Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

You'll get no argument from me that Apple's system is pretty good from a consumer standpoint — that's the primary reason why I predicted that it'd remain popular. It's really nice knowing that you can nuke a subscription without getting some dark patterns trying to talk you out of it.

On the other hand, it's really easy to imagine that you'd see something like “$9.99 IAP; $7.99 direct from Epic/Amazon/Google/Netflix/et al.”, especially when it's a company they already deal with and don't have a negative impression of.

The big question I'd have is whether that's possible or the other terms require price parity — and whether they'd be able to do something like offer bonus content, rewards clubs, etc. to nudge people toward their own store. I'd be somewhat surprised if, for example, Epic couldn't entice a fair number of people with some kind of in-game skin or other loot which they could argue has a resale value of $0.

View on HN

I had a WSJ subscription which I couldn’t cancel online. You have to call them, wait in line and then let them talk you into another free month and stuff. A bad experience.

It was so annoying I just gave up until my CC was locked.

This experience was definitely more expensive than using Apple’s services.

I cancelled mine by sending them an email stating that I would be disputing every charge.

The reply email I got was at 9:07am EST, 'dispute' probably automatically puts your email head of queue for them.

Seems like the right strategy. A chargeback request automatically implies a $25 fee for the merchant if I remember correctly (read this on Braintree long ago). I'd expect any merchant will want to avoid disputes/chargeback requests like the plague.

Take this with a grain of salt, it seems excessive, I should probably have looked it up again :) But there definitely is some kind of strong incentive for merchants to avoid these, not just because it wastes time for them.

It's not just the direct chargeback fee - too many chargebacks and the credit card companies will start actively penalizing you with higher fees overall and more declines and more 3DS verification requests.

As someone in the fintech field, a $25 fee doesn't sound unlikely. The credit card companies love their fees, and every time I see them I'm amazed at just how high those fees get.

"chargeback" is probably a good keyword too.

Ah, it seems we are back to dark magic times, where you have to find the right magic words, to actually have an effect and not default to bots. To achieve complicated things, like cancel a subscription.

I literally cannot speak to a human at my ISP unless I tell the robocall system that I want to cancel. As in, I'll call and say I need to return some equipment, be on hold for an hour, leave a callback number, and not get called back in the same week. Versus calling and saying I need to cancel, then getting connected to a service rep in 15 seconds and asking them about returning equipment.

I recently had the same issues you did with my ISP. I started mentioning firing middle management for tolerating such poor customer service. I received a call from a person within a couple minutes.

If only there was meaningful ISP competition in my area.

Was this your first email to them? Is this how you cancel any service or just this one?

I don't understand how this works in favour of Apple. Imagine you had paid with any other third-party payment provider, e.g. Paypal. Wouldn't you have been able to cancel the recurring payment just as easily? Even with a CC payment, wouldn't you be able to cancel the recurring payment by going through the account options on your bank website?

> Even with a CC payment, wouldn't you be able to cancel the recurring payment by going through the account options on your bank website?

No? I don't know where you're located, but I'm not aware of any North American banks that offer anything of the sort. Typically the only thing you could do through your bank is dispute a charge after the fact and request a chargeback. The end of that process may or may not see the company in question left unable to charge you again, but it's not a "cancellation of recurring payment" process in any normal sense, and it's going to require some phone calls and form-filling.

Companies will famously decline to offer subscription cancellation options on their website, leaving consumers with the only option of calling them on the phone and facing a hard sell when attempting to cancel. Apple's subscription cancellation options are night-and-day better than the status quo.

Here in UK if a company wants to charge you regularly for anything they have to start something called a "direct debit" on your bank account - then they can withdraw money from your account whenever they see fit. The thing about direct debits though is that you can cancel them for any reason within few clicks on your account website, and all charges are reversible without having to provide a reason - I just call my bank and say I want to reverse a direct debit charge X, done.

I know the American system is bad, but it's not like the only system in the world. There are other ways of doing this, without going through Apple's closed ecosystem.

I may not understand properly what you are saying but here in the UK you can have regular payment on your credit/debit card. Except for Utilities, basically all my recurring payments just happen like that. Netflix does not require a Direct Debit, neither does a variety of service, including Apple iCloud.

Although you can chargeback those payment, that's not really a cancellation. It's a last recourse type of stuff. I'm still subscribed and liable for whatever charge I have incurred. If I want to cancel Netflix or iCloud, I need to go there. So sure, if the payment fails your account will eventually be suspended but not necessarily cancelled.

Even Direct Debit are like that. I cancelled my Electricity DD by accident, but I still received the bill in the mail (at the time) and the electricity wasn't just cut.

Also in the UK, Paypal will allow to setting up subscription. Similarly you can cancel the subscription, but it is not a cancellation of the service. You need to go to whatever setup the subscription and unsubscribe there.

Apple system is a centralised cancellation of the service first, the fact that the payment are stopped is a consequence of cancelling the service. Not the other way around as with all the systems I listed.

UK direct debits are only for debit accounts.

But most of the commentators are talking about credit cards.

There is no equivalent system for credit cards.

> Here in UK if a company wants to charge you regularly for anything they have to start something called a "direct debit" on your bank account - then they can withdraw money from your account whenever they see fit

Here in Czechia most periodic payments are paid through either direct debit or standing order. Direct debit payments require apriori permission (enabled for each recipient max sum per period), which could be revoked at any time.

Yup, same here in Italy.

The infuriating thing is that some american users think that since they have to endure crappy banking then everybody else on the planet must also be enduring the same thing, and that's not the case.

I must explicitly approve any direct debit subscription before it can withdraw money from my balance and I can kill a subscription from my home banking (I'm an Unicredit customer btw).

That's actually how I made sure my gym subscription was terminated for good.

> That's actually how I made sure my gym subscription was terminated for good.

If for nothing else, the angry Americans downvoted you to hell for this

I can't hear them over the sound of proper banking :P

Probably because it incorrectly characterizes the typical US banking system experience while throwing shade on Americans.

Very likely that doing this will still mess up your credit ratings and result in calls from debt collectors, even if you're in Europe.

Over a 10 euro/month subscription? Zero chance. Even in Europe.

There are also 720 euro/month gym subscriptions in Europe, and probably everything in between.

Just a 30 euro/month subscription would quickly add up to amounts worth collecting, although I've even had a debt collector call me over a debt of 2 something euros.

Precisely this. And I realize it's not the same around the world, but recurring payments get really bad in large parts of the world.

If you, the customer, want to cancel a recurring payment and you're using ApplePay, it's one button and done.

If you're using 3rd party billing from $randomcompany, it usually works by you, the customer, trying to find who to call and spending a substantial portion of your time being badgered by customer retention people. They're set up to make it as difficult as possible because they know that they can make people give in if the effort is too high.

This is a huge part of the reason why companies want the second option - they want to own the customer, and for you to have to get permission from them to stop belonging to them.

I've had to deal with this type of thing in the past. Not often. What has worked for me was saying something like the following right off the bat when they try to keep me (but I guess it only works if not all of us do it :):

I get it. You are doing your job. You have a script. You have to try and keep me. It's not gonna work on me. Skip to the part of the script where you begrudgingly give in and cancel the service for me and you can take your next call quickly.

Usually the easiest way to solve this is to send a written letter, registered mail for like $1.50 or whatever it is now.

Then you dispute the charge each time. It's a pain, but it's a bigger pain for them and costs them more than it does you. Especially once you've documented with that receipt of a registered letter.

In PayPal, any recurring payments and subscriptions can easily be cancelled on the centralized "Pre-approved payments" page:

https://www.paypal.com/va/smarthelp/article/how-do-i-cancel-...

The process can be done in the PayPal app, or on any web browser. It is just as easy as Apple's process, and PayPal doesn't charge 30%.

PayPal is not a bank, however.

looks like Paypal charges $0.49 + 3.49% for Paypal checkout. so seems like more expensive in some cases.

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

From the same page, micropayments on PayPal have an alternative fee structure of 4.99% + $0.09. PayPal is less expensive than Apple's 30% fee in every scenario.

This is why I use privacy.com. Each company or subscription gets their own personal dedicated credit card number, and if I don’t like their service, I can pause or cancel the card.

And if someone else tries to charge that card, then I know who leaked it.

Done.

Which is strange considering that both Mastercard and Visa require banks to offer this feature, and provide services to make it easy to implement.

I suspect if you called up your bank and asked to block recurring payments from a specific merchant, they could do it. It’s just not advertised very well, and the implementation aren’t always granular enough (block a merchant using Stripe for example, can result in all Stripe payments being blocked).

I guess that's because they cancel the payment, not the subscription.

If you cancel Netflix that way, Netflix isn't told. They will just realise the payment failed and block your account until you upgrade your payment details.

Apple system cancel the subscription, just like if you go on Netflix account and cancel. The blocking of the payment just happen as a consequence of the subscription to the service being cancelled.

Of course maybe time changed. Like shop returns 20 years ago, it was badly seen to pick load of stuff and bring most of the stuff back. Nowadays shops expect it and during Sales period they will ask you to do it that way rather than jam the few fitting rooms.

I just report my card as stolen and call it a day, but I have noticed sometimes it does not stop recurring payments.

My bank let's me make a "temporary credit card" with only so much money on it. Good luck squeezing blood from this stone

At least with my European CC I need to fill out a PDF, put a signature on it and upload. Not the level of convenience I am used to. Maybe it’s different elsewhere.

>Even with a CC payment, wouldn't you be able to cancel the recurring payment by going through the account options on your bank website?

High quality bait right here.

They have a class action lawsuit against them.

I believe it just covers automatic renewals, which are illegial.

The WSJ needs to clean up their act. Offer better info to subscribers? The rest of us arn't going to pay. And I know it's difficult business. Figure out something newsboys besides trickery?

Fire that MBA in charge of subscriptions.

We just got an email notice that $locl_newspaper was doubling its monthly subscription rate effective immediately. When we called to cancel they permanently us in at the old subscription rate.

Pretty clearly a cash grab against those subscribers who aren't watching the notices + auto-billing closely...

Let me guess. A Tribune paper.

If a smooth cancelation is so important to users that it justifies a 30% upcharge, other payment processors will compete. They can even advertise the easy cancelation during checkout next to the payment method (“install the stripe subscriptions app or go to stripe.com for one-click, prorated cancellations!”). I think once one of them does it, they all will. If the injunction goes into effect in 90 days, it will be a gold rush for everyone who gets to finally compete with Apple Pay. This will induce a bunch of rapid innovation in the iOS payment space.

The thing that I think you're perhaps missing is that Stripe etc. will be competing with Apple for developers. Letting developers make it harder for consumers to cancel something is a feature, not a bug.

Stripe etc. do not care about competing for consumer favor. Apple does. As far as any large company is on the consumer's side, Apple is, because they need me to buy another iPhone more than they need me to buy a subscription to somebody else's app, even at a 30% vig.

This is a deeply threaded discussion, but if you look up there, you’ll find that people are arguing that users will choose Apple Pay over other payment processors or refuse to use apps that don’t offer Apple Pay. That’s the context in which my comment is written. If it’s true, then app developers and payment processors will need to respond to that market demand. If users don’t care, then of course developers and payment processors don’t need to care either (absent regulation).

It’s very wholesome (or, naive) of you to think that developers will give users the choice for a less predatory payment gateway out of the goodness of their hearts, but that’s not going to happen.

Making it harder for users to cancel their recurring payment is a feature, it’s customer retention, the only choice you’ll have is whether a given site or payment processor is so egregious that you will forego use of the service entirely rather than take the risk.

If not being robbed is so important that it justifies buying locks we might actually decide that robbing should be illegal and punishable by jailtime....

Not when the robbers are writing the rules.

My mother can trump that. Her VOLUNTARY subscription donation to the guardian was messed up and again could only be cancelled by phone despite signing up online. Dialing through the phone tree eventually connected cancellations to the NHS blood delivery service, really, I kid you not. They were very polite but equally bemused. Eventually sorted but way to drive away a donor.

How does this work for deaf or hearing impaired users? Surely even in the US there must be a way to cancel a subscription without having to speak to someone on the phone?

Generally in the US, if a company is large enough they will provide a TTS number, otherwise you can call via a TTS “gateway”, many of which are provided free of charge by various government entities or by the phone company.

When you call via a TTS gateway, a certified transcriptionist for the deaf or (now) a computer program that does speech recognition will transcribe what is said by the other party to text so you can read it and speak out loud what you type exactly. There’s quite a few regulations around this service, although I’m sure it’s developed since I last looked into it.

There are also special phones or phone apps many deaf people have that do live captioning. CaptionCall is one common brand.

The other part is, what do the Apple subscription cover in terms of platforms?

e.g.: If I can pay for say Guardian subscription either:

1. via their website/app and use it on iPhone, android, PC, etc; or

2. Pay for same subscription via Apple subscription and ONLY have it on my iPhone

- that's a HUGE diff, and one that I have been extremely peeved off to discover in the past :-/. It only took one such experience to permanently sour me on Apply subscriptions.

That's not a shortcoming of Apple's system - every subscription I have using IAP has a way to tie to to an existing or new account for use on other devices. If the Guardian decided not to do that, that's kinda crappy and 100% on them.

I subscribe to HBO through Apple. The platform I watch it on doesn't matter. We use Roku.

I would consider going through HBO directly. I used to subscribe through Apple but once HBO offered a promo that I didn't qualify for because I was billed through Apple.

The Guardian allows you to sign in from a browser with your AppleID - does that not give you access to your subscription? https://profile.theguardian.com/signin

I ended up canceling a magazine subscription I’d done with Apple, because there was no way to use my Apple credentials on the web site. It was app-only, and the app was crap compared to the web version. I might resubscribe but… friction…

> It's really nice knowing that you can nuke a subscription without getting some dark patterns trying to talk you out of it.

Tim Cook said at the trial they could integrate a separate payment API into Apple's subscriptions. Alternatively, Apple could check the cancel method during app review - so that's not a reason to allow Apple's payment monopoly.

I suppose that would only happen if Apple were very uncompetitive in price. In the example above, the options would be equivalent to the company if Apple only dropped their cut to 25% and the competition was free.

Assume Apple dropped to 15% and the competition was 10% - then it would be 9.99 IAP, 9.63 on Amaozon/Stripe/Netflix, which probably wouldn't be worth the consumer confusion.

~USD$70 B AppStore revenue (yearly, 2020), so simplistic estimates:

5% price cut: -$3.5 B

15% price cut: -$10.5 B

... I think all bets are on the table as to how Apple will respond, given the magnitude of what we're talking about.

Doing some back of the envelope "what would it take to do micropayments with PayPal"

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

A micropayment is 5% + $0.09. For a $0.99 purchase, this is about 15%.

I would expect other payment processors to be similar.

This also leads to the question of "how do you maintain the in app purchases?" Is it an account on a website that has 100% uptime? Does it work for solo games when there's no network connectivity?

This works for Epic (big company, lots of payment processing already). It doesn't work for SmallGamerInc that would find that they'd need to do a bunch of other stuff to get it working that incurs more costs than what Apple offers.

> I would expect other payment processors to be similar

SumUp wants just 1.95% flat for online payments. I would expect other payment processors to do even better with some shopping around.

In the UK and in person transactions that appears to be correct. For card not present (online) transactions its 2.50% ( https://help.sumup.com/en-GB/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3... )

---

For the US ( https://support.sumup.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008338687-Pri... )

> When you take payments over the phone or via payment link, you’ll pay 3.25% + $0.15 per remote transaction.

In Poland it's 1.95% for pay-by-link and 1.49% for card-present. https://support.sumup.com/hc/pl/articles/115008338687-Op%C5%... The card-present fee is actually on the high side for but there is no monthly fee, the usual rates are around 0.7%.

They're not allowed to offer it lower price direct.

I’m very curious if that clause would be challenged by this judge or another one — because that’s the linchpin.

That decision changes register my Netflix account, that I don‘t remember doing, nor do I remember what interface I used to do it ––it was three computers and two phones ago–– but if another decision says I could save 20% every month, I’d munster the energy to get off the couch.

The question I’d have is whether they can hedge around that with freebies. It’d be an interesting lawsuit if, say, Epic started including some in-game rewards rather than direct monetary discounts and Apple sued claiming that those should count as a violation of the contract.

Is that part of the ruling? Because they stopped requiring price parity long ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com