is incredibly profitable.

I, for one, just hate all this adversarial bullshit you have to deal with on a daily basis. I don't want to fight to cancel something. It's one reason I don't pay for some publications that do good reporting because canceling those is notoriously difficult. So instead they get nothing for me but of course they've done the math and the people who don't cancel make them more money than people who don't join because of this.

Another thing: automatic price rises. Cable is the worst for this. You can go through a dance of cancelling to get a lower rate. If you don't your $60 FIOS bill will turn into $150 in a few years without intervention.

I'm so tired of the constantly nickle and diming.

This is great. Maybe one day we'll see action on timeshares. I got one a long time ago that was impossible to get rid of. Fully paid for, Westgate told me it had a lot of value so I told them to just take it back, but they would't of course. I ended up just stopping all payments, went through a few years of harassing calls, and then done, nothing more. Still haunts me though, I'm afraid it could come back up with outstanding balance owed.

My dad got a Westgate timeshare back in the '90s. I was there when he was conned. And even at the young age I knew the salesman was the sleeziest guy on Earth. He drove us around in their limo to impress us, showing us their property. The way he talked just felt slimy.

My mom recently told me they tried to book their week at the timeshare and were told they would have to pay $1,000 to do so. Because it's a premium week or whatever bullshit. It's absolutely insane this predatory company is allowed to continue. I'm going to be forced to deal with this fucking thing when he dies. That's the truly insane thing. It's treated as property, but it's not. It's a fucking subscription that you can't cancel. Ever. You own nothing.

By the way, depending on your state, you may have to officially file to not receive the timeshare and its obligations in your father's estate. And whoever is next in line to inherit has to do the same, on down the line until the state, I suppose.

Would love to see Westgate tell the state of Massachusetts that they are the legal owners of this timeshare, and owe for annual repairs.

I think it can. More scary though, when you die unless they take active action to refuse it, your kids or whoever your inheritance goes to gets it by default. With all the financial obligations.

Yeah, John Oliver just did a Last Week Tonight on Timeshares. He goes over that in the video. Also there are scam companies that exist that promise to take your money to help you exit your timeshare agreement, then disappear. So you get double-scammed. And somehow this is technically legal?

Link to the Last Week Tonight video: https://youtu.be/Bd2bbHoVQSM

Why can't you create a corporation, have the corp buy it from you for $1, and then go bankrupt in a month or three?

I guess if you inherit a timeshare you can just insist that it goes to a sibling. Or, even better, a step-sibling...

> The proposed 'click to cancel' rule would require companies to let you cancel a membership in as many steps as it takes to sign up.

This is actually a very smart and simple rule and I love the reciprocity of it---if it takes a click to sign up it must take no more than a click to cancel; if you want to require months of advanced notice to cancel, then you also have to wait just as many months before charging when someone signs up. Tit-for-tat.

Seems like fair game.

Yep. I've never understood why this wasn't the default, and making it so after self-regulation failed feels like the right level of regulatory involvement to me.

Lol the EU has done this years ago. Silent renewals for a year are forbidden now and so are cancellations that must be hand-delivered on gold paper on the third Thursday of the month between 9:00 and 9:05 kinda deals. Cancellations must be available the in all the same manners a sign-up is.

The US should really catch up to banning this consumer-hostility.

Mine had a clause if I moved 30 miles away I could cancel. And I moved to the country, so I canceled. They wanted a letter from my preacher to prove it, my power bill wasnt enough for them.

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. - Winston Churchill

I don't think America is the outlier here, I've had some maddening experiences with French companies when I lived there. You basically have to send them formal recorded letters threatening them with legal action just to cancel basic things, and even then they call your bluff and just ignore you 50% of the time.

I am extremely disappointed that US laws in almost all cases, seem to side with businesses, or at the very least turn a blind eye to very obvious consumer abuses. Actually, I’ll take that further: it seems like our system is designed to allow consumer abuse. I am shocked that our government is actually standing up for us, but I am being cautiously optimistic because lobbyists have a way of shutting that shit down real quick. Look at how ferociously corporate America has been fighting against proposed right-to-repair legislation. Yay for New York, but we need federal involvement on that one too, please and thank you.

“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250063 - Nov 2021 (860 comments)

Similar to privacy.com, which you can use to give predators a credit card that you can cancel:

You can open another checking account at your bank easily, online. I use that for my book expenses and (cough) royalties. Close the account after notifying the gym in writing that you're canceling, and voila they can't charge you anymore.

(that's if the gym draws from your bank account and not by charging a credit card. You could also tell the bank to reject charges from the gym, if that works.)

I hope this extends to every business. I wanted to cancel an arts&craft subscription package for my son (he lost interest) and had to call during business hours and be on hold forever to get through, which I never managed to do because ... guess what ... I'm f*ing working during business hours. Literally months went by before my wife, bless her soul, finally got it done (and was on hold for an hour and then had to haggle with them for another hour). Never again.

In Canada (and probably elsewhere) it's very common for a cell phone web portal to give you a TON of power to make changes, add features, make upgrades. All automatically. But any sort of downgrade or cancellation magically requires you to call a retentions department where, surprise, the employees are incentivized to hang up on you or screw things up to meet their quotas so they can feed their families.

> so they can feed their families.

You are free. But you are only free to sell your labor.

Yes please, this is a legitimate course of government action. I personally am very reluctant to sign up for new subscription from smaller companies because I don't want the hassle of unsubscribing.

Tough-to-cancel subscriptions actually make it harder for small businesses to succeed because potential customers like me are reluctant to sign up for subscriptions thanks to a few bad apples polluting the market.

Please do, they're predatory for people with mental health struggles.

It should be rather simple to deal with: if the cancel method is more difficult than the method to subscribe, then the customer does not have to pay any service due if they do not want to. Or with the addendum: its up to the company who deliver the service to prove that the customer has used their service; otherwise, the other party would need to prove.

I would like to propose an addition: “Business can’t charge the consumer’s card if the consumer has not been actively using the service for last 90 days. Active is defined as significant usage. Significant is defined as consumption equal-to or greater-than a median user in the same pricing tier.”

There's a lot of vague terminology in there that would inevitably need to get hammered out in court.

Something wrong here: government agency taking action on behalf of citizens, against corporate overlords??

It is so wild to read stories about gym subscriptions from here (Czechia), where gyms mostly work on "prepay principle" (buy 10 entries or 3 months in advance etc.), or you use a "Multisport Card" that will let you enter one sports facility a day almost anywhere in the country.

I have been frequenting gyms since 1998 and I don't think I have ever heard of anyone actually signing a contract with a gym and letting them charge his card. That is just not a part of the local gym culture, most gyms probably don't even have the necessary logistical structure in place to handle such contracts with repeated charges.

You know what's tough, is when you inherit someone else's finances, and they've signed up to things and you don't know what they are. By the same token, when you've signed up for a lot of things when you have a good income, and then years down the road, you need to clear up that stuff, especially what you don't use and what yields no goods or services.

I think it's a bank regulation now that all recurring charges must include a phone number for cancellations and inquiries, but of course that's like saying all spam needs an unsubscribe link.

Wouldn't changing from a "pull" payment model to a "push" one solve all these problems?

Why don't we have a system where we can, by default, give out highly restricted payment credentials? Yeah, you CAN get a virtual card IF your bank offers or you go through a third party and set it all up as a bunch of extra hoops...

I keep thinking about joining a gym, there seem to be six within a 5km radius, but I think the best choice might be to go to the Senior Centre 15km away because I figure the city government that runs it has no motive to roach-motel my bank account.

Privacy.com offers such a thing if you’re interested.

California law supposedly allows this but I haven't had much luck. Very recent experience was with wifi on American Airlines. I was taking a bunch of flights in a 30 day period, so I signed up for the wifi subscription. Very easy to do online. But there's no way to cancel it online that I could find. I couldn't even find "cancel" in the FAQ, and had no choice but to engage a customer service agent (during business hours) to cancel. They cancelled it, but it was a greater number of hoops than I ever should have needed.

Laws don't magically make things happeb, they punish them not happening, which, ideally, over time, encourages compliance.

This, especially with things like consumer protection law, relies on people seeking enforcement when they are violated.

I don't understand the notion that if you cancel a credit card, a company can continue to bill you afterwards, unless they are billing you for a service you have already incurred prior to being billed (which is pretty rare - most times you pay before the next month/year of service). Enterprise contracts may add some more complexity to this, but for standard consumer subscriptions I can't comprehend why a company is allowed to bill you for a service once you stop paying for it.

You agreed to the payments, you owe them regardless of ability to pay. A lot of services will cancel if not paid. But gyms are usually on fixed contracts and will milk you until you cancel.

If you stop paying your rent, you still owe your landlord. If your cancel credit card for autopay electric bill, you still owe the electric company. Both of those will cancel but you still need to pay them back.

That would be wonderful. I had the unpleasant experience of joining a gym then shortly moving several hours away. Cancelling the gym subscription was the last thing on my mind at the time.

I legit had to drive back to this gym in New Jersey to sign a form to "cancel" my membership. They would not accept a phone call, email, not even a signed letter stating my intent to cancel, even after I explained to them I had moved hours away. Ridiculous.

Can they add T-mobile to the list too? You can’t unsubscribe via their website, have to call and argue with a customer retention assho… er rep.

I get the sentiment, but we should blame the system. The reps are just trying to make a living for a low pay and don't have much power to change things.

How about Congress do it? They could wrap it into an inclusive worker and consumer rights bill that bans a laundry list of predatory practices.

Once when I was without money, I had to cancel a gym subscription. Inside the gym, the manager informed me of how I couldn't cancel because of my contract. This was a mom&pop level gym, too. It's also worth mentioning that he parked his Porsche cayenne on the sidewalk.

He did let me cancel, on the condition that I acknowledged it was because a he is a good christian man.

I'm not making this up.

I got the run-around one time when I tried to cancel my membership at Planet Fatness. After my evil twin got me in trouble at the gym I made sure to bring along my 6′3″ son and my 300 pound probably-autistic and foul smelling friend (also offended by my evil twin) for backup and had no trouble canceling “our” membership.

It’s even worse for some companies. Planet Fitness makes you go in to a physical location to cancel. Complete bullshit.

Usually people sign up at gyms that are convenient for them to physically go to, since that's the entire point. But you can cancel PF via certified mail.

As a gym, Planet Fitness is nonsense. As a moneymaking scheme it's top-notch.

I know it's about US but this screams to me "Germany". They are the top subscription predators on our continent. Two years duration by default, automatic renewal, cancellation 3 months in advance by post or fax. Stay away from subscriptions when dealing with entity incorporated in Germany.

Tangentially related - I signed up for DSL through Deutsch Telekom while living on a US military base in Germany, in 2002. I signed up in person at a DT location, and due to the language barrier, I did not get the 'unlimited' plan that I asked for. Instead, I got a 10 hour per month plan, with hourly overage charges once I passed 10 hours. I did not discover this mistake until I returned from a deployment several months later, during which I left my DSL connected. The bill from DT was over 10,000 euros. I never paid, and I had to use creative methods to get online from then onwards. It was annoying.

It seems like you haven't followed Germany's laws for a while. It's now mandatory that you can cancel the say way you signed up, so if you allow people to sign up online you have to allow them to cancel online. All contracts can also be canceled monthly now after the agreed minimum duration.

Source: https://www-baden--wuerttemberg-de.translate.goog/de/service...

So- I'll pose the question from the other side because I've been in the position before- do you have any moral obligation when you know for a fact that a paying customer is not using the service you're providing?

My gut would say it's not really your responsibility to prompt the cancellation as long as you're not actively trying to make it hard to do. That is, in this situation you'd be accountable but not responsible.

On the flip side, as a consumer, doing something like automatically pausing a subscription if it's not actively being used would make me think highly of your company

I've often thought this with digital streaming services - a law that said if you charge for the Month of January and it shows at the end of the January that not a single stream even started, then you can't charge for the next month. Not holding my breath.

This situation was actually a lot worse back in the late-90s, when the consumer internet first got rolling. I recall conversations with my local ISP and my credit card company that were just bonkers.

Also the NYT! You should be able to cancel your subscription online.

I really like the idea of having a hard limit of 'clicks' to get something done/undone. If it's 4 clicks to subscribe, it should be no more than 4 to unsubscribe.

I think a better approach is to just require business to accept certain standard ways of being informed of cancellation. I.e. they must accept an email, a phone call, a letter, etc. If they then want to have an even simpler cancellation flow, that is fine, but they must accept all of these basic methods. This is how it works in Sweden.

Hopefully this does end up happening. One of the reasons I personally don’t mind Apple’s 30% IAP take is because going through Apple guarantees I won’t need to deal with any dark patterns—cancelling is one or two clicks in the settings app, I get email notifications a few days before each billing cycle happens, and if something does go wrong then Apple’s customer support is generally very helpful. 30% is a big price increase, but the peace of mind is wonderful.

I’ve been burned a lot of times in the past by businesses that make it extremely hard to cancel, and cracking down on this kind of behavior seems like a no brainer to me personally.

I don't think Apple is any better about dark patterns with apps. It's been a while back, but they got sued for in-app purchases and settled with a large payout.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-lawsuit/apple-to-se...

thank god we're back to having regulators doing their jobs.

I'm not sure whether to thank biden or anyone-but-trump or something else - but whoever is responsible, *THANK YOU*.

I had a gym that I signed up online for, I tried to cancel one day in person and they said I had to fill out a questionnaire and mail it to cancel. Fuck that company.

I have gotten some fraudish autopays canceled by having my lawyer send a certified letter that we'd take action if it happened again. Cost a few $$...worth it.

This is why I pay most bills with a push rather than a pull.

Binance next, please[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34682469

I hate uncancellable subscruptions too, but under what authority can the FTC just ban these subscriptions? I had a similar issue with their ban on non-competes.

The authority granted to them by their charter granted them by Congress.

"(2) The Commission is hereby empowered and directed to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations, except banks, savings and loan institutions described in section 57a(f)(3) of this title, Federal credit unions described in section 57a(f)(4) of this title, common carriers subject to the Acts to regulate commerce, air carriers and foreign air carriers subject to part A of subtitle VII of title 49, and persons, partnerships, or corporations insofar as they are subject to the Packers and Stockyards Act, 1921, as amended [7 U.S.C. 181 et seq.], except as provided in section 406(b) of said Act [7 U.S.C. 227(b)], from using unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce."

Congress has the authority because the Constitution grants them the power to regulate interstate commerce.

The Constitution is the root of all authority in the US.

How about those sneaky add-on subscriptions in Amazon Prime (via Prime Video and Music)? Lots of people complaining that there was auto-enroll happening.

They should mandate unsubscribe like how they do with email, make it like apple app’s subscription, you just sign in and cancel with a tap.

What about NYTimes and the only cancel via phone?

Fortunately I gave them my PayPal because they randomly signed me back up for $4.50 a month after I cancelled. I opened a dispute with PP and they set it straight.

They're mentioned in the article. You can cancel by chat now though. I take advantage of that to renegotiate yearly.

> Khan said it likely wouldn’t apply to non-commercial services like recurring political donations, which have also left some donors feeling scammed and tricked.

Khan knows how to stay clear of politically intense scenarios. She also has not gone against Amazon which was the entire thesis of her paper. Assigning Khan into this position forced Amazon to cozy up to politicians, and keep funding them in some shape or form. This was a net gain for both parties. This was a net gain for politics.

hit NY Times too please.

The principles should be that the same methodology used to signup should be used to cancel.

Online signup -> online cancel.

yeah, and don't forget those "timeshares" abominations (cf latest last week tonigh).

How about the tuff to cancel WSJ?

I assume the side effect of this happening is that everyone's rates will go up.

Can’t wait for all of the deceptive corporate marketing against this!

think thrice before i subscribe to the economist ever again.

This is going to be amazing if you can time it.

I hope this includes gym memberships!

I hope this included gym memberships!

Timeshares too I hope.

is there a link to provide public commentary?

About time.

like GEICO?? YESSSSSS!!!

Go gettem.

Fucking ChargePoint straight up ignores account cancellation requests, and honestly at this point my next idea is to reach out through LinkedIn contacts to their legal team to see wtf I'm not understanding here...

had a related - but not quite the same issue - with a vendor, and was getting zero help from the company trying to get a refund for a few thousand $$ for a defective product - got nowhere for weeks - finally resorted to finding the officers of the company and repeatedly calling them and their spouses at home, on the weekends in order to get satisfaction - very early in the morning and very late at night.

Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home - and this was not a small company.

Not sure what state you live in, but file a complaint with your AG's consumer affairs office.

But those unused gym subscriptions subsidize the gym membership i do use. Please don't take that stimulus away.

Misguided priority IMO. Silicon Valley's actions are much more egregiously and obviously criminal than even the worst gym.

As tough to cancel as some gym memberships are, they at least usually spell out their precise cancellation procedure as a part of a contract and have multiple ways to get in touch with some human to deal with a situation. And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops). And with these gyms, as a last resort you at least have a chargeback as a fairly realistic option with no consequences to your life.

What I'd like to see investigated in this vein is Silicon Valley companies who provide no human customer service. Your only recourse in the event of a flawed transaction is either suck it up and take the loss, or do a chargeback and risk having your entire digital life destroyed as they retaliate against you by locking up your account. What these companies do to people daily is criminal on a level that the worst gym can't even fathom.

The FTC can do more than one thing at a time.

> And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops).

Why do they even get to dictate how you cancel? You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them, etc. What purpose does it serve for society for companies themselves to be able decide to ignore your cancellation requests unless they follow a specific procedure?

On the flip side it’s actual useful to have no human customer service in at least domain - mobile service. For example, it’s much more difficult to sim swap a Google Voice number than a T-mobile number, in part b/c it removes social engineering of customer service as an attack vector.

Why not both?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com