Bit of a rant here, but I am currently subscribed to a game development related Patreon because I wanted to follow the development of a project that was interesting to me. The reason I covered the name is that the developer is doing a fantastic job with the project, posting regularly and providing interesting and informative posts, but the main advantage of Patreon is simply that he also provides builds which I was interested in checking out.
Patreon rebilled at the beginning of the month and I thought “Fine I guess, but I don’t really want to pay $6 a month to get test builds of this game” and tried to cancel, assuming it would simply not rebill next month, but instead of cancelling rebilling, Patreon says I will immediately lose access to everything I can currently see on Patreon and new posts for this month, even though it billed me for this month literally three days ago.
There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month, but they are clearly hoping I’ll be scared to lose access to what I’ve paid for and will forget about cancelling later in the month, which would be the better time to do it, since I would benefit from access to more posts and development builds. There are a few other subscriptions I’ve used in the past that remove access to everything the instant you cancel, but even Amazon lets me continue free trials of Prime until the end of the trial period when I cancel it.
There are presumably no laws against this, or it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up, but I do think that there should be a law that forces providers of subscription services to allow users to access their subscription for the entire period for which they have paid, regardless of whether they cancel their subscription if no refund is due.
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Have you thought of not canceling but simply removing your payment method?
I’m my experience a lot of these scammy companies won’t let you remove the payment source without cancelling.
Try some virtual cc services that you can use for each service and cancel when you don’t need it. And check with your bank as well, they might provide that service as well.
Yeah https://privacy.com is pretty good for that
And the scammier the service, the more joy it brings me when they try to charge my dead card a bunch of times.
Pretty sure that is illegal at least in Europe.
Essentially the subscription is you and the business entering into a contractual relationship. The deal is you pay X amount of money and in exchange you get access to a particular service for a particular period of time. Is they are going to bill you in advance that’s their problem, but they still have to provide you access to the service for that period of time since you’ve already paid, or they have to refund you.
It’s like with phone contracts vs just buying a prepaid phone. When you’re on contract you literally have an actual contract to pay off the value of the phone that’s why you get to keep it at the end and that’s why you’re not allowed to just end the contract early because otherwise it would be a cheap way of getting a phone. But you can end a prepaid contract whenever you want because the phone is literally already paid for that’s the prepaid bit - they also tend to include some minutes which confuses things, but what you’re actually paying for is the phone.
If I’m not mistaken, this is a setting that only the patreon user you’re subscribed to can change: whether you’re billed in advance, or billed retrospectively.
One lets you cancel and keep your benefits for the rest of the month, the other will immediately terminate your subscription upon cancellation.
Their terms describes both of these IIRC?
I thought patreon subs were post-billed, meaning your payment is for last months usage. Check your settings to confirm.
That would only make sense if you were able to get a month of access without paying. Because they charge you upfront before allowing access, they can’t really argue that it is post-billed.
My bank lets me do chargebacks in cases like this.
