this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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I mean I don't even know what the end game is here. Is their business model "maybe a fraction of them will forget to cancel and we will squeeze some juice out of them"? or do they sell card info? what?
Yes. Quite literally the model used by most subscription services.
It also prevents an user from repeatedly creating account, use free trial, then create another account.
IDK, I have a lot of credit cards.
Forget to cancel is definitely one of them, the other being that if you dont enter your info you likely wont purchase it anyway after the free trial so why waste resources on you, the third is the sunk cost fallacy, you already took the time and effort to enter your info for the free trial, so maybe you dont need it right now but might need it later, so you just let the subscripton run.
Many are just to reduce the amount of leeches trying to use and abuse the trial. Usually happens when it offers too much good stuff and people keep creating new accounts all the time to use the resources.
The logic is that putting a credit card is a much higher level of commitment and ensures people aren't just creating new accounts with new emails since card numbers are a somewhat smaller set.
I also hate it and walk away from those things, but it makes sense.
hmm I mean if you put an email requirement, I think it will deter most non psychopaths after 3-4 renewals This is based on my own feeling and assumption that I am not a psychopath. I am sure there will be some people with 20 emails for such stuff but I wonder what is the trade off between preventing this and scaring away people like us.
My password manager generates an email in 2 clicks, its a useless identifier.
Creating an email is so easy, and email isn't tied to a real name. A card has more identification info on it
The meal box kit things seem to be the worst for that shit here. They don't let you cancel your first box, even if you want to do so 10 minutes after you sign up, and you have to cancel a week or sometimes 2 before they prepare (not even send) your box. Then when you do cancel, they have 3 or 4 rounds of questioning where they'll swap the position of the "yes I'm sure" button, as well as changing the colours to try and trick you into clicking "no I want to stay".
I also signed up for an online news site once. It was a $1 trial for a month or something like that. Annoying, but I wanted to read an article no other news site had. Then the only way to cancel is to call them. Being ADHD as fuck, it was on my to-do list, but I forgot I even had a to-do list and I forgot. Then the subscription renewed at like 30 bucks a month. They weren't even transparent about the renewal price, I didn't see it anywhere when I was signing up, so I assumed it'd be around the same price as Spotify or something.