• The cancellation process requires many more clicks. If your process is to subscribe → buy → cancel each time, this gets very annoying.
• You can't buy additional credits without outright changing your overall subscription plan.
• If you cancel your plan, you immediately forfeit any unused credits.
Not sure when the last time you used Audible was, but nowadays (or at least as of a few months ago) they offer to sell you more credits at a pretty decent rate (3 for $35) when you run out.
So what do you do if you're nearing the end of your subscription period, and there aren't any new books you want at the moment? You're forced to subscribe for an additional month.
> Also why do you need to buy more credits? You can buy audio books directly for $ once you exhausted the credits. I use credits for audio books that cost more than the price of a credit and $ for audio books that cost less.
So what do you do if you've already used this month's credit, and you want to buy a second book which is much more expensive to buy in dollars?
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I have run into both of these scenarios with Audible. Neither of them are the reason I don't use Audible—that would be the DRM—but I do find their policies frustrating. Downpour and Libro.fm make it significantly easier to buy what I want when I want it.
The unsubscribe process ends up taking hours of time because now you need to find 1-5 books to get before you cancel.
It's also frustrating because they won't allow you more than 5 credits, so if you have 5 credits, they will take your monthly payment and give you nothing in return.
Worse still is if you click on the wrong thing on Amazon it will re-activate your audible account automatically. I've had my audible account accidentally re-activated multiple times and not noticed (my amazon email goes to a non-primary email)
All in all I've made many payments with max credits and gotten nothing in return, purchased a ton of books that I'm only partially interested in, and actively cancelled the service at least 3 times (including being forced to waste time shopping for books to complete the task every time)
If you don't see this as a consumer trap, it's because you haven't tried to get out and stay out yet.