Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

> People need to have personal responsibility.

Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there?

I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's responsibility to not do it.

Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...

Serious lack of empathy in this thread, mostly by a bunch of incredibly wealthy individuals that have their life in order.

When a lot of people struggle with certain categories of problems, it's worth considering if those problems could be nerfed in some way rather than telling them just "get good".

There's definitely a huge slew of predatory billing techniques and dark patterns to get people to keep paying for services. These patterns should be documented and destroyed.

Having more accessible billing methods also makes life better for everyone (maybe except the company). Consider how absurd it is that only from California can you cancel your New York Times subscription online while every other state requires you to call in and deal with a retention agent. Let's not pretend this is in any way reasonable, it's straight up bullshit.

Sure personal responsibility is important, but there's no reason we should accept predatory and abusive practices from companies. It just makes reality worse for everyone.

Most of them will, particularly the sketchier ones like online dating sites.

It is worth it to them to let you cancel a subscription rather than have to deal with chargebacks, lawsuits, bad publicity, etc.

If I watch 1 hour of Netflix a month and you watch 300 hundred hours a month, should the government mandate that Netflix charge you 300x more than me? If not, why should the person who watches 0 hours be treated any differently? Ultimately Netflix is creating the plan and publishing its details, and we are all opting into it willingly. Whether we get value from it or not is for us to decide, not the government.

I definitely understand. There are several reasons why I can sympathize with folks that don't check their bank statements daily/weekly and miss leaking transactions.

First, there is a lot of crap in a bank statement. They are tiring to parse.

Second, logging into and using your banking portal is a chore. First, you have to remember your password. Not everyone is using a password manager. (Love the work that Apple has done to bridge this gap, and I'm ABSOLUTELY LOVING passkeys.) Second, you have to present a second factor. Some (few) banks are with the times and use a TOTP second factor. Many use SMS two-factor. Many will CALL you with the code. All of them suck. Then you have to navigate the new UIs that look very pretty and are designed to simplify common functions (mostly checking your balance) but have made things like filtering your statement by transactions from today more difficult.

Third, many merchants use very confusing IDs that make it confusing to see where a transaction originated from (for example: a restaurant that uses an abbreviated form of their former name or their parent company's name in the merchant ID). Apple, for example, uses APPLE.COM/BILL for iCloud _and_ AppleCare transactions. This segues into my last reason why navigating transactions periodically sucks.

Tracing a previous expense is an AWFUL experience 99.95% of the time.

I capture every single receipt and bank alert into Expensify (moving into Google Sheets), so tracing an unknown charge is very easy for me (search my email; failing that, search Expensify; failing that, log into bank, which is painful; see above). However, I had to spend significant effort building systems and writing code to accomplish this since there are basically zero services that do this for consumer spending.

Most people don't save receipts. Those that do often don't save them digitally. I know this because I work in consulting, an industry where we have to track receipts to submit expense reports, and EVERYONE whines about this. Many have to block time in their calendar to get this done.

Regardless, even if you do save all of your receipts and alerts, you still need to log into the portal for the vendor that charged that $5.95 and find that charge. Portals that can be even harder to log in and navigate through than banks.

Determining which Apple service that APPLE.COM/BILL charge was associated with, for example? Good fucking luck. It's clicks on clicks on clicks. (They also make you use a single card for ALL digital purchases you make with them. Want to buy an album? Want to buy AppleCare for your new iPhone? Are you forced to subscribe to this super critical app on that iPhone that used to be free? The same card is used for all of that. This is the biggest reason why I've been investing time in moving App Store subscriptions into separate accounts. But even this sucks because many app vendors will only use the App Store for managing subscriptions!)

Consequently, when your statement, which you spent five minutes _just trying to get to_, presents an unknown $5.95 charge (that you didn't get alerted on if you had alerts on because your bank won't send alerts for anything below $50), it's easier to say "welp" and charge it back (a whole process in and of itself) or say "it's five dollars" and forget about it.