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I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

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Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#51

Post by indus »

tie_ wrote: post #46
indus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

More like gym, "clubs" (Verein-s), mobile phone, internet, electricity, etc. It's an established contractual practice, and e.g. Telekom are not in any way obligated to notify you when your cancellation date approaches. They can very well sue you, however, should you refuse to pay your automatically-renewed-in-advance contract. Even in the cases where you're allowed to cancel on the last day of the subscription, we as…

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

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#52

Post by CPLX »

indus wrote: post #45
CPLX wrote: post #23

These are far from the worst patterns. I've seen so much awfulness out there. My favorite recent one was a renewal if you don't cancel by a deadline that's months ahead of the actual end of the contract period and it also had a substantial rate increase and all the language that we supposedly agreed to wasn't actually present in the contract we signed. Those terms were in one of those "incorporate by reference" claus…

Interesting idea. But isn't there a risk that if the company that gets your certified mail, reads it, and then cancels your account?

Sure I suppose that's a risk. But then they'd be in breach of the contract since the letter definitely doesn't say to cancel the account, it says that this is notice given to all extant notice clauses that could result in additional billing, renewal, and so on. It's worded well I'm paraphrasing.

As a practical matter though I don't think there's much to worry about. These guys don't have a process to field letters like this.

The joy comes from the elegance of it all. If they want to play a game of exploiting the fact that people don't read the fine print then they should be prepared for a fair contest.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#53

Post by indus »

lordnacho wrote: post #30

Is anything being done about this kind of thing? It's one of those steal-a-dollar from 1M people tricks. If you stole 1M from one person they'd do something about it. Pick 1M pockets and nobody can do anything.

there are a few ideas, to let technology help.

Others are around legislation, such as the one that came yesterday from FTC on call to cancel being illegal.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#54

Post by indus »

brooklinnash wrote: post #22

"Our research shows that companies underutilize their SaaS products by an average of 30% across the board" Big yikes. I'm curious which of these approaches would have the biggest impact on bringing that SaaS waste down.

Though not easy to implement, but consumption driven billing rather than seat/user-driven would reduce the grief quite a bit.

In the early days AWS EC2 became popular for their per compute per hour pricing compared to hosting providers fixed monthly cost.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#55

Post by dinobones »

atgarone wrote: post #35
encoderer wrote: post #27

Of all the nasty things somebody can do with billing, I'm surprised the author leads with card-upfront trials. "Free trials should not require a credit card." This is opinion presented as fact. This is not a dark pattern. Totally unrestricted free trials are wonderful, you've invested a ton in your product and you want a prospective customer to experience everything. But there are legions of abusers and bad actors of…

I'm sure that when you're analyzing SaaS transactions for a year (full time), you see a lot more data than we more-select-few-who-can-discern do.

You forget this is HN, where software engineers will go off on tangent talking about how "they could have designed the airplane rotor to not crash" or something equally ridiculous. Everyone here is an expert at everything, because they wrote a blog once, or since Paul Graham is perceived to be an expert on everything, they can be too.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#56

Post by rsstack »

digitalengineer wrote: post #14

Hubspot. The yearly plan is way cheaper. But you need to cancel it 3 months in advance or you’re on the hook for ‘the same period’, thus another year. No reminder email of course.

FullStory sent us a reminder email last week that we need to cancel 2 months before the annual contract ends. I started a Slack thread, we all agreed we love FullStory, done. I think SaaS that try to trick their customers by not reminding them about their cancellation policy (which isn't consistently 1 month, 2 months, or anything, and is hard to track when you're a small startup) are just afraid their product isn't good enough or valuable enough for people to renew. Instead of improving their product, some exec can say "let's not remind them", and get about the same rate of retention.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#57

Post by dqv »

tie_ wrote: post #31

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

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

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

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

Edit: oh you already do sans the contract terms

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#58

Post by flerovium »

encoderer wrote: post #27

Of all the nasty things somebody can do with billing, I'm surprised the author leads with card-upfront trials. "Free trials should not require a credit card." This is opinion presented as fact. This is not a dark pattern. Totally unrestricted free trials are wonderful, you've invested a ton in your product and you want a prospective customer to experience everything. But there are legions of abusers and bad actors of…

It's about effort. The seller is asking you to put in the effort to enter your payment info in order to use the "free" version of the product. It's an exchange. The seller benefits because there is less friction to paying later.

The dark pattern is billing the card without consent from the user, or some weird implicit consent.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#59

Post by indus »

r00fus wrote: post #47
elias94 wrote: post #11

I forgot the AWS password once for an account with only one S3 bucket. I did the recovery procedure but they wanted to verify my identity using my document. I send them my ID, which was with a different address from my account information. They didn't accept my ID and I wasn't able to stop the service and the recurring payment. Fortunately I registered my payment with a prepaid credit card, so was easy to empty the c…

Is failure to pay (ie, card authorization) good enough for inability to cancel? Couldn't they just invoice you and hold you liable for fees regardless?

A failed card auth does not remove the obligation to pay. Most vendors write if off, and don't follow-up after a few emails. Plus, they don't want users to get pissed off and post a negative review.

Many vendors have now optimized their billing flow to reduce write-offs. They start charging on the first of the month for the upcoming use, and then cancel the account if the auth continues to fail.

Re: I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

#60

Post by tie_ »

indus wrote: post #51
tie_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like gym, "clubs" (Verein-s), mobile phone, internet, electricity, etc. It's an established contractual practice, and e.g. Telekom are not in any way obligated to notify you when your cancellation date approaches. They can very well sue you, however, should you refuse to pay your automatically-renewed-in-advance contract. Even in the cases where you're allowed to cancel on the last day of the subscription, we as…

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

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

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

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

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