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Comment by john37386 | Hacker News Reader

I subscribed to a weekly meal kit. It was very easy to onboard and I liked the service for many months. My situation changed and I no longer needed their service. I wanted to cancel my subscription and it's impossible to do online. It's written in super small to call their happy representative. I didn't like this situation so what I'm doing is skipping the meal kit for the next 4 weeks. Every month I log on their website and skip the next 4 weeks... I'll do this until my credit card expired. Just for this, I won't recommend them to anyone. It's sad because I kind of liked it when it was useful to me.

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You should honestly just tell your credit card about this situation and if they are tier 1 (Chase, Amex, etc.) they will likely deny the charge on your behalf if you can show proof that you tried to cancel but weren't able to.

People can say they have you in whatever financial agreement, but if the processor has evidence you are NOT trying to pay it, they can at least stop it from going on their rails (and your card)

Question from a non-American. Is it actually legal to "cancel" a service by having your credit card expire?

At least here, if there is a subscription with recurring fees active, you're liable for those fees, whether or not the provider is able to collect them at this moment.

This sounds like you risk building up a lot of debt and eventually having a collections agency come after you.

I might change my strategy and finally call them at some point. It's just frustrating to be stuck in this situation. Thanks for the tip.

Many banks will automatically transfer recurring subscriptions to your new card as a "helpful" measure.

> Updater services allow merchants to know when your credit card information changes, and to alter their records accordingly. If you don’t want to continue the subscription, you’ll need to cancel it directly.

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/recurring-charg...

You can also try changing your address to a California address, and then the cancel button might magically appear in your account, due to different regulations around this for companies doing business in California.

It depends on whether you have a contact that binds you to pay until you cancel. Gyms force such a contact. Most SaaS websites don't. They'll cancel your service if they can't collect and move on with their lives.

Some day, someone will offer contract enforcement as a service that makes it really easy for a SaaS to come after you for payment and collect. Or maybe the friction of the legal system makes it untenable and the legal process has to become easier as a prerequisite.

And to nitpick on vocabulary, it is legal to break a contract. It is illegal to break a law.

Most SaaS services are pre-paid rather than post-paid, so if they cannot bill you, it's easy for them to shut off your service and be out basically no money.

My experience is that the actual terms of service don't guarantee that will happen, but rather that it's more cost-effective for the company to block your account than it is to allow a debt to accrue, document that debt, and then attempt to collect on it or sell it to debt collectors for pennies.

Probably not legal, but in the sense that you could get sent to collections for what you owe vs getting charged with a crime. If the company wanted to be difficult I think they could keep billing you and then send you to collections and likely most people would pay to avoid court costs and continued credit degradation.

> Is it actually legal to "cancel" a service by having your credit card expire?

Especially for services that are paid up-front, they sometimes specify in the contract that the service is terminated upon non-payment (my renters insurance is this way).

Many services don't contractually specify this, but they are still in the habit of doing it because documenting debt takes effort, and selling it to debt collectors only gets you a fraction of its value. It's relatively easier for them to just shut down the account and move on.

That said, the terms of most services I've interacted with require you to explicitly end your service via one of a contractually specified set of communications channels (e.g. "call us or send a letter to XYZ address").

So yes, it's also the case here that you risk accumulating debt and being send to collections.

My very limited experience with Blue Apron was that it was easy enough to cancel. But pretty much all the meal services, as far as I can tell,work on the subscribe and then you have to cancel model. Which makes them pretty uninteresting to me.

I might give a service a try for a week here and there but I definitely don't want one week in and week out. And I don't want to deal with signing up and then (hopefully if all goes well) immediately canceling. Dark pattern.

For a very very long time (I don't know what it's like these days) Blue Apron's cancellation has been available online, but not linked anywhere on the site. Contacting support would either have them cancelling the subscription for you, or just sending you the link.

It was an extremely dark pattern intended to combat churn, which was a huge problem. Practically nobody working there liked it, but the orders to do things this way came from execs.

I used to subscribe to a meal it service (Hello Fresh), but circumstances changed and I just chatted with the online rep via the website and was able to cancel rather quickly.

Can you name the meal kit place ( asking only, because I was debating the heavily advertised one about fruits and veggies )?

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