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Comment by thousand_nights | Hacker News Reader

this is one place where middlemen actually shine imho, like apple managing your app subscriptions for you all in once place making them easy to cancel

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Yep, but the middlemen that is on the correct position and should do that is your card operator, not the merchant's payment processor.

You should be able to do it on your bank's site. And the fact that you can't is symptom of a really large problem.

i'd love to learn more about this but i think banks don't actually know you have a subscription or how long is it, they just let the vendor charge you repeatedly and you have the option to revoke this permission through your bank (so the result would be a transaction failed upon next renewal, which not exactly the same as cancelling your subscription through the vendor)

I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks - at any rate these days the "merchant" from the banks' POV is often a processor like PayPal or Square etc. But you're right that banks themselves don't have direct visibility into subscriptions - there might at best be a flag to indicate that a particular transaction should be authorised as part of a recurring payment.

> I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks

You should be able to dispute any charge on your card. If you can't then you need to change banks.

Yes but you'd have to keep doing it every month unless they cancelled your card.

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