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Their "shrink rate" is low. Members are less likely to steal.

Recently cancelled something early so I won’t forget, they didn’t send my shipment even though I paid for it. They said I cancelled, tried to work with support but given after a point.

So yeah, not all companies do that.

Some don't treat months as discrete units. Uber revokes your membership immediately.

I currently do this with language models subscriptions.

When I actually use a service, it's more work to resubscribe. But money is also tight enough for me that I'm on top of my subscriptions and don't have any I don't need (and when I'm unsure, I set reminders to cancel)

This is indeed my standard practice. In my head, I just tell myself "I'm buying a month."

Because for some subscriptions the price goes up.

The core value for most subscription services is their convenience. There's usually another less convenient way to get the same thing cheaper or free.

Most people are literally paying so they don't have to set all that shit up again and the cost is trivial to them.

If that's not you, fine, but my point is that nobody is "right" about this topic. Services exist because they make money.

I saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.

Over here in The Netherlands, with a bit of hacking, sailing the seas and maxing out Revolut virtual cards I managed to trip my subscriptions down to ChatGPT, rent and a phone (only 2.5 Euro/month). Currently thinking of the ways of pushing this down even further by living in an anti-squat. Hacking is the only pathway to inner independence.

same. It's brilliant and I pay them nothing.

I tell friends and family about it all the time, but I can't seem to convince anyone to use for it every subscription like I do.

This is good advice for email/newsletter subscriptions, but that isn't what the article is about.

Highly recommend this, I no longer need any spam filtering following this approach.

My old Gmail would be loaded with spam and the filter would screw up and mislabel legitimate mail. Now, no spam at all.

It also helps when your email is involved in a data breach which is becoming the norm now.

Although be prepared for awkward in person interactions when a business wants your email. Everything from "no, your email silly not mine" to "I own this business name you can't have it in your email address"

It's def good advice.

I've been doing something similar with Firefox relay to have proxy emails that I can regenerate if needed, it worked well but not for every site. Recently I've been testing SimpleLogin and it worked every time, it's by Proton.

You obviously didn't read the article at all since it's about paying for subscriptions.

It's the most HN technology there is: "Has technology caused problems in your life? Well good news, this additional technology sits at the top layer to protect you from the prior technology."

Especially when one considers how friggin difficult this service makes it to cancel a (paid) subscription.

Agreed, I have a few hundred subscriptions and now use PocketTube to manage them into categories but I should probably cull a lot of them. It's a shame as many channels make some great one-off videos and I subscribe for hoping for the next one but it seems like they never come.

I never saw the point of subscribing. The home page will show you videos from channels you've watched whether or not you've subscribed.

I'm pretty sure you can harm your credit and have the debt get sent to collections by doing this, at least it's common for gym subscribers not paying their fees.

I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.

But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.