Getting around autorenew?

Parent Cafe
1

Does anyone have any ideas for how to avoid having subscriptions autorenew? There are many, many online subscriptions I would sign up for if I could choose to subscribe for a single month or year or other fixed period of time but now almost all subscriptions are autorenew.

They purport to allow you to cancel at any time, but for most, you lose the remaining time THAT YOU ALREADY PAID FOR when you cancel. So, if you sign up for a yearly subscription for say, $39 and cancel the next day, you only get ONE DAY for the $39. So you have to keep track of when they are set to autorenew so you can cancel that day if you don’t want to pay for another year. No thanks! And cancelling is a giant headache for many of these services.

Plus, if you sign up through an App purchased thru iTunes, there is not even an easy way to see what you are paying monthly or yearly fees for. I recently found out I had been charged for years for a service that I used only for a couple of days many years ago. The charges were bundled with other iTunes charges so I hadn’t noticed it. I couldn’t even figure out how to see what other autopayments were on my account with a gigantic hassle.

I thought I could use a VISA or American Express branded gift card to get around this (since there would be nothing left on the card at renewal time) but they cannot be used to buy subscriptions that come with an autorenewal feature.

There honestly should be laws requiring NOTIFICATION prior to an autorenew charge posting. It is widespread fraud, in my book. But there have been court challenges that have been lost.

My new policy is NOT to sign up for any subscription that mandates autorenewal. I’ve had to make exceptions, such as for Audible, because I use it so much, evrn though their autorenew policies make me insane.

I would bery much like to sign up for many online newspaper subscriptions, magazine subscriptions, the OED, the NY Times crossword puzzle, etc., but there is simply no way to do it for a fixed period of time, so far as I can tell.

Any thoughts? (Sorry for the rant!)

2

I agree with your rant.

I can’t help but I did call JibJab when it auto renewed to have it cancelled. I expected a fight but they were very nice about it.

3

The few times I’ve purchased something where auto renew was the only option, I immediately entered a reminder task on my calendar so I could discontinue in a timely manner.

4

If you know that you don’t want to autorenew, you might be able to log in and remove your credit card from your account, or change to a fictitious card number. You can use a web site like this - http://www.getcreditcardnumbers.com/ - to generate fake credit cards that will pass a checksums test. (That is, they will validate with whatever code is on the site where you are entering the information, even though of course they would never be approved by a merchant processor).

I agree with you that there really ought to be a law requiring that there should be an emailed advance notice for any auto-renew for an annual subscription. I recently had to puzzle out what I had ordered from Amazon for ~$100 that was showing up on my card-- of course it was my annual Prime renewal. But it would have been nice to have received a reminder notice first.