481–490 of 677 posts
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It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context: the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it was edited) because you've already made up your mind about the malicious intent of companies who use this model. The reality is that companies can't know if they're "bleeding people for no services rendered" because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then staying off for a few months is difficult…
> People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you. People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying…
They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.
> Their average response was $62. When they were given more time to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were still way off. The correct answer was $273. I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked. People are terrible…
In my budget I allocate $100 for subscriptions and just look to stay under that. I found giving myself allowance to spend X amount made me chill out a little, so I wasn’t always trying to cut at all costs, since they are hard to avoid now. That budget item avoids the death by 1,000 cuts, while also letting me not sweat the small stuff.
The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…
A subscription service is an agreement between a consumer and a business, where the consumer agrees to provide money in exchange for access to some service. That service might be something that they regularly receive, e.g. meal kits, or it might be something that they can choose to access, e.g. Spotify. In the former case, where there is a definite agreement that some item will be delivered, I agree with you; not pro…
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I strongly disagree, I have media subscriptions right now that I won't sign into for a month or even multiple months but I don't intend on giving it up. This is especially true for niche streaming content where production costs aren't exactly cheap but their niche nature means not everyone is consistently in the mood for that content.
Ok so why do you want to pay for that time? Why not have payments paused during the period of inactivity, and resume when you want to use it? The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.
I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.
The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…
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Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns. I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping opt…
"Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns." I just got myself a month of Prime because of this. And cancelling requires you to go through around 5 screens with buttons "Do you want to cancel?", "Yes, I want to keep Prime" and so on. And the colors of the cancel button are always different. So you have to closely read and understand eac…
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Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. If everyone paying into it actually expected to extract their entire money's worth of value the whole industry would collapse.
>Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. I'm struggling to understand how you can lambaste people by saying "jUsT cAnCeL iT"[0] when you seem to be well aware of the business model of gyms, wherein cancelling a membership is widely-known to be a purposefully cumbersome and difficult experience. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059793
The worst one, which was very unique, was when the gym had just change hands and I was looking to cancel on the guys first day and he didn’t want to lose anyone. We (me, him, and some other trainer who was his mentor) talked for probably 3 hours. From our talk, I was also a bit of a unique situation, and I don’t think they would have talked to other people for as long. I was also being nice, I could have just drew and hard line and walked out. He ended up giving me 3 months free and a few free training sessions… then I went back when that was running out and cancelled when he wasn’t there in about 3 minutes.
The second worse was maybe a 10 minute conversation (Lifetime). The others weren’t enough to remember. Some I cancelled by sending an email.
Even if you aren’t moving, just tell them you’re moving and there are no affiliated gyms nearby. It’s not like they are going to check. They can’t really argue with that.
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Yeah, was just going to say this is Planet Fitness' whole value prop .. Cheap enough that the lie you tell yourself that you will go more next month is easily worth $10 / month.
That's part of all Gym's model really. They gleefully under-provision their facilities, knowing that on a given day, almost nobody will show up relative to the number of people who will pay.
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That's misunderstanding the point, "this business model" doesn't mean hard-to-cancel. The comment specifically points to a model where customers with heavy usage are subsidizing customers with light usage (edit: I mixed it up, it's light users who subsidize heavy users). With maybe the exception of gyms which I've heard bad things about, cloud storage and buffets and insurance are usually not hard to cancel.
I completely understand the original point and also agree with it wholeheartedly, but you misunderstand the reason for my comment. The user I responded to made a separate comment elsewhere in this thread, and I highlighted their comment in this chain we're in as evidence that they should be well aware of why the point in their other comment doesn't always work out the way they would like. The fundamental business mod…