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Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

This crap is what prevents me from subscribing US press. I would love to some of their titles but I am a foreigner and there's no way I am going to call a number in US to cancel.

I am also not desperated to create burner cards for paying for those.

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This crap hurts an awful lot of good actors. I used to work for a small startup in the education sector. We offered trial subscriptions, but because of the 'cancel before your trial expires' anti-pattern that so many companies adopt, potential customers were suspicious. To the extent that they thought they might be charged on trial expiry, despite the fact that they didn't even provide a means of payment at any time during the process.

Sometimes you find a very underrated comment here, and this is one of those instances.

I NEVER subscribe to free trial offers simply because of the number of negative posts about how hard it is to cancel, and the pain involved.

It absolutely does hurt "good actors".

I do sub to free trials, if I have the time/energy to immediately cancel afterward. I never leave it until later for the above reasons.

More and more I've been seeing the pattern where if you cancel a 7 day trial on day 3, it ends immediately.

Still solved by my approach. If you sign up and cancel immediately and the trial is over before you start, you just move on from that service.

I'm also in the edtech sector, and we purposely offer our free trial without requiring an email or credit card, for this reason. This limits our ability to ensure that each person only does one trial though; for years, anyone could get unlimited free trials by uninstalling/reinstalliing. But it was better than the alternative, which you note!

Yeah some companies try to make it more obvious by writing 'no credit card required' as a subtitle on the 'sign up' button itself.

The issue with burner cards is that if you do not actually cancel the subscription and just fail to pay, I think can be liable for payment delinquency and accumulate charges and possibly interest.

I used a burner for Financial Times and they were pretty clear that my subscription was active but pending payment. I still did not have access to the articles while in that status. They eventually cancel the subscription though. The reason I did not actually cancel was that the cancel page failed with an error.

Would you like to use an aggregator service which gives you credits? You can use those credits to 'buy' an article from any paid news sites. Maybe a browser addon which activates articles you want to read.

Close, but I'd rather have a portion of my aggregator subscription be dispersed consistently, not just when I consume articles.

I use a virtual debit card and cancel that when I want to end a subscription.

I've had about 5 emails from Microsoft this week about my Xbox ultimate ending.

> This crap is what prevents me from subscribing US press.

I know this issue is not limited to the USA.

Some online banks allow you to easily create virtual cards. I use revolut, which is free.

This is what burner card is, and I don’t want to bother with.

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