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Comment by kikki | Hacker News Reader

Completely off topic but the title made me wonder if there’s any subscription service that cancels you if you don’t use it? Not quite usage based billing - plans that cancel (or pause) without use? I can’t think of any - terrible business model of course

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> plans that cancel (or pause) without use?

Kagi is one of them.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing

I recall a db service does that too long ago. Although I'm not sure if they changed policy as it's been a while.

In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...

Kagi arguably “pauses” your subscription if you don’t use it in a month. They give you a credit at the end of the month that then applies to the next month, so that people aren’t charged if they aren’t using it.

Slack. Deactivates a seat after 28 days of inactivity. A really good practice.

edit: and obviously reactivates after activity

Uber dropped me and closed my account. They gave me warning, but I was fine with it and took no action to prevent them from doing it. The email said something about being based on no activity.

I know it's not exactly a subscription service though where they were making money from me whether I used the service or not. It was just surprising to me that someone felt the need to develop a cancel user purging system at all.

Uruky [1] (a Kagi alternative, but simpler and EU-based) does this in a more intentional way: You can only pay once for a period of time (one, three, six, or twelve months), there is no subscription! If, after that period, you want to keep using it, you have to pay again.

This was mainly done for privacy reasons, so less data needs to be stored in the account (it also only uses a randomly-generated account number, like Mullvad), but honestly, we don't want people paying that don't use the service.

And you're right, it makes "making money" much harder, but also, feels more honest.

[1]: https://uruky.com

Kagi does something close to that. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#monthly-pla...

tailscale used to do this for teams ("active user billing"), but recently changed pricing models to be purely seat-based.

they had a whole webinar about it with all sorts of justification, although most of it sounded like mba-isms to me.

We take a slightly different approach for https://pico.sh -- no automatic subscription, but we charge for an entire year. It's great for us because each sub is a year and if someone truly isn't using our services then it'll quietly drift into the background for the end-user.

Tarsnap has you put money into a stored balance, and when that balance goes to zero (and after a grace period), they delete your backups.

Not exactly a subscription since it's a stored-balance system, but still.

Morning brew (the email newsletter) iirc would unsubscribe you if you didn't open their email for a while. Not a paid sub though

Xbox/Microsoft Game Pass actually automatically canceled for me when I hadn't used it.

netflix did this. I didn't use streaming for a (long) time, they turned it off. Kudos.

Not any more. They'll keep billing you, and they'll even follow you getting a new card even if you don't explicitly update your account with the new card info. That does not sound like the same mental space as not charging people for being inactive.

I’m stealing this idea!

Kagi does this

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