In practice this never happens. I wouldn’t worry about this unless it has happened to you at least once.
Why do you think that?
For comparison, I work on a service that uses recurring billing, and we have wording in our legal terms specifically so we can go after you for things like the cost of recovery as well if you abuse us like this. Our lawyer didn't include those words just for fun.
But on the relatively rare occasions that someone has been abusive -- the kind of person who repeatedly tries to sign up under different aliases and get a bit more for free in violation of terms, for example -- we can and sometimes do take action, and we have never lost.
It's a little disturbing that so many people's reaction here is apparently a form of wilful ignorance. You can downvote or make comments about how this has never happened to you or talk to your attorney or whatever if that makes you feel good, but your opinion does not change the legal situation: cancelling a payment method is not generally equivalent to cancelling a legally binding contract, and the advice to rely on doing so could lead to people being the wrong side of a real legal action, paying recovery costs that far exceed the original size of the debt, damaging their credit, etc.
It's only reasonable to interpret that as you not calling at all. And in that case it would be abuse to file a chargeback.
It seems like that's not what you actually meant, and you do call first? Great! But you shouldn't be confused that people misunderstood your earlier comment.
I'm always happy to steal from companies that turn my free trials into subscriptions. I'd steal more if I could.
You're coming at this as if the service provider is innocent, and merely providing a service. But we're talking explicitly about companies that give you free trials with the "asterisk, ps, you will pay real money in for this every month on this".
As in you were skimming through the signup and didn't notice the part where you typed in your credit card details and clicked the subscribe button? That seems unlikely.
If you don't want to buy something, the best policy is not to buy it. Then you won't have bought it by accident and have to get your bank involved to unbuy it.
So why are you pretending not to know the difference in this comment?
No, this subthread is definitely about cancelling services in general.
My approach to customer payment is that i don't want your money unless you're happy with the service so if you've gone as far as stopping payment with your card provider, I'll take that as a sign you don't want to be a customer anymore.
I never dispute chargebacks, but instead try to get the customer to withdraw it and behave like an adult, letting me refund and cancel his subscription like we would have had he simply asked.
There's no situation where I'd consider chasing down a customer who didn't want to pay to claw back my fourteen dollars. In my mind, it's not mine to have if he doesn't want me to have it.
I've tried to do this too, but unfortunately you're in the position of asking a former customer a favor, and you can't give them anything in return. They end up in the same position (getting refunded), but have to waste time on the phone with their bank. It's a tough sell, in my experience.
And we're happy to refund, just drop us an email. But going around us to your bank leaves us not only with the refund, but also a chargeback fee, plus it hits our merchant reputation. Granted, it's a tiny fraction of all transactions (because we don't use dark patterns), but just feels really unfair, and not the adult thing in the first place.
I guess both our small business and the customers (and even banks, having to process disputes etc) pay the price for all those big-co contracts that are notoriously hard to cancel.