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Comment by quartz | Hacker News Reader

I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods.

After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them.

Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill because it was on autopay. Turns out now after 4 years I'm paying more than double the published rate. Called the storage facility and they said the only way around it is to rent a new unit at the new rate and move my things there to start the process all over again.

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Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.

I feel like a great way to solve these <businesses practices that are indistinguishable from scams> is to require confirmations when payments change (maybe with exception of variable rate loans?).

If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed amounts that notifies customers when they change. In fact, also pitch giving your customers a fucking list of reoccurring transactions.

Seriously, how is so much software so bad and so many products lack very basic functionality that would not be very difficult to implement but have high utility? I mean my laundry app doesn't even sort the laundry rooms in alphabetical order, they're just in a random fucking list. It's impressive to me we have systems that are so low value you can hire software engineers that don't know about sort. I don't think AI is going to replace a lot of coding jobs, but I suspect it'll replace these jobs (I just fear it'll also make this type of software more common).

> If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed amounts that notifies customers when they change.

I get exactly these types of notifications from both Discover and Citi.

Thanks for letting me know! That's an awesome feature.

This is something my central bank has forced on all banks. If I want auto pay, then my bank notifies me a day or two before, and after the mandate is executed. I also have a single place where all my auto pay mandates can be managed from

They're also difficult to cancel. They gave me a student discount for using my .edu email address, but after awhile I realized I wasn't really using it so I tried to cancel. They work really hard to make that difficult to do.

Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if you changed your address to California you could cancel online since IIRC it's a law there.

I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel after a trial.

When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.

Then you have the risk of the vendor sending your account to collections and trashing your credit score.

I've done the same thing for years. I've never seen collections.

This should be illegal. I lived in apartments like this as well, they would increase the rates for existing tenants while giving lower rates to new tenants. I’d also move out when they tried to pull this, just out of spite.

I have always heard that it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than to acquire a new one. Apparently these places don’t realize that. They don’t need to pay for advertising when they are filly booked up with people paying the market rate, nor do they need to do all the extra work invoiced in signing someone up or moving them out. I don’t own or operate a business, so maybe I’m talking out of my butt, but these people strike me as bad business owners who are chasing the wrong metrics.

I've very late to the discussion, but this seems relevant anyway -- The issue isn't just the cost of getting/retaining customers. Businesses don't charge solely based on cost, they charge based on what customers will pay. Existing customers also are willing to pay more to not have to move. If customers are willing to pay more, then it makes good business sense to charge them more. For the owner, having an empty apartment is the worst, so it's worth it to do extra work and give discounts just to get somebody renting.

It isn't nefarious, and you do your part by being willing to move instead of pay the higher price. It's all just the way the capitalist market works.

Ah yeah. The good ole' storage unit scam. They all raise the prices about every 6 months. I just rent a U-Haul for a day and move it to a new place. And it forces me to throw things away that I truly don't need. Over the years, the amount of stuff I have has been shrinking and I have less to move.

Rinse and repeat every now and then.

My final calculus was adding up what I had spent on storage units, and realizing it was way more than the replacement cost of most of the crap, so I reduced it down to personal momentos only.

In general, based on various family/partner-related experiences, is that you either have a specific I need more room for a specific set of activities that I have a concrete plan to use OR I have a specific plan to have more space for this crap--which I want to keep. A lot of people pay for storage space with no real plan which is just going to be tossed at some point anyway.

A while ago I read something along the lines of, clutter is a delayed decision. That's what most storage units are. People don't want to make a decision today, so they stick it in a storage unit and pay on it monthly so they can make the decision later... or the decision gets made for them.

I think that's about right and it's even OK to a point. Sometimes I do come back to hobbies, etc. Or it takes that 5 years to be confident I'm really not going to wear this clothing again. But keeping stuff "just in case" is definitely a tendency to keep under control or it gets to a point where dealing with clutter is such a chore that many people lie down until the impulse to deal with it goes away.

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