Hacker News Reader

Comment by madars | Hacker News Reader

I heard you can change your address to California, which then gives the option to cancel online (due to state law). It is absolutely ridiculous that NYT will happily take your card info online, but require you to be on hold to speak with their "customer care" to cancel. Maybe it is time to use virtual CC's a la privacy.com.

View on HN

Even better, when I had to cancel my NYT subscription, it said there weren't enough cancellation reps to connect me; "try again later".

I went in via the normal support chat, said I wanted to cancel, and was immediately redirected to one. It was an outright lie.

Yep - and these are the SAME places posting LONG articles about how terrible Apple's store policies are. Uh, folks spend a lot on the apple store for a reason.

The problem is how Apple both profits from the app store and sets rules on the app store. It’s incentivized to create rules that make it money without helping users. Apple needs to either stop making money from the app store or to create a separate body that can set rules without being incentivized by profit.

Laws are good, but the lawmakers shouldn’t profit from them.

Walmart profits from their store and sets the rules from their store. The incentive is to make the store a place people want to spend money. This is the same as almost any other store isn't it?

You do that by making it safe and comfortable for users (or in androids case maybe by doing deals with phone companies to pre-load their apps and make money off users there ).

Apple is only partly successful, they have 15% market share in phones or so. But one area they've been good at is trust - users on an iphone probably spend a lot more (it's also harder to pirate, so what developers give up in profits they make back in lack of pirating).

Except, as a seller, I have multiple avenues to deliver my product to customers other than Walmart. On top of that, Walmart charges a fee per sale [1], and doesn't get to double dip into additional services rendered on top of that product. As soon as the sale is done through Walmart, they're cut out of the picture. Could you imagine Walmart demanding a 30% cut of profits if I sell a video game with in-game purchases--just because they performed the task of stocking it on the shelf?

[1] https://deliverr.com/blog/costs-of-selling-on-walmart-vs-ama...

Your boy at darkpatterns.org would love that gem. I don't know if you can give it a more succinct name other than, you know, lying.

Well, you tried later. Technically.

Just dispute the next charge with your card company.

Is apple somehow weird with canceling subscriptions on the iPhone?

I can just go into the Google Play store and terminate the subscription for the NYTimes on Android in one click.

Apple makes it easy. I was subscribed directly with the NYT on their site, not the iOS app.

In California the New York Times still requires you to chat with a customer support person on their website. You still have to wait in queue, then wait for the person (or maybe it's a bot at this point) paste in several attempts at retaining your subscription.

The law needs to be that you can cancel all recurring payments through a standard interface. It's ludicrous that my online banking account doesn't just show me all subscriptions and allow me to cancel all future payments of any of them.

I should be able to tell my credit card company that I'm ending a subscription, and have them be in charge of notifying the provider that the subscription has been terminated

Or just reject the payment the next time they try, that would be fine by me.

I think my bank does this, when I called for another reason this week there was an option on the phone menu to stop a recurring payment.

I've done this using my credit card company (not the bank) and they were very helpful. I explained why I wanted them to stop the recurring payment and they asked if I wanted to dispute any of the older charges, took less than 5 minutes. I call the 'fraud/disputes' phone number on the back of my card for this and I think that is not the bank, I think it's Visa / Mastercard themselves.

I bet processes like this are why subscriptions like gyms are starting to require your _bank account info_ rather than just a card.

Any banks that offer this service? I would switch my primary banking service for this.

You can kind of get close to this using merchant-specific card numbers from privacy.com (not affiliated). If you want to cancel a subscription, you just deactivate the number associated with that subscription.

All of them. if you don't like a subscription and don't care about burning a bridge, issue a chargeback.

Yes for recurring subscriptions the control should be firmly under the consumers control. Perhaps there should be a special recurring transaction type on credit cards akin to those in PayPal.

Startup idea? I would totally pay for / use a service that managed and paid all of my subscriptions to various things that also made it so that I could cancel any of them at any time with a single click (okay maybe 2 clicks) on their website and hear nothing more about that account.

Privacy.com

you can do that already. just issue a chargeback and poof.

Do that to a gym and they'll sue you for not paying out your contract.

And your bank will probably get upset at you too.

A gym is not a recurring payment, it's a facility access contract defined for a period of time. You agreed upon price for the year, broken down into monthly payments. You are obligated to pay that full amount b/c you agreed to it when you signed the contract at the beginning of the membership.

You don't have such contracts with recurring payment products.

No, quite a few gyms advertise “no contract” month-to-month payment schemes that still require a specific cancellation process.

For example, Planet Fitness has “no commitment” memberships, but you still have to explicitly cancel.

> You may cancel according to our policy: Per the agreement, in order to cancel a membership, one must either go to your home club in person to fill out a cancellation form, or send a letter (preferably via certified mail) to the club, requesting cancellation. Please note: Memberships cannot be cancelled via fax, phone, or email.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/51m0e0/com...

Can you dispute? Just say that NYT cannot be unsubscribed from because of unresponsiveness and blacklist it from ever charging the card number.

I doubt the bank is going to be happy with you disputing charges if you haven’t followed whatever process the company makes you follow in order to cancel.

I love privacy.com for this, and I’ll never sign up for a trial or something recurring without using it again.

I signed up for a trial for another service which shall remain unnamed, and of course I couldn’t find anywhere on the site to cancel my trial once I wanted to. No problem, I just disabled the card. They’ve probably tried to bill me a dozen times since.

was it… stamps.com? adobe? wsj? a gym?

Privacy.com is free, but I’d pay quite a bit of money for it, it has saved me hundreds of dollars.

There are some less scrupulous sites that ban privacy.com cards. Dallas Morning News is a recent one I ran into.

I hadn't heard of privacy.com cards, but that thought had crossed my mind. What is to stop organisations simply banning privacy.com cards?

We’ll technically I don’t think they’re able to, but they can ban prepaid cards which I think is how they’re classified.

That's my biggest use case for Privacy.com. I care less about the privacy aspect and more about the convenience. I've already had once instance where a single-use card I created for 1 specific vendor started getting fraudulent hits (declines) and all I had to do was delete that card.

> all I had to do was delete that card

Careful. If you didn’t properly terminate the contract, you still owe that money. I have a friend whose credit got hit because a service sold his debt to a collector.

Thanks, good to note. In this case, they were declined transactions (nothing that went through) so it was only a tip-off to something fishy.

Be careful. You are still on the hook. And in many cases companies will sell you debt to collection agencies.

Long-time Privacy.com user.

You'll typically be OK with streaming services, newspapers, and mobile / web apps.

Definitely be careful with gyms, insurance companies, and any service that sends out invoices (instead of calling it a monthly subscription.)

I dunno. I cancelled the other day now that I no longer care about the pandemic data and it was basically just three minutes of politely stonewalling in a chat box saying “No Thanks, please cancel my subscription.” a couple of times.

I live in California and would have tried cancelling online but actually couldn’t find the option. I can’t say it was difficult to cancel though once I picked a process and initiated it. Maybe that was the online option now that I think about it? I was expecting a button or link.

I did the same a few years ago and it was relatively painless, however there are many people that do not like confrontation and "stonewalling" is not an easy task. NY Times understands this and preys on a specific segment of the population.

I don’t know. It’s 6 words and you don’t even have to be rude about it or get annoyed at the offers they throw at you. Then you get the confirmation email and you’re set.

I hate talking in the phone to people I don't know so intensely that I have wasted hundreds of dollars on various things because I procrastinated calling to cancel.

This effect is real, and companies know it, and design their cancellation processes to extract extra money from people.

Mate, I mentioned up above that the process by which I cancelled was a chat box that intermittently ate maybe three minutes. Not mentioned was I did it while cooking breakfast.

The best experience would have been no human intervention necessary, but for a process where someone was involved, it was incredibly straightforward. They gave me an offer, I refused it, and nobody had to be a dick about it and no phone calls were made.

Then that part has changed. I had to talk on the phone when I canceled about 8 years ago

Someone informed me in a different part of the thread that this apparently is the California cancellation experience from the New York Times, which I wasn’t sure of. Like I said above, I was expecting a button or link because that is more akin to how I actually signed up, but there you go.

Unfortunately that leaves the phone option as the remaining option for everyone else.

They don't have the right to my attention. If they were to cancel my service due to lack of payment (for example), do you think they would engage me in a dialogue to discuss it or just send me a notice in the mail?

> […] politely stonewalling in a chat box saying “No Thanks, please cancel my subscription.” a couple of times.

> I live in California and would have tried cancelling online but actually couldn’t find the option

The chatbox is the online option.

That answers that. Thanks!

If you have a credit card with capital one, they provide a browser extension for generating and managing virtual numbers which works like a charm. I’ve been happily using it for all online purchases for the past couple of years. No need to worry about merchants charging for cancelled subscriptions, and if a service has implemented any dark patterns in their unsubscribe process, I just kill the virtual number and let it resolve itself, rather than needing to worry about it.

The Globe and Mail operates similarly. I spent some time while cancelling a few years ago informing them that making me call them to cancel is a crime in California. The person on the line cancelling my account was genuinely surprised.

Canada was the first to require simple unsubscribe for email lists... I'm surprised it still does not have a law to require online unsubscribe for media subscriptions.

> I'm surprised it still does not have a law to require online unsubscribe for media subscriptions.

Newspaper editorial endorsements are still a big thing in Canada.

> The Globe and Mail operates similarly.

But this is good to know. I was considering swapping another newspaper subscription for a Globe and Mail subscription, but after looking into it, the eventual unsubscribe hassle isn't worth it.

I used a Privacy card and NYT did a “force post” [0] after they got a decline. I contacted Privacy and this is apparently a per se violation of the Visa rules, so they opened a dispute and I won. But NYT actually tried to charge me despite me trying to cancel, and I live in CA, and the card was blocked in Privacy.

[0]: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...

As a side note, I got a subscription to the online edition of the NY Times included with my local newspaper. When I cancelled my local newspaper subscription, the NY Times access was never removed, meaning I have free access to the Times. I've told them about this issue several times, and they acknowledged it, and yet, I still have free access to everything. My account says I'm a "subscriber." So, apparently , it is sometimes just as hard to stop getting something for free.

That’s every newspaper online. And gym memberships. And many others. Easy to get, pain in the ass to end.

I had no difficulty unsubscribing from The Washington Post.

If you use PayPal to pay for NYT, you can cancel via PayPal and never speak to anyone.

I signed up to NYT using a virtual CC, knowing how much of a pain it was to unsubscribe (I'm not in California). When I was through with it, I just paused the card. And I was amazed at how many times they tried charging it before giving up and actually cancelling the account. 13 times, now that I'm looking at it. The Gray Lady isn't as well-mannered as one might think.

Do any banks do a good job offering this feature for debit?

Back in one of the days, the PayPal TOOLBAR used to offer this feature, it was really convenient since you were essentially direct drawing from your bank account with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com