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Comment by ranrotx | Hacker News Reader

My gripe with SiriusXM is their pricing model (worse than the cable company). You only buy it when they have a special which makes it 50% off, that is actually a fair price. However in 6 months it will auto-renew at the public rate, snd they hope you won’t notice or you’ll be too lazy to call.

Their call center is horrendous but at least if you threaten to cancel they will magically find another special that’s good for 6 months. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Don’t even get me started with their additional fees that they try and mask as being regulatory/licensing. That’s their freaking business, to license content so they can broadcast it. Just like the airlines, it pisses me off when they try and pass their cost of doing business (actually the whole basis of the product) off as an additional fee.

I will never do business with them again due to these deceptive practices. Hopefully I’m not the only one.

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You could replace "SiriusXM" in your comment with "<insert your ISP here>" and it would still be 100% relevant. Fortunately for you, SiriusXM is easily replaceable ... your ISP? Not so much.

My ISP doesn’t have anywhere near as shady marketing practices. Does yours regularly ignore do-not-call and do-not-mail requests? Do they send misleading envelopes that don’t have their brand on the outside? Mine (AT&T) doesn’t.

AT&T is nortourius for this in my area. They will send letters on cardstock with handwritten font, an obscured return address, and a stamp that looks hand placed. No branding until you actually open it.

I was speaking specifically to their predatory "intro rates" and added fees which obscure the actual price of the service.

Comcast most definitely does this in my area, and even withholds higher speed tiers unless you bundle with TV and phone.

Luckily, I have the choice of getting gfiber for 1/3 the cost of comcast.

Well, it's not really fully replaceable in your car without other work. That is, I have SXM in my car radio, integrated in the system. It's the only option. All else is bluetooth or cable plugins, a different interface to manage while I'm driving, and potentially additional costs (data costs, etc.).

Note that BMW and other "lux" makers are now offering deeper integration with phone apps... but they make you pay a subscription to them to enable said functionality. https://www.bmwusa.com/explore/connecteddrive.html describes it; half the features are free but traffic for the nav, integration with mobile apps, other features have an annual cost, around $50 US currently.

And yes, fair point on the 6 month complaint cycle being forced on us by obnoxious subscription approaches.

This is also why I dropped SXM. I got tired of arguing with them on the phone every six months. Especially after the last time where they admitted they over-charged me for three months and gave me three months longer on the existing account balance.

I started shuffling my music library onto USB sticks for my car and haven't looked back.

Just find someone else who has it and ask to add your radio to their "family plan", it's only a couple bucks

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