That's a facile answer. You're extremely well educated on this matter and know full well the downsides of "unpaying".
EDIT: see sibling comment from "notaustinpowers" for an explanation of the downsides (thanks!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060260
Sign up and immediately cancel/turn off billing, so you aren't charged again next year (again, they'll send you a bunch of notices ahead of the end of your service).
Put a calendar reminder in for 11.5 months out from when you sign up.
In Slack, /remind me in 11.5 months to cancel X service.
But reading suggestions like yours, apparently it's all on people like my poor mom to outwit corporations with multi-million-dollar budgets dedicated to screwing her over. (And yes I'm helping, but precious few tech-noob elders have an engineer in the family.)
Why? That's much worse. If anything is going to do a recurring charge to me, I want it to go through a credit card which offers a layer of indirection.
I never authorize automatic billing directly to a bank account, then the money is truly gone. With a credit card I can always protest the charge and have had to do this with particularly difficult businesses a few times.
Congratulations, HNer — you're more tech savvy than my mom.
Perhaps you're volunteering to help vulnerable seniors like her navigate the Hobbesian nightmare of subscriptions?
I applaud your initiative, but if you're new to this, let me caution you: they don't always understand or follow the advice you give them precisely. Even if they are trying their best.
Use a virtual card from your credit card Many banks offer these now a these days (Capital one does, with all cards, in app or in browser, no need for extension).
These get sold to a collections company. Invalid payment doesn’t invalidate the contract.
The chargeback doesn't supersede the vendor's control of access to the service or potential legal/debt obligations.
When terminating my account is exactly what I want, that's totally fine.
This does highlight yet another problem with consolidating to huge companies. You'll never be able to charge back to a behemot like amazon or google, they'll just erase you off large parts of the internet which would be problematic.
But with smaller vendors that you are trying to get rid of and never want anything to do with them again, it works wonderfully.