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Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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