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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

In general, I use privacy.com everywhere I can. I don't even bother unsubscribing, I just pause the card.

Does that work in the US? In Germany stopping to pay does not cancel your subscription, and the provider can apply the usual debt collection measures.

I wouldn't know, but they're welcome to send their debt collectors to Greece.

They'd just contract a Greece debt collector. I'd would cost you extra fees.

It does work in the U.S., legal agreement or not, I think debt collection is far less successful in the U.S. so most companies will just cancel the subscription for you.

On the other hand in the EU it's much easier to cancel subscriptions thanks to legal requirements on cancelation methods…

> so most companies will just cancel the subscription for you.

This isn't "it working" really. It is just that for most companies it is not worth chasing down the debt that is rightfully owed to them.

Fair point, but it works great for the consumer

Speaking as a SaaS business owner that is real bad customer behavior. Is spending a couple of minute clicking "unsubscribe" too much work?

> Is spending a couple of minute clicking "unsubscribe" too much work?

I can't speak to your business obviously but the couple minutes to unsubscribe is often actually finding a hidden support number (because they don't even have a way to unsubscribe otherwise) and getting stuck in some dead end phone tree game like the OP describes. Many companies make it easy to give them money but really hard to stop doing so.

This is one of the reasons I try to avoid recurrent billing products altogether. I actually don't think I'd purchase them without a middle layer like privacy.com to mitigate these potential situations.

Fallacies SaaS business owners have about unsubscribing from things:

* The unsubscribe buttons exists at all

* The unsubscribe button is available to every customer

* The unsubscribe buttons actually work

* When something goes wrong, the company's support is useful and helps the customer unsubscribe.

I'm sure you're one of the good ones, but i've been bitten too many times. Every subscription is believed to be on the same tier as gym memberships until proven otherwise. If I'm wrong, that's nice. If I'm right, I have all the levers.

I understand you (as a business owner myself), but asking that in a post about a company that won't let users cancel their plans... feels poetic?

Wouldn't it be the same if the card was rejected for any other reason, including that the card is no longer active, don't have enough funds or anything else? What makes this particular behavior "real bad customer behavior", compared to the other reasons a payment could be rejected?

A lot of services don't stop the day payment wasn't received but try for weeks to follow up, be automated or manual. In our (small scale) B2B SaaS we give benefit of doubt and the last thing we want is to stop access, which might break some production system on the customer side. I'm more concerned about the "I don't even bother". Some companies might hide their unsubscribe feature, that's frustrating, a lot others make it super easy.

Ok, so what's the issue exactly? The person is no longer using the service, so won't matter if you retry one time one day then cancel VS retrying for weeks, their usage wouldn't impact you, and eventually the account will be deactivated/suspended?

Maybe payment processors will charge significant fees for declined transactions and it may hurt your reputation with them, possibly resulting in overall fee increases or outright being kicked off of the platform.

But again, that issue appears no matter what reason the card didn't work, it's not exclusive to someone who themselves "paused" the card and the business continued to try to charge them.

Given that there are no laws against using credit cards this way, is bad customer behavior just defined as customers not doing what you want them to do? I would suggest that you should account for real customer behavior rather than just characterizing it as malicious, which does not seem like any kind of solution.

Make it easier to unsubscribe instead of complaining.

Is gracefully handling a payment decline too much work?

People do this because of "real bad SaaS behavior" in the past.

> Is gracefully handling a payment decline too much work?

It's not only that. If enough people do it and you pass a threshold you might get kicked out of stripe etc. So is it too much to ask to differentiate between good and bad businesses?

> If enough people do it and you pass a threshold you might get kicked out of stripe etc.

Stripe should be entirely capable of differentiating between first-time declines (which might be someone testing cards) and a previously good card used for recurring charges that's out of funds or no longer active.

If your declines are well outside the industry norm because of the scenario we're talking about, I'd consider it a sign your unsubscribe process is too onerous or broken.

> So is it too much to ask to differentiate between good and bad businesses?

How am I going to know in advance if you're gonna put me through the ringer to cancel?

It's a safety measure.

I understand your view and I'm very sorry what this world has come to in this regard. Doing business together is something I really value. So I can't blame you.

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