FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

It would be great to see the FTC go against predatory subscription services like Adobe. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them.

One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it. For example: if I go a full monthly billing cycle without watching Netflix then my subscription should automatically pause and allow me to resume it next time I log-in. There's a ton of money that gets siphoned off to parasitic companies just because people forget to cancel their subscriptions or because they're too busy dealing with life. It might not be viable for all companies, but there's definitely a lot of services where such a thing would be possible, given the huge number of customer analytics they collect. Maybe give people the option to disable such a pause feature if they're really determined to keep paying for a service. But a default where subscriptions automatically pause if you're not using them makes a lot of sense from a user perspective. Of course businesses would probably hate such a ruling because it means they can't scam as much easy money.

Let me regale you with the story of my Adobe Subscription cancellation.

I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.

Boo.

I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.

His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."

So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.

I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.

A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.

Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.

I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.

Great Story!

I think you could also dispute the charges via your credit card company. The credit card company should reverse the charges.

I thought he was just going to say he did a chargeback, with how the first seven paragraphs went. What he described was not ideal for several reasons:

- Some websites won't accept prepaid cards (largely because they can be used to get around things like this).

- Who knows if a platform's going to save your previous card info to use as a fallback?

- As another reply stated, the company can send you to collections if they think you owe them money. They can also do that if you do a chargeback, theoretically. However, with a chargeback, your card company did some basic checking of the situation and agreed with you that something was wrong about the payment, so assuming you win the chargeback, you've at least had a second pair of eyes on the case, and you have that tiny bit of metaphorical "precedent" to use if you take the collections order to court-- both of which also mean they're less likely to take you to collections. If you just swap out your card number for one that doesn't work, that shifts some of the shadiness to your end, and it legally appears less like you have any grounds to stand on.