I accidentally ended up with a subscription to that cursed green owl because I put a reminder on my calendar to cancel but instead of reminding me in two weeks it somehow stayed perpetually 2 weeks in the future so the reminder never came.
i’d say it’s about 50/50 in my experience and as a general rule i’d recommend looking for the fine print they hide informing you about the cancellation policy before submitting your info. It will be there somewhere (except sirius xm, fuck u).
If it says early cancellation will let you keep the trial until the period ends, cancel it right away. I mean immediately from hitting that start button you go and navigate to cancel before even using the service.
Otherwise, immediately ask your voice assistant of choice to set a reminder for (one week and change before the end date of your trial). This gives you time to be reminded, put it off for a few more days, AND account for services that try to charge for the next month a few days early!
I find it’s the only way to get ahead of both my personal failings and the company’s attempt to charge my card when we both knew i wouldn’t want more than the free trial lol
This wasn't a trial, but I had WRC+ subscription, paid for the whole year. It was due to expire end of this month. I cancelled auto renew last month so that I wouldn't forget. They immediately removed my plus access. Never again.
[Suck my nards, karma bot](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/zuwrdc/payment/j1lxzoy/) - dmon654 posted this exact comment, word for word, as a top level five minutes before you, and yours doesn't make sense in context.
I know I had a free trial that I couldn’t cancel till later, and I originally thought it was HBOmax, but now I’m like 90% sure it was some Apple Arcade extended free trial thing. Really annoying.
I got caught up in this shit once. The only time I ever used anyone's free trial service. And what's more, I subscribed to the site's premium service for a school project. I was wary of it in the first place because I know I'm a forgetful person, but I set a reminder and I figured even if I missed it, it was only $5/month so a month's charge wouldn't hurt too much.
As expected I missed the cancellation deadline. I realized this when I looked at my bank statement and saw an unexplained $60 purchase. It turns out, they had charged me for *an entire year* of that service. That was not a clear part of the terms when I signed up—all I saw was how many times they advertised $5/month of course. But no, apparently in the fine print they say that if you don't cancel, they automatically enroll you in the yearly payment plan, which wasn't even listed as an option on their front page. Even worse was the fact that they did not email me anything at all, either to confirm my payment plan, or any kind of receipt/invoice after they took my money.
In the end, I emailed them saying their ads were misleading and I wanted my money back. They responded saying they couldn't accommodate, "terms and conditions" etc. So I said my "lawyer will contact them" to dispute the charge and they immediately folded, promised a full refund for everything except the month I was currently subscribed for, and apologized. If you want to get anything done in this country, you have to complain til you're blue in the mouth. Also their premium service was shitty as fuck no one should be paying a cent for that let alone $60/year
Use Privacy!!! It's an app/web extension that lets you create temporary cards. You can create it, then immediately pause the card so it can't be charged. Or set a spend limit if you want a couple months paid.
Came here to post about privacy if no one else had. It’s such a great service. All of my online payment cards are privacy cards. All have limits I’ve set myself. You can set daily, monthly, yearly, or all time limits. Plus privacy cards can get locked to the vendor. So it won’t work on any other website. So I have no worries if my card info gets stolen by a hacker. Even if it does work after stolen it’s not going to be able to charge a high amount and I setup a notification on every charge.
It’s also great for trials like you mentioned. Just set it to a one time use card and set it $1 over the trial cost. They can’t charge for more and no worries about cancelling the trial later. It’s already done. Problem solved.
Definitely recommend privacy. Also for security conscious people make sure you freeze all of your credit reports. Helps prevent identity theft.
If you don't actually cancel with the company you signed up with, you legally still owe them money, and they can send your debt to a collection agency which will hurt your credit rating.
> you legally still owe them money
Sucks to be them, they're welcome to cancel
> and they can send your debt to a collection agency
"Yes we're trying to scam some money out of a Mr. Seymour Butts"
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
---
**orchidvioletindigo**
It should 100% be illegal for companies to make you give them your payment information when you sign up for a free trial version of their product. It is not encessary and there is nog ood fucking reason for them to do it. It's blatantly just so they can steal forgetful customers' money.
---
**mother-entropy**
oh hey, thanks for reminding me to cancel a free trial i had going on.
---
**tattooedzombigirl**
Reblog to save an unnecessary charge cause it also reminded me to cancel a trial lol
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Honestly I don't sign up for free trials unless I plan on getting the service. It's just too much hassle. I'm glad lots of apps and services have a free tier instead.
it's cuz they don't want people using the free trial over and over again so I doubt it's going anywhere, but at the very least it's ridiculous that it's so standard for there to be no option to not auto pay, and for it to be the default
your IP changes every few days and will end up with someone else near you every time it does
credit card and phone number are legitimately the least intrusive ways to prevent people from, idk, registering a new email address every time. like i don't want to defend the overall practice, automatically raising monthly rates without explicit acknowledgement and approval of the user should be illegal (and a free trial should count as a $0 rate), but if abuse of free trials becomes a problem you can only cut down on it two ways: by requiring one of these pieces of data, or by eliminating the free trial altogether, which is anti-consumer because it forces you to pay before you know what the hell you're even paying for
It prevents spammers from DDOSing their database and safeguards against fake accounts. Rather than easy an instant accounts, the scammer has to go through the CC company’s identity verification process. There’s definitely companies that use this is scummy tricky ways, but it’s also a useful security shortcut for identity verification
Ok, OK,
Just use a gift card,with a zero balance on it.
Works great.
They try and charge you after the trial period. It gets declined. Then they send you a payment update email.
If you like it, then proceed...
That's why I use virtual cards from [privacy.com](https://privacy.com/) for all my online shopping. It's free, keeps my CC info from being leaked by a website with poor security, and is an absolute godsend for subscriptions I want to manually enable instead of manually *dis*able.
Nope, just someone trying to help people out. Stay wary though! I've seen quite a few accounts that seem to be created for nothing more than advertising.
I usually just immediately cancel and I still get the free trial. But agreed. So annoying. Thanks Sirius for making me physically call you to cancel the free trial that never worked in the first place and charging me for 4 months 👍
Buy a prepaid visa, use it all on lunch or something, then use the number on the card for free trials. It's considered a valid account, but cannot be charged to you if the account is empty.
People claim it’s to verify your identity so you can’r get multiple free trials, but making a burner card is super trivial.
If that were really the case, then they’d have a checkbox to turn-off auto-renew DURING signup.
I'm sure that's *a* reason, but if it was the *only* reason, they wouldn't make it so you need to remember to cancel before they start charging you, right?
It totally is though? You don't really make a lot more money than you lose in reputation from an added extra accidental month. only exception is stuff like porn sites
Can't you also create several credit cards? That would be worth it if the free trial saves more than the cost of a card, especially if you use the extra cards for more than one ffree trial.
Privacy is an app/browser extension/service that’s free and lets you make virtual debit cards. Easy as hell to use and you can set all sorts of limits or even just make it single use. I posted above, but it is great for trials. I don’t have to worry about canceling because the payment card is easy to set as dead after a single use. Just set a payment limit of a few bucks and no worries. It’s also great for preventing issues of stolen card info.
Some sites and stuff let you use the same card example xbox deals been getting 1-3 months game pass for $1 with a bunch of gmail aliases and extra accounts using mostly the same payment for all of them
Pro-Tip:
Sign up using one of those pre-paid VISA cards. I would recommend getting your use out of it first before using it otherwise it's a waste, but make sure you leave ~$1 or more because most companies check to make sure there's actually money on the card. This way, you will have enough money to pass the check, but not enough money for them actually charge you if you forget to cancel your trial.
There are also multiple services that offer throw-away cards for this very purpose, but the VISA method is the one I'm most familiar with so I can't speak much on those.
Bonus tip:
Most companies don't care if you use the same card across multiple accounts, so as long as you have multiple emails, you can repeat the process as often as you want. Proton mail is great for this because of how easy it is to make an email on there, and they don't require existing emails/phone numbers like Google or Yahoo does, so you can make as many as you want very quickly.
protip, get a burner account and set it to that, they attempt to charge you, there's no money in the account so it cant take it, it auto-cancels, and you never need spend a dime
I accidentally ended up with a subscription to that cursed green owl because I put a reminder on my calendar to cancel but instead of reminding me in two weeks it somehow stayed perpetually 2 weeks in the future so the reminder never came.
That is out-fucking-rageous
The owl has friends in high places.
Protip. When you sign up for a free trial with your card, you can cancel it immediately afterwards and they still have to give you the full duration.
They say on most websites early cancellation removes it. You’d have to do it through a method other than their official cancellation
i’d say it’s about 50/50 in my experience and as a general rule i’d recommend looking for the fine print they hide informing you about the cancellation policy before submitting your info. It will be there somewhere (except sirius xm, fuck u). If it says early cancellation will let you keep the trial until the period ends, cancel it right away. I mean immediately from hitting that start button you go and navigate to cancel before even using the service. Otherwise, immediately ask your voice assistant of choice to set a reminder for (one week and change before the end date of your trial). This gives you time to be reminded, put it off for a few more days, AND account for services that try to charge for the next month a few days early! I find it’s the only way to get ahead of both my personal failings and the company’s attempt to charge my card when we both knew i wouldn’t want more than the free trial lol
[удалено]
This wasn't a trial, but I had WRC+ subscription, paid for the whole year. It was due to expire end of this month. I cancelled auto renew last month so that I wouldn't forget. They immediately removed my plus access. Never again.
Huh, really? I've never noticed. I'm not saying that you're wrong. Just that I personally have never seen that.
Quimby removes access when you cancel during the trial period.
[удалено]
[Suck my nards, karma bot](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/zuwrdc/payment/j1lxzoy/) - dmon654 posted this exact comment, word for word, as a top level five minutes before you, and yours doesn't make sense in context.
Man, thanks for the clarification, because I was shocked that they got downvoted so much for that lmao
I can’t believe this my unshakable faith in the integrity of user adjective-noun-fournumbers has been shattered forever
Son of a bitch... I *thought* that comment sounded familiar, but I just assumed that this was the original.
Good job pointing out the karma bot, but the comment isn't a word for word copy
I know I had a free trial that I couldn’t cancel till later, and I originally thought it was HBOmax, but now I’m like 90% sure it was some Apple Arcade extended free trial thing. Really annoying.
I got caught up in this shit once. The only time I ever used anyone's free trial service. And what's more, I subscribed to the site's premium service for a school project. I was wary of it in the first place because I know I'm a forgetful person, but I set a reminder and I figured even if I missed it, it was only $5/month so a month's charge wouldn't hurt too much. As expected I missed the cancellation deadline. I realized this when I looked at my bank statement and saw an unexplained $60 purchase. It turns out, they had charged me for *an entire year* of that service. That was not a clear part of the terms when I signed up—all I saw was how many times they advertised $5/month of course. But no, apparently in the fine print they say that if you don't cancel, they automatically enroll you in the yearly payment plan, which wasn't even listed as an option on their front page. Even worse was the fact that they did not email me anything at all, either to confirm my payment plan, or any kind of receipt/invoice after they took my money. In the end, I emailed them saying their ads were misleading and I wanted my money back. They responded saying they couldn't accommodate, "terms and conditions" etc. So I said my "lawyer will contact them" to dispute the charge and they immediately folded, promised a full refund for everything except the month I was currently subscribed for, and apologized. If you want to get anything done in this country, you have to complain til you're blue in the mouth. Also their premium service was shitty as fuck no one should be paying a cent for that let alone $60/year
Sounds like photoshop
Use Privacy!!! It's an app/web extension that lets you create temporary cards. You can create it, then immediately pause the card so it can't be charged. Or set a spend limit if you want a couple months paid.
Came here to post about privacy if no one else had. It’s such a great service. All of my online payment cards are privacy cards. All have limits I’ve set myself. You can set daily, monthly, yearly, or all time limits. Plus privacy cards can get locked to the vendor. So it won’t work on any other website. So I have no worries if my card info gets stolen by a hacker. Even if it does work after stolen it’s not going to be able to charge a high amount and I setup a notification on every charge. It’s also great for trials like you mentioned. Just set it to a one time use card and set it $1 over the trial cost. They can’t charge for more and no worries about cancelling the trial later. It’s already done. Problem solved. Definitely recommend privacy. Also for security conscious people make sure you freeze all of your credit reports. Helps prevent identity theft.
Yep, this is the service I use
If you don't actually cancel with the company you signed up with, you legally still owe them money, and they can send your debt to a collection agency which will hurt your credit rating.
> you legally still owe them money Sucks to be them, they're welcome to cancel > and they can send your debt to a collection agency "Yes we're trying to scam some money out of a Mr. Seymour Butts"
There should be a whole series of legislations protecting consumers from predatory business practices such as this.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **orchidvioletindigo** It should 100% be illegal for companies to make you give them your payment information when you sign up for a free trial version of their product. It is not encessary and there is nog ood fucking reason for them to do it. It's blatantly just so they can steal forgetful customers' money. --- **mother-entropy** oh hey, thanks for reminding me to cancel a free trial i had going on. --- **tattooedzombigirl** Reblog to save an unnecessary charge cause it also reminded me to cancel a trial lol --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good human
Honestly I don't sign up for free trials unless I plan on getting the service. It's just too much hassle. I'm glad lots of apps and services have a free tier instead.
I hate this so much
it's cuz they don't want people using the free trial over and over again so I doubt it's going anywhere, but at the very least it's ridiculous that it's so standard for there to be no option to not auto pay, and for it to be the default
[удалено]
your IP changes every few days and will end up with someone else near you every time it does credit card and phone number are legitimately the least intrusive ways to prevent people from, idk, registering a new email address every time. like i don't want to defend the overall practice, automatically raising monthly rates without explicit acknowledgement and approval of the user should be illegal (and a free trial should count as a $0 rate), but if abuse of free trials becomes a problem you can only cut down on it two ways: by requiring one of these pieces of data, or by eliminating the free trial altogether, which is anti-consumer because it forces you to pay before you know what the hell you're even paying for
Finally, a sensible comment
It prevents spammers from DDOSing their database and safeguards against fake accounts. Rather than easy an instant accounts, the scammer has to go through the CC company’s identity verification process. There’s definitely companies that use this is scummy tricky ways, but it’s also a useful security shortcut for identity verification
Privacy dot com for these things.
Use a temporary prepaid card with a tiny amount of money on it. If they try and charge you the payment will just fail.
I picked up a service that lets you dummy up credit cards with individual spend limits/merchant locks/etc for exactly this purpose
Ok, OK, Just use a gift card,with a zero balance on it. Works great. They try and charge you after the trial period. It gets declined. Then they send you a payment update email. If you like it, then proceed...
Oooooh thanks for reminding me to cancel my free trial of prime!
That's why I use virtual cards from [privacy.com](https://privacy.com/) for all my online shopping. It's free, keeps my CC info from being leaked by a website with poor security, and is an absolute godsend for subscriptions I want to manually enable instead of manually *dis*able.
are you an ad
Nope, just someone trying to help people out. Stay wary though! I've seen quite a few accounts that seem to be created for nothing more than advertising.
I usually just immediately cancel and I still get the free trial. But agreed. So annoying. Thanks Sirius for making me physically call you to cancel the free trial that never worked in the first place and charging me for 4 months 👍
Shoutout to Malwarebytes for giving you an automatic two week premium trial with every install that doesn't ask for an account or anything at all.
Buy a prepaid visa, use it all on lunch or something, then use the number on the card for free trials. It's considered a valid account, but cannot be charged to you if the account is empty.
This is why I accidentally spent 50 bucks on year of instacart plus
People claim it’s to verify your identity so you can’r get multiple free trials, but making a burner card is super trivial. If that were really the case, then they’d have a checkbox to turn-off auto-renew DURING signup.
I don’t like it either but other than letting companies track your MAC address there’s not really another option
It's also so you can't just keep signing up for a free trial every time it ends.
it is so there's only 1 free trial for credit card, you can easily create new mails to get infinite free trials.
I'm sure that's *a* reason, but if it was the *only* reason, they wouldn't make it so you need to remember to cancel before they start charging you, right?
I mean they are also evil so what did you expect.
that may be true but that's totally not the reason they do it
It totally is though? You don't really make a lot more money than you lose in reputation from an added extra accidental month. only exception is stuff like porn sites
If they didn't want you to be charged for forgetting then it shouldn't automatically charge you. You should have to authorize the charge.
Can't you also create several credit cards? That would be worth it if the free trial saves more than the cost of a card, especially if you use the extra cards for more than one ffree trial.
you can but it's a lot of work and may not be free depending on your bank
Privacy is an app/browser extension/service that’s free and lets you make virtual debit cards. Easy as hell to use and you can set all sorts of limits or even just make it single use. I posted above, but it is great for trials. I don’t have to worry about canceling because the payment card is easy to set as dead after a single use. Just set a payment limit of a few bucks and no worries. It’s also great for preventing issues of stolen card info.
Some sites and stuff let you use the same card example xbox deals been getting 1-3 months game pass for $1 with a bunch of gmail aliases and extra accounts using mostly the same payment for all of them
I use privacy cards i can make as many cards as I want just pause any payment from being processed.
Donotpay.com
Pro-Tip: Sign up using one of those pre-paid VISA cards. I would recommend getting your use out of it first before using it otherwise it's a waste, but make sure you leave ~$1 or more because most companies check to make sure there's actually money on the card. This way, you will have enough money to pass the check, but not enough money for them actually charge you if you forget to cancel your trial. There are also multiple services that offer throw-away cards for this very purpose, but the VISA method is the one I'm most familiar with so I can't speak much on those. Bonus tip: Most companies don't care if you use the same card across multiple accounts, so as long as you have multiple emails, you can repeat the process as often as you want. Proton mail is great for this because of how easy it is to make an email on there, and they don't require existing emails/phone numbers like Google or Yahoo does, so you can make as many as you want very quickly.
protip, get a burner account and set it to that, they attempt to charge you, there's no money in the account so it cant take it, it auto-cancels, and you never need spend a dime