Netflix stops charging customers who never watch • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#361

Post by hrktb » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #212

dylan62 wrote: post #177

Netflix impressed me recently with how easy they made it for me to cancel my subscription. It means I will have no hesitation to re-subscribe in future, should I feel the urge. I just wonder how long it will last. It sometimes feels like all the big successful consumer companies become accountancy-driven scumbags sooner or later. Fingers crossed Netflix can buck the trend and stay a nice company to deal with.

I would think this might be triggered by a decline in revenue. When Netflix can't continue to grow organically into new markets and the share price starts to suffer, they might resort to less friendly tactics for increasing the revenue per customer.

It might also come from detecting recurring patterns and trying to facilitate them.

Before the simplified version, we already used to only register to Netflix during long vacations, binge watch whatever we wanted (typically Black Mirror and Sherlock) and cancel the rest of the year.

Now that it’s way easier, there’s less friction in reenabling the account when there’s a series we want to watch and set the subscripting to cancel again at the end of the month.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#362

Post by eganist » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

digitalengineer wrote: post #347

sytelus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…

“ Apple Card has awesome features but the most important of them all, at leasts from a security standpoint, is probably the ability to generate virtual card numbers on demand, which will come in handy for those times when you won’t necessarily trust the recipient.”

it's funny because:

1. Citibank did this for a long time. They still might. I remember using this in the late 2000s for some online services at the time.

2. Apple and Google Pay both do this as well, though these are all one-time-use implementations.

It's sold as this pretty revolutionary feature that others have done (in some capacity) for quite a while now.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#363

Post by bcrosby95 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #89

cocochanel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a few weeks ago I realized I was paying for Xbox Live without having played it for 8 years. I didn't even remember the password.

Cancelling for XboxLive has always been a pain (at least until 5 years ago, I don't know now): they make it easy to subscribe online and pay with a credit card, but cancelling forces you to look for a phone number buried in help pages and call a hotline that's only open during business hours or something. Pure dark pattern.

I cancelled through their website around 6 years ago. I didn't find it particularly hard, and it definitely didn't require a phone call, but maybe I just got lucky by randomly happening across the correct page.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#364

Post by wolco » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

lucasverra wrote: post #301

elcomet wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it exists, it is not followed. In France, Le Monde (most famous daily newspaper) requires you to send a paper mail (and not a regular mail, but a registered mail, which costs around 5-10€) to cancel your subscription. Even if you subscribed on the website, for a 100% online subscription. It's really shady.

yeah, when i saw that i got so mad that I created a virtual credit card, changed the billing method, and then deleted the card. You can not imagine the big smile on my face when i received the email "we cannot charge you".... Reaaaaaally big smile on my face

I tried that with rebel.ca (domain reg) a few years ago. They setup this dark pattern where domains wouldn't expire they get renewed two months before they were due.

In my case they froze the account preventing me from moving domains. I called support and they unfroze it. The next night the system it froze again. It became a race, manually moving 200 domains over in 12 hours. They don't allow bulk moves and you can't quickly open each domain for editing in a separate tab.

Fyi: Why move. There prices went up to some crazy amount $30 for a .org 60% more for[a .ca it ended up costing me hundreds extra one month. Glad I caught it...

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#365

Post by andrewon » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #287

raiyu wrote: post #12

I always wonder when a company does this if it is completely altruistic or if something else is going on behind the scenes. Maybe notifying customers gets them to reactivate, maybe if they resubscribe later they can charge more, maybe it’s better for financial reporting and projecting subscriber counts. On the other hand it could just be a rare moment of a company doing right by the customer.

Does anyone else find it unfortunate that this entire topic is devoted to the fact that we find that a company being ethical about their business practice is so out of the ordinary, and we're spending a lot of energy guessing what nefarious motivation might lie behind it?

Making money is the reason why a for-profit business exists. Keep charging customers because they neglect to cancel is unpleasant, but can hardly be qualify as unethical.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#366

Post by bcrosby95 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

cdolan wrote: post #285

For those in the chat who react by saying “this should be law!” Laws have unintended consequences. Also I subscribe to a number of services I barely ever use, generally because I got in with an account very early on, and the price I’m paying is usually 1/5 or less of the current retail price. I do not want companies to proactively cancel my service. “Thats Absurd!” You may say... well for about 10 years I kept my ori…

My wife has an old gym membership for 24 hour fitness. She pays $120/year. Never uses it. Figures it's good "whoops, you're homeless" insurance - it's a place you can get dressed and take a shower.

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#367

Post by scrollaway » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #179

mav3rick wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual Cards with set expiry numbers will end this game

I'd prefer my bank to allow me to manually approve every payment, e.g. via smartphone application. It would be easy to understand, fast enough, with some options like "approve netflix forever". That would be ideal for me. And if I don't like this particular payment, just decline and move on. Those agents who pull my money without my explicit consent every time are the reason I'm keeping my card with minimal amount of…

You're describing something called direct debit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_debit). In the US, you may know it as ACH, but the american version of direct debit is a far cry from EU direct debits.

When setting up a DD, you can give a european company your IBAN. They will be able to make withdrawal requests, directly to your bank account. Your bank will usually give you full control on what you can do with those. For example, my bank Bunq (https://bunq.me/) allows me to accept once, or automatically accept any debit request up to whatever amount I choose per period from that same merchant.

Direct Debits are free. You bypass credit card fees (which in Europe are much lower than in the US in the first place but still percentage-based). They are also usually real-time (though slower than the credit card network, and depending on banks and fraud checks there can be latency of up to a couple of days).

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#368

Post by TrinaryWorksToo » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #143

goodside wrote: post #55

Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their account, but still allowed monthly fees to be charged, they were labeled as a “sleeping giant” in the database. Once in this state, they would not be contacted by the site for any reaso…

I'm getting charged by rhapsody.com every quarter for no apparent reason. I used their service like may be 8 years ago. They have a phone number in their merchant line which is invalid. When I filed request to void the charge to American Express, initially they declined! Then I filed appeal with angry comments and they finally voided it. It took over two months for the process. I just saw new Rhapsody charge again. T…

Try Privacy.com

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#369

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #242

tialaramex wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The credit card companies literally have no control over who can charge us. That's not quite true. The card network can refuse a merchant for any reason, constantly making bogus charges would probably be a good reason for the network to refuse them and that's likely to be the result. Of course you don't see if your bogus charge was reflective of 0.01% of the charges from this merchant or 99.9% However as I've expla…

You obviously understand payment systems more deeply but to me this is like someone explaining why I need to deal with mainframes with tap drives in 2020. Many of us don't even need credit cards, we just need a way to transfer existing money from our bank account on agreed upon transactions safely . There are far more modern ways to electronically "agree" on a transaction then to use exact same 19 digit number for ev…

[deleted]

Re: Netflix stops charging customers who never watch

#370

Post by robohoe » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

eganist wrote: post #362

digitalengineer wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Apple Card has awesome features but the most important of them all, at leasts from a security standpoint, is probably the ability to generate virtual card numbers on demand, which will come in handy for those times when you won’t necessarily trust the recipient.”

it's funny because: 1. Citibank did this for a long time. They still might. I remember using this in the late 2000s for some online services at the time. 2. Apple and Google Pay both do this as well, though these are all one-time-use implementations. It's sold as this pretty revolutionary feature that others have done (in some capacity) for quite a while now.

Bank of America and https://privacy.com/ Have done this for years too.