I should be able to go into my bank or card service online. View a list of all my subscriptions. Click on a subscription (or select all). And cancel.
If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.
astatine · 1h ago
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
wobfan · 3h ago
Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.
babyshake · 2h ago
You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.
anonzzzies · 56m ago
I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.
venkat223 · 1h ago
This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
vincenzothgreat · 2h ago
use an alias with an alias email, the Privacy.com card will accept any name and address. Never had any sort of issue in all the years using them
LiamPowell · 3h ago
Simply move to Australia, all the major banks here offer this service: https://payto.com.au/
Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
eleveriven · 6m ago
Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it properly
missedthecue · 3h ago
I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!
nico · 3h ago
I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel
So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription
This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account
It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
__david__ · 2h ago
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
sebbadk · 2h ago
I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for now.
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
saulpw · 3h ago
I use privacy.com for this.
(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
gblargg · 2h ago
I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.
bushbaba · 1h ago
Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from the bank.
codemac · 1h ago
Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed through apple, google, and amazon.
I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.
dmoy · 1h ago
That... doesn't necessarily work though?
If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
advisedwang · 2h ago
What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?
koiueo · 2h ago
Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen it any other way)
kalleboo · 1h ago
Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly
ivape · 1h ago
I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card numbers but haven't bothered with it.
dalemhurley · 4h ago
Here is an idea, make your service value for money and people will not want to cancel.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your product needs to be improved.
silisili · 3h ago
You just offended siriusxm, every newspaper, and every gym in the country.
_carbyau_ · 1h ago
Don't forget swimming pool season pass.
I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry transactions that proves I could have saved by buying one...
delecti · 3h ago
WaPo and NYT were both very easy to cancel.
ethagnawl · 3h ago
WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone call.
buckle8017 · 1h ago
They say it requires a phone call but amazingly an email that's says you will charge back any future charge works too.
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
dylan604 · 3h ago
Office365. I only have it because it’s necessary for work not because I want to use the product.
unethical_ban · 1h ago
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel, then your business model should be illegal.
No comments yet
db48x · 3h ago
That is a novel idea! But ironically it is not actually the issue that was in front of the court.
The FTC was warned at the time that they were flouting required procedures and that their rule would therefore not survive legal scrutiny. Lo and behold it did not.
dboreham · 4h ago
Because systematic corruption presumably?
tbrownaw · 3h ago
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
bjt12345 · 2h ago
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
jibe · 4h ago
If you are sniffing out corruption, aren’t the ones flouting required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
Aeolun · 3h ago
Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me complain about it.
xedrac · 4h ago
I always felt like those click to unsubscribe links were nothing more than a "please prove to us with certainty that this is an actively used account so we can set a sticky bit on it and sell that info for $$$"
orev · 4h ago
That’s a commonly held idea for spam emails. This is about services you’ve signed up and pay for on a recurring basis, and was targeted at companies who make it very easy to open an account, but then require byzantine methods to cancel.
DANmode · 3h ago
That is a valid paranoia,
but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
Irongirl1 · 3h ago
FYI: Everyone just use privacy.com
It allows you to make virtual cards that are single use.
So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
Until the powers that be gets its act together and stops allowing businesses to run all over us...this is the way.
highwayman47 · 4h ago
Severing contracts for me, not for thee.
No comments yet
eleveriven · 8m ago
Honestly, it's wild that something as common-sense as "make canceling as easy as signing up" is this hard to implement
oblio · 4m ago
It's not hard to implement, in the sense of "hard to implement software feature".
It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if cancellation is hard.
And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
It's basically the financialization of business, as some point one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming everyone you can.
bpodgursky · 4h ago
From a different article [1]:
> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.
> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time, but when asked to change it now we have to consider their costs.
I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.
MangoToupe · 3h ago
A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder... including statute itself.
sameermanek · 20m ago
Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.
How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?
This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it
jordanb · 4h ago
From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own case.
bpodgursky · 4h ago
It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the way she came in — losing every single case.
fxtentacle · 1h ago
Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
fritzo · 4h ago
The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity of this issue.
renewiltord · 4h ago
Typical decel nonsense to add all these preliminary analyses. This is CEQA/NEPA type garbage.
Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.
bpodgursky · 3h ago
Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as irritating as it is here.
renewiltord · 3h ago
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
throwawaymaths · 2h ago
Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
JohnTHaller · 1h ago
Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
MengerSponge · 3h ago
My favorite underappreciated aspect of the iOS app store is its absolutely friction-free cancellation.
It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
arielcostas · 27m ago
Google Play also has that if you subscribe through there (which might be more expensive because of the fee Google takes), plus an easier refund system if you subscribe to something and decide it's not worth paying it
Towaway69 · 3h ago
This. My iPhone is still a pleasure to use, everyday. But perhaps I can only appreciate this because I was an android user for years.
The killer app for me on iPhone? Files. I literally switched from iPhone 3 to android because it didn’t have a file manager! Thankfully I came back.
oblio · 1m ago
Apparently Google Play has the same cancellation mechanism.
politelemon · 46m ago
It was the opposite journey for me. I never felt for once that it was my iPhone, perhaps because I was an android user for years.
barkingcat · 28m ago
Dark pattern galore
tiahura · 3h ago
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1), which states that the agency “shall issue a preliminary regulatory analysis” whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a significant economic impact.
After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
unethical_ban · 1h ago
If we had a Congress who knew what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards were, then we may get actual legislation protecting consumer rights.
The 8th circuit court of appeals is the most conservative, with only one judge appointed by a Democratic president.
dmix · 4h ago
What about the earlier administrative judge who warned FTC they were ignoring established rules when it was reviewed the first time, then FTC proceeded to ignore that judge and passed it anyway, which resulted it in being in front of this appeals court?
xyst · 3h ago
The USA is not a country for the people. It’s a country for the rich and powerful.
The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can "game" it as well.
arwhatever · 35m ago
Our culture is an unfortunate nexus between strong contract enforcement and weak consumer protections.
dylan604 · 3h ago
This was pretty well established by the constitution, only you left out white male from your rich and powerful. It took amendments to get past white and male.
tjpnz · 25m ago
Sure it is. Corporations are people too and laws like these take away their freedoms!
ars · 5h ago
"after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process."
throw10920 · 3h ago
I hope the FTC tries to re-submit the rule while following procedure - click-to-cancel is really good for consumers... but not enough to justify trying to break laws to pass it.
dylan604 · 3h ago
You realize the current FTC is not the same FTC that did this? There’s no way this FTC does anything in favor of consumers
If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.
Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription
This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account
It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.
If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your product needs to be improved.
I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry transactions that proves I could have saved by buying one...
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
No comments yet
but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
It allows you to make virtual cards that are single use.
So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
Until the powers that be gets its act together and stops allowing businesses to run all over us...this is the way.
No comments yet
It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if cancellation is hard.
And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
It's basically the financialization of business, as some point one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming everyone you can.
> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.
> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5390731-appeals-court-...
I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.
How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?
This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
The killer app for me on iPhone? Files. I literally switched from iPhone 3 to android because it didn’t have a file manager! Thankfully I came back.
After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
Bush 41: 2
Bush 43: 6
Obama: 1
Trump: 4
oh
The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can "game" it as well.