• Jim@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Every damn time. IMO, it’s not really free if it requires a payment method; free trials should automatically end when the time is up instead of making you the one responsible for canceling to avoid being charged.

    • nadram@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It should also be illegal for someone to mandate you hand over credit/debit card details if you are not making a purchase. A free trial does not qualify as a purchase, nor should it be treated as an opportunity to sneakily take money from people. It is purely out of bad intentions that they request card details and should be banned.

    • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I agree completely, but in practice I’ve never had trouble stopping a free trial before it charges me. Most I’ve done even let you turn off the auto-renewal immediately after signing up and still let’s you run out the trial.

      I always just set a reminder as soon as I sign up for it to make sure I cancel. Not ideal, but gets the job done.

      • wsweg@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I got a free membership to a car wash, and they would not let me cancel over the phone. They made made me go to the physical location, which doesn’t even have an indoor part! So, I had to go through the car wash line to talk to an employee, and then didn’t even get to go through the car wash, lol.

        • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Car washes seem particularly aggressive about their memberships. I’ve heard the same thing about gyms.

  • Agent641@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Get a universal gift card for $20 and spend all but a few cents. Use it to subscribe to qll the things

  • dlok@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If it helps I find most of the time you can cancel a subscription as soon as you start the free trial and it will give you the full trial period.

    No need for setting reminders etc

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        In Europe you can probably use Revolut, they let you generate single-use cards.

        Please note however that websites can tell it’s a single-use card and refuse to accept it. Most recently Amazon and their related services (Twitch etc.) started refusing them.

      • provomeister@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        There’s KOHO for Canadians, still not a proper Privacy.com replacement but you get two Mastercard cards (one physical & one digital) and they are refillable via Interac payments.

        When doing trials, I set a few dollars on the card to ensure if they try to do a 1$ transaction to verify the card and I’m good to go. Even if I forget to cancel, the payment won’t pass.

    • SpiderShoeCult
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      1 year ago

      Funny that “DoNotPay is a paid service that currently costs $36 every two months, a subscription that renews automatically.” on a thread about subscriptions. Would be even funnier if they had a free trial.

      • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Damn, last time I checked, which was admittedly quite a while ago, it was less than 10. Which easily made up for Spotify, Apple music, Google music etc

  • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Every service claims that the primary motivation for that is just to verify that you’re a real person and to cut down on spam/fraud.

    Some services actually mean it. Most are exploiting you, because somebody heard at a conference one time that conversions go up when you do that.

    • FierroGamer@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I mean, I used to believe people were better at keeping track of those things, but now I know a lot of people aren’t even aware of all of their subscriptions.

      It’s likely a fair amount of people forget and later get charged for quite a while, they just bank on those.

      • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. Even if you only let one or two payment cycles go by and then cancel, that’s still money in the bank, and-- perhaps more importantly-- someone’s KPI (like “number of paid conversions” or something) goes up. It’s a “win” for someone, even if you feel cheated.