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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

And your bank will probably get upset at you too.

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.

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.

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