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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

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Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#431

Post by justusthane »

ggrelet wrote: post #421
renewiltord wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Copilot (which costs $100/y) and review every transaction across all of our accounts. Gives me a lot of piece of mind. It's very fast to audit because the UI is slick and it has simple name matching rules it uses to categorize. EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.

This app is only available in the US. Any other similar app you’d recommend? Maybe one you tried before using copilot?

This might not be quite the same, but I’ve been using YNAB for years now. I religiously budget and track every dollar spent. It takes me maybe 20-30min/week, and it’s provides so much peace of mind knowing where every dollar is going, and more importantly, knowing what every dollar in my bank account is set aside for.

You do need to adopt their zero-based envelope budgeting paradigm though. It’s very opinionated.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#432

Post by [deleted] »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #38
quartz wrote: post #30

I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods. After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them. Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill…

Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.

[deleted]

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#433

Post by randomdata »

jjav wrote: post #320
Alupis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible. If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you…

> If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things. Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.

But then how do they end up with the subscriptions in the first place?

I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.

Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.

If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#434

Post by weikju »

renewiltord wrote: post #413
anthomtb wrote: post #411

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually…

I use Copilot (which costs $100/y) and review every transaction across all of our accounts. Gives me a lot of piece of mind. It's very fast to audit because the UI is slick and it has simple name matching rules it uses to categorize. EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.

Too many products called Copilot these days.. Which one are you using and what does it do?

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#435

Post by _Algernon_ »

themacguffinman wrote: post #347
eropple wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for…

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…

Not signing in to a service you have a subscription to is a pretty clear signal that it is not being used. I'm not aware of any streaming service that automatically pauses a subscription if you don't sign in for a full month.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#436

Post by eropple »

dayjaby wrote: post #390
jjav wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things. Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.

A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes. So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?

Of course not. He's saying that the cumulative mental effects of grinding precarity means that beep-boop rational actor theory doesn't survive contact with the pavement.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#438

Post by _Algernon_ »

Alupis wrote: post #128
eropple wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and…

What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible. If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you…

Personal responsibility only works if parties are roughly equal in terms if power. This is not the case in corporation-consumer relationships. Corporations can employ hundreds or thousands of people whose sole goal is to employ the forefront of scientific psychological knowledge to design dark patterns to make end users not cancel their subscriptions.

I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#439

Post by kwanbix »

Loughla wrote: post #428
anthomtb wrote: post #411

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually…

Pandora is my favorite subscription. I have paid $3.99 a month for years, for all the music I could ever listen to. It is literally always on in my house or office.

Any advantage over Spotify or Youtube Music that you know about?

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#440

Post by makeitdouble »

silisili wrote: post #388
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

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…

I worked once for a company who internally decided to never contact paying accounts that hadn't logged in in over a year. This isn't a gym membership, this is 5 digit yearly payments. The reasoning? "We don't want them to realize they're paying us for a service they don't use and cancel." I guess I see the point, but feels unethical.

The next step should be to transform "unethical" into "illegal", except enormous business entities rely on subscription revenue.

Otherwise it's a very well know effect. There will be unsubscription peaks every time the service communicates with thei customers, even purely informative stuff like "we now have a dark mode" emails will remind people they've a subscription and some will cancel, that's part of the business and something that affects communication frequency in subtle and obvious ways.

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