141–150 of 412 posts
if it takes more than 30min to cancel a service/account i just call my bank, explain the situation and reject all future transactions from that merchant.
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The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.
So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider. I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.
This is tangential, but on the topic of PayPal and privacy, this article is interesting about PayPal and HIPAA: https://simple.icouch.me/blog/is-paypal-hipaa-compliant-revi...
Short answer: if privacy matters, PayPal is a non-starter. I don’t want news publishers to have my information either. I know publishers like to howl and whine about “owning the customer relationship,” but unless they allow Apple for subscriptions, I won’t subscribe. I don’t need to be constantly reminder if their “special offers.”
If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it. I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the…
I was really surprised because they generally have a good reputation as an organization. I'll never let them get their hands on my payment details again.
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This is definitely not the case in Germany, unless there has been a very recent change in legislation. There are lots of scummy companies in Germany that make you fax/email copies of official ID to unsubscribe, even if joining was possible with a click of a button.
They simply violate the law and don't care about it, it's that simple. It wouldn't be the first time they did that. I've been waiting since November to try and switch ISPs cause Unitymedia is as reliable as RFC 1149.
Don't tell me... As reliable as Twitter? It's got birds :-D
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Can you expand further on this?
Bad debt lists are sold for pennies on the dollar to collection agencies, who can and do make a profit on then collecting a percentage of it. Planet Money had a good podcast episode on it: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/08/354591198/epis...
If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it. I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the…
This happened to me too with NYT. 20 minutes on the phone with some poor woman whose compensation I'm sure depended in part on convincing me not to cancel. I was really surprised because they generally have a good reputation as an organization. I'll never let them get their hands on my payment details again.
I'll take that flow any day over a company that makes you call or email to cancel. Recently had a horrible experience with Full Contact. You can sign up with a couple clicks, but you need to email them to cancel. Then they'll sit on your request so you get billed for another month while they're processing it and then they'll kill your plan right away for the month you just paid for. Horrible!
It's annoying as hell. Dropbox deleted 50,000 files on our dropbox business account once. I had to go in an manually undelete each folder. There were hundreds of folders. Poof, suddenly gone. After that we were done, had to go through these hoops to cancel.
I used to use Dropbox for syncing between machines, and had to do the same thing a few years ago. Utterly insane that you still have to manually undelete folders one-by-one. Also insane was the crap customer support (not sure if it's better for business accounts?) - it was all forum based, and you were lucky to get a response. In this case I did get a response, saying that one of the machines hooked up to the account…
It's such a major annoyance that I ended up paying for another cloud file host instead.
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Say you sign up for a gym. The agreement is for $50/month with a year commitment. You give them a credit card to pay. 6 months in, you cancel your credit card (or it expires or whatever). The fact that they can't bill you doesn't change that you agreed to the plan and that you owe the second 6 months anyway. That's a debt and the gym can (and some do!) choose to go after you for it in whatever legal way they feel. Th…
Well explained. Privacy.com gives the illusion of control in this regard (and I love the service) but to enable full user control like this you have to be untraceable after ghosting, which means signing up with a "fake" (I prefer "per-use") identity. --amend yes it's (close to) fraud so be careful. Lots of things were illegal before they weren't; union strikes come to mind.