US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

I should be able to go into my bank or card service online. View a list of all my subscriptions. Click on a subscription (or select all). And cancel.

If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.

Simply move to Australia, all the major banks here offer this service: https://payto.com.au/

Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.

I use privacy.com for this.

(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)

I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!

I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel

So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription

This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account

It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires

Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.

You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.

What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?

use an alias with an alias email, the Privacy.com card will accept any name and address. Never had any sort of issue in all the years using them

I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.

Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen it any other way)

I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for now.

The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.

Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.

Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly

I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card numbers but haven't bothered with it.

This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly

You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.

Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from the bank.

That... doesn't necessarily work though?

If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.

Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed through apple, google, and amazon.

I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.

I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.

Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it properly

Any subscriptions that are paid through Apple Pay are like this. Apple also takes about a third of the money for the trouble.

This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a subscription.

Here in the Netherlands, via my bank I can list all of my pre-approved transfers and block them. I'm pretty sure every bank here is required to support this. PayPal also has this feature.

I recently had to cut down on expenses starting with extraneous subscriptions and charitable donations, of which I had dozens. Many ad a click-to-cancel or at least fill-out-a-form-to-cancel process, but some of them said 'call us'. Then I discovered that I could cut them all off from my side!

I got a few 'hey your donation stopped' messages, and answered the first ones, but they all eventually went away.

In theory I can do this with standing orders / direct debit in the UK and there are some subscriptions where "cancelling the direct debit" is the official way to cancel. There should be no need for firms to reinvent recurring payments and store card details for their own ad hoc system. I don't know if it might disadvantage some people not familiar with managing direct debits though.

However, many years ago, after an hour on hold failing to cancel Virgin ADSL I just cancelled the direct debit instead. They put a debt recovery firm on me! The direct debit was charged at the start of each billing period so it wasn't a non payment thing. I recall there used to be more indefensible "notice periods" for cancellation which were just pure scummy ways to force feed unwanted services but I don't think this had one.

They'll have to change their model or implement like a breakup fee depending of what would has been missed if you didn't have a discount.

Revolut does that, at least in France. You can see and cancel both card subscriptions and direct debits

Be careful there. You can block further payments, but that won't necessarily cancel your subscription.

You may still be responsible for the payment, and may need to pay collection fees as well at that point.

> If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.

Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.

Could you point me to some European banks that integrate your product? My current bank doesn't have something similar, and I would like to have an option to view all my subscriptions at a glance

You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial but sorry to tell you that "most" people is "forgot" they sign up something and not open it in years

that's happen more often than you think

also financial illiterate is real

Legally, this isn't sufficient. Your subscription contract is independent of your payment method. If you don't pay, that doesn't necessarily mean that your subscription is cancelled, and you could end up in court and lose.

What is necessary is regulatory (or statutory) enforcement of easy, online notice of cancellation, without a company able to frustrate you giving them (and them recording and acknowledging) that notice.

This would be illegal in western countries.

> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial

Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.

I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.

Thats how it works in India: all your "repeating" charge authorizations show up on a portal maintained by the issuing bank. All services that charge via these authorizations send an SMS alert before they debit the next charge. At any time, you can go into the portal and cancel any of these authorizations. No need to talk to the charging co at all, though still, best to first cancel from them. Jus that they know its trivial for the user to go and cancel the auth, so no one makes it difficult to cancel.

The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.

When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.

Sir, sorry to inform, but you do this:

> I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into

You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)

This is brilliant and simple. Canada could have this. Except the major telecommunications companies have a stranglehold on the govt and wouldn’t be for it.

The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture financial illiteracy as part of their "business"

It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.

> I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.

One reason is that the negative impact on your credit may end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars if you e.g. need to get a mortgage

Cell phone plans often charge monthly but can be years long contracts.

Creating a "stop subscription" button within a bank/credit card interface but allowing companies to charge a breakup fee when that gets pressed seems like a recipe for a lot of people to get whacked by big breakup fees they didn't know about.

Deep deep minority. I'm similar to you, in that every dollar going in or out gets tracked and categorized, but due to a medical emergency I recently started helping an elderly family member with their finances (logistically, not monetarily) and was astounded that they just can't identify what the destination is for half (by value) of the money going out of their bank account (we're working on it...).

Ok? It's worth self-sacrifice to push back against practices hostile to humanity, like credit. But conforming over a fucking gym membership just strikes me as spineless.

Well, even just being autistic is already a minority.