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Privacy.com. You can mint a credit card with a $0 limit (or $1 if they need to do a test transaction) and kill it right after.
Seems to be for americans only, sadly.
In Europe you can probably use Revolut, they let you generate single-use cards.
Please note however that websites can tell it’s a single-use card and refuse to accept it. Most recently Amazon and their related services (Twitch etc.) started refusing them.
Yeah I already have Revolut but those single use cards can’t be used on subscribtion services sadly.
There’s KOHO for Canadians, still not a proper Privacy.com replacement but you get two Mastercard cards (one physical & one digital) and they are refillable via Interac payments.
When doing trials, I set a few dollars on the card to ensure if they try to do a 1$ transaction to verify the card and I’m good to go. Even if I forget to cancel, the payment won’t pass.
🙁
That’s where the VPN comes in?
+1 for privacy.com
Should be a default feature with all card issuers
If you’re getting “site not found”: https://privacy.com/
http://privacy.com/ doesn’t work, it doesn’t answer on port 80.
Fascinating. I use Firefox with “Force HTTPS” enabled so I never noticed this before.
Does that mean you can’t explore sites like toastytech.com?
I just get a “Secure site not available” warning with a button to proceed into the HTTP site anyway
I defer to second image on this post when I see that
Which is not a good look for privacy.com. You have to be either very lazy to not set up the redirect, or use a very cheap service that doesn’t allow you to do it.
No, it’s just ensuring SSL encryption to their servers at all times. It’s the best possible look for a website called privacy.com. If they allowed http connections, those connections aren’t guaranteed to be private (encrypted).
I’m talking about leaving http://privacy.com (the non-secured version) not leading anywhere. It’s an amateur move.
Right. I don’t feel like trusting my CC information to a company that doesn’t even know how to do a redirect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Car washes seem particularly aggressive about their memberships. I’ve heard the same thing about gyms.
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Also noping out at “Creqte an account or continue with Facebook login.”
No thanks! I’ll just never visit again instead.
This is designed to be predatory. They want you to forget to cancel in time, because once they charge you, you will never be able to get a refund. And that’s if they don’t “forget” to not charge you in the first place.
That a lot of these that I see only have, or at least default to, expensive yearly subscriptions, make these even worse.
Reality is it is very easy to create a new email every 30 days and use a service for free. It is just a bit harder to create a card every 30 days and apparently most people are not going that length. If you were a business owner you would do the same
I think it’s both. There’s no reason I should have to jump through three layers of account pages to cancel a free trial. Additionally, if they are using cards as an identity measure, then why would they charge you at the end of the trial? They could shoot you a message asking you to renew instead.
“we know no one wants our service, so we’ll pretend to give it away and then charge for an entire year up front”
Every subscription service that takes your credit card will let you cancel in advance. Some have gotten wise to it and will cancel your trial if you do that, but I’ve only encountered it a few times, but if you’ve actually paid they will always let you cancel early and complete the period you’ve paid for.
Used to work for Books-a-Million.
We had a metric that asked us to sign people up for magazine trials. You could choose three, and you’d get your trials alright. But cancelling in itself was more obtuse and time consuming than cancelling a Prime membership. People often would complain, I kind of just figured it was people complaining because… well, that’s what people do.
Then I signed myself up one week to help our metrics. No money out of my wallet, w/e, I’ll just cancel. When I went to go cancel it, though, that’s when I realized it was a lot more difficult than I imagined. You had to call in, you’d be out in a long-ass queue (15 or more), and you’d have to speak to someone you couldn’t understand and who couldn’t understand you to cancel magazine trials one at a time. And remember, you could sign up for three, so you had to go through this whole rigamarole three times to be fully cancelled, which in itself wasn’t clear. Sometimes people would cancel just one thinking they’d cancelled all of them. For the elders, it’s even worse, they wouldn’t even remember they’d signed up for anything, they would just see the transactions on their bank statements. Or shit, sometimes they just wouldn’t.
This reminds me of back in the original Xbox Live days.
Back on the OG Xbox, when Halo 2 came out, they gave out 3 month (maybe less, don’t quite recall) trials of Xbox Live.
Cool, I’ll sign up, play with my friends and randoms online for a few months. I just need to add my credit card. OK sure, no problem.
Fast forward 3 monthes. None of my friends play it anymore, they community is mega toxic, way more than you could imagine, and I see my first charge as I forgot to cancel.
OK, whatever. I’ll just go into my account settings and cancel my membership. Why can’t I find the option? So after researching it, I found out that you have to call their 800 number, Monday through Friday, between 8 and 5, talk to a live person and get them to cancel your account.
So I do that, and after wait on hold for a bit, I get this lady who tries to talk me out of canceling. She offers me a free game (if I sign up for a year), she tries to sell me a second account to practice on so I will play better on my main account, then she insults me for a bit before finally canceling like I asked. I still remember this call vividly some 15 years later.
And the best part? Next month I get charged again.
So I have to call again, have to wait on hold again. When I finally get someone, and I explained that my account was supposed to have already been canceled, he checks my account history to make sure I didn’t play since I called last (which I hadn’t, since I thought it was canceled), when he confirms that, he tells me that if I had played since then, he couldn’t cancel my account, but since I didn’t he would go ahead and take care of the cancelation for me.
I didn’t touch anything Xbox for about 10 years after that.
That’s rough, buddy
… did you actually try asking for the refund? I just got one recently when I started a Kogan subscription for a few bucks off shipping on an order I was doing and forgot to cancel. Nothing to it, just emailed and asked.
Get a universal gift card for $20 and spend all but a few cents. Use it to subscribe to qll the things
I’ve had those not work. Apparently they can detect when it’s a gift card
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
Until they get rid of that everywhere too.
“In most cases you can do this”
“Unless everyone stops letting you do that”
I’ve already seen instances of it. It will happen eventually.
Then just don’t buy th… oh wait.
“Yes, you just lied to me, but by all means, here’s my sensitive payment information.”
Yeah that’s not a 30 day trial, that’s a subscription with the first month free.
Prepaid gift cards and virtual credit cards not accepted!
You do realize what you’re asking right? My credit card is across the house and I am waaaaaaay too lazy to get out bed.
This is me for sure lol.
They got me on this one with Uber eats premium, never again…
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This meme was me on AWS yesterday.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
