• Jim@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Every damn time. IMO, it’s not really free if it requires a payment method; free trials should automatically end when the time is up instead of making you the one responsible for canceling to avoid being charged.

    • nadram@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It should also be illegal for someone to mandate you hand over credit/debit card details if you are not making a purchase. A free trial does not qualify as a purchase, nor should it be treated as an opportunity to sneakily take money from people. It is purely out of bad intentions that they request card details and should be banned.

    • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I agree completely, but in practice I’ve never had trouble stopping a free trial before it charges me. Most I’ve done even let you turn off the auto-renewal immediately after signing up and still let’s you run out the trial.

      I always just set a reminder as soon as I sign up for it to make sure I cancel. Not ideal, but gets the job done.

  • Plap plap 𓁑𓂸 @lemmyf.uk
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    1 year ago

    This is designed to be predatory. They want you to forget to cancel in time, because once they charge you, you will never be able to get a refund. And that’s if they don’t “forget” to not charge you in the first place.

    That a lot of these that I see only have, or at least default to, expensive yearly subscriptions, make these even worse.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      “we know no one wants our service, so we’ll pretend to give it away and then charge for an entire year up front”

    • dansity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Reality is it is very easy to create a new email every 30 days and use a service for free. It is just a bit harder to create a card every 30 days and apparently most people are not going that length. If you were a business owner you would do the same

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        In Europe you can probably use Revolut, they let you generate single-use cards.

        Please note however that websites can tell it’s a single-use card and refuse to accept it. Most recently Amazon and their related services (Twitch etc.) started refusing them.

      • provomeister@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        There’s KOHO for Canadians, still not a proper Privacy.com replacement but you get two Mastercard cards (one physical & one digital) and they are refillable via Interac payments.

        When doing trials, I set a few dollars on the card to ensure if they try to do a 1$ transaction to verify the card and I’m good to go. Even if I forget to cancel, the payment won’t pass.

    • SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Funny that “DoNotPay is a paid service that currently costs $36 every two months, a subscription that renews automatically.” on a thread about subscriptions. Would be even funnier if they had a free trial.

      • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Damn, last time I checked, which was admittedly quite a while ago, it was less than 10. Which easily made up for Spotify, Apple music, Google music etc