I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as!
The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.
It screws over other use cases because it changes the economics of these streaming services. Monthly subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix, account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will break that amortization and the monthly price increases as a result.
If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money. It is of course possible to accommodate everything by adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs for people who don't.
I doubt the ability to look down will go away either, people who lack even this minimal amount of personal responsibility have endless ways of losing money and falling behind those who strive for personal responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for that viewpoint. Instead you got on that bicycle, just like the other person, and doubled down on the Fun At Parties thing. "I don't want to pay more because I practice Personal Responsibility, please bask in my my perceived moral value."
And that makes me think a little more. So after doing that thinking, here's what I realized.
It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and the other person if you have to pay your own freight about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't being subsidized by other people, even. When you are standing on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible manner.
It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context: the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it was edited) because you've already made up your mind about the malicious intent of companies who use this model. The reality is that companies can't know if they're "bleeding people for no services rendered" because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then staying off for a few months is difficult to distinguish from someone who has forgotten about their subscription for a few months.
The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it.
> You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even.
I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.
> People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
> Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly
Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
> People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.
They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.
> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.
But, by that same logic, they should just be charging you by how much you watch. So it's no longer "don't charge them for the month they didn't view" but, instead, "charge them $X/minute watched". If you're going to go with usage based billing, go with usage based billing.
Not signing in to a service you have a subscription to is a pretty clear signal that it is not being used. I'm not aware of any streaming service that automatically pauses a subscription if you don't sign in for a full month.
I strongly disagree, I have media subscriptions right now that I won't sign into for a month or even multiple months but I don't intend on giving it up. This is especially true for niche streaming content where production costs aren't exactly cheap but their niche nature means not everyone is consistently in the mood for that content.
I described the reason in more detail in my previous comments up-thread: because I understand the cost is amortized and it's an intuitive billing system that supports two different watching habits: consistent watching as well as bingeing. Refusing to pay because I binge means prices increase for people who don't binge. Pricing issues like this are really killer for niche streaming sites that I want to support.
I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.
I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.
Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.
All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.
(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)
> Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.
I am actually talking about this here. It sounds like you understood my point but also think this is not what I'm talking about? I'm not saying I underutilize my service, I am actually talking about equivalent usage except concentrated rather than diffuse. When you ask companies to automatically omit fees for months of inactivity, you are punishing users who diffuse their use while rewarding users who concentrate their use.
> I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.
Literally false. Netflix did this because they're not trying to build a business on tricking people who don't want their product. But it's a fairly long period of inactivity because anything less and it's not clear if they actually forgot or not https://about.netflix.com/en/news/helping-members-who-havent...
The problem in question is really a problem with the subscription model that charges you a flat rate regardless of usage. The ostensible selling point is that what you pay does not depend on how much you use, and that you can use as much of a service as you want, such that the price is significantly below what you'd pay if you were using the service maximally. This is similar to dial-up internet in the old days, where you used to be charged per hour, before flat rates became common.
But here's the rub. While it is true that any given person in practice might benefit from such a pricing scheme, it isn't true that everyone could in principle benefit from such a pricing scheme. The model depends intrinsically on uneven and non-maximal usage of the service, which is what the aforementioned subsidizing is doing. For it to work, it requires that a large share of people overpay for the service, where overpaying means paying more than the value of what you receive (by definition, if you don't use a service, then you are overpaying). If everyone were using the service maximally, there would be no difference between paying for how much you use and paying a flat rate, because you can be sure that the service provider would raise prices to cover costs and reap profits.
So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.
So two natural questions to ask are:
1. What could a pay-as-you-go model look like in such cases? Could it cover the expenses of the service? Arguably, no. Those who don't use much would probably continue not to use much. Those who do might reduce consumption, because now you must pay for what you use.
2. Is there a morally sound justification for paying at least a base rate for an unused or underutilized utility to keep it afloat (perhaps charging additionally according to usage)? Putting aside all utilitarian arguments, which I take to be unacceptable, we can find a number of cases that seem to operate similarly that we do not appear to object to. Take the salary, for example. One is not payed strictly according to the value one provides, though you could argue that salary is, ideally, a method of paying for the value provided in a diffuse way (value provided previous year reflected in the following year, esp. bonuses, or upfront payment with expectation of value). So salary doesn't seem quite the same. What about the fact that you can use the service on demand? This is like having a driver who gets payed for being on-call. It seems like this may be a good analogue to begin with to try to grasp the ethical and economic reality of the subscription model in question.
> So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.
Firstly, I wasn't talking about under-utilization, I was comparing equivalent usage but one person watches most of their media consistently week by week while others binge a lot of content in a month and then take a break. They are not subsidizing each other in a normal monthly subscription model, they are just using the service in different patterns. But if the binger only paid for the month he binges, he's paying less but still consuming the same bandwidth.
Secondly, personal responsibility means different things to different people. It's absurd to suggest that if everyone was "personally responsible" they'd all be spending as much time as possible streaming TV shows to maximally utilize their media subscription. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do with health insurance is be as sick as possible so you get the most amount of medical care for your buck. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do in a buffet is to eat as much as humanly possible.
Most people are not hellbent on squeezing the last drop of value out every service, they accept the simplicity of a consistent monthly price so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume. If you want to financially evaluate everything, you can go to a digital or retail store and buy one movie or TV season at a time, that way no one is subsidizing anyone else, but a lot of people think that kind of sucks.
The benefit you get in return is variety. In a buffet, it's easy to try small bites that you would otherwise be hesitant to pay full price for and you don't have to financially regret every bad bite of food.
Yeah, some people get less bang for their buck than others but not everyone is obsessed with coming out ahead.
>so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume
This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.
Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.
I know you're being somewhat flippant with this question, buy I'll bite.
So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.
Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.
Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.
I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.
What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.
"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
It’s asymmetrical. On one side you have the consumer who wants to save $10 by canceling a service they don’t use. On the other side you have highly paid software engineers, data scientists, and product managers who have tens of thousands of dollars riding on meeting their metrics for subscriber retention. For example, Amazon implemented their “Iliad flow” to make it hard to cancel Prime.
I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel.
This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.
This is one asymmetry which can and should be corrected by legal means; markets which require unsubscribing to be as easy as subscribing get a bit more 'healthy' for subscriptions than those that don't.
About every week there is an article on HN about dark patterns. It's always fun to say "personal responsibility" but that tends to neglect quite often there is a billion dollar entity spending vast amounts of time and money in finding ways to screw you over. It is not about the $10 per individual, it's the fact they may be spreading that behavior across a million people or more that makes that company a danger to the public.
> If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.
A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes.
So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?
Of course not. He's saying that the cumulative mental effects of grinding precarity means that beep-boop rational actor theory doesn't survive contact with the pavement.
You can check to see if thousands of customers actually used a subscription service last month in less than one second, and automate it
Why not point this logic to companies and ask them to do this for their customers? Surely you can see the value in saving every one of your customers 10 minutes.
> A monthly financial review doesn't take longer than 10 minutes.
That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.
It’s really not though. Seeing all these comments concerned me a bit. So, I opened up my credit card apps and scrolled through the last six months of transactions to make sure there was nothing unexpected. It took 5 minutes while I was sitting on the toilet. And that 5 minutes normally would’ve been spent browsing instagram or hacker news, so it’s not like it’s 5 minutes that I lost.
You already had the apps installed... already had the passwords loaded... had zero transactions that you had to recall who the vendor was? really?... and you recognized all of your spouse's transactions? and all of your kids?... and you also checked ACH payments?... every ATM withdrawal accounted for?... not concerned with any gradually increasing amounts?... why did you wait 6 months to do this if it's so simple?
I pay through the apps. I have a password manager. There were a couple transactions that took me a couple seconds to recall. I’m single, but this whole thread is about _personal_ responsibility. I would trust my spouse to also keep up with her expenses. I also wouldn’t give my kids credit cards. Cash works fine when it’s needed, that’s what my parents did and I was just fine.
I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.
The point is, not everyone's situation is the same as yours, lots of people have a whole lot more going on. You sound like a tool by insisting that 5 minutes (while taking a shit, no less) is universally sufficient for a comprehensive financial review.
I understand everyone has a different situation. OP literally said that it’s impossible for anyone to review their finances in 10 minutes, and I provided a counterclaim. Additionally, my point was that in this day and age, the majority of people that are able to subscribe to these things have the tools at their disposal to find and cancel the subscriptions while taking a shit. Just hop on your phone, it really is that easy.
You calling me names because you can’t formulate a valid argument does not dispute that fact. It weakens your argument and goes against the nature of this site.
> I opened up my credit card apps and scrolled through the last six months of transactions to make sure there was nothing unexpected. It took 5 minutes while I was sitting on the toilet.
Six months in five minutes? How many transactions? (and did you remember them all?) How many different credit cards? How about your bank statements, other accounts, etc?
I still stand by the statement that 10 minutes is an absurdly small amount of time for a meaningful review of anyone's finances, and find your claim that you did it in 5 minutes very surprising. I would ask you to show me, but not interested in watching you take a dump :)
But then how do they end up with the subscriptions in the first place?
I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.
Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.
Personal responsibility only works if parties are roughly equal in terms if power. This is not the case in corporation-consumer relationships. Corporations can employ hundreds or thousands of people whose sole goal is to employ the forefront of scientific psychological knowledge to design dark patterns to make end users not cancel their subscriptions.
I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.
If personal responsibility requires a roughly even power balance, does that mean we have almost no personal responsibility today?
Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."
> and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are
For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.
These patterns work on adults and are economic inefficiencies whether you subscribe to strict personal accountability or not. Good policy improves individual and social outcomes.
Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible?
What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?
Does this analogy actually explain or clarify anything, or is it just an attempt to raise the stakes for rhetorical effect?
Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.
It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.
Not my intent to claim equivalence. The comparison just shows that it's possible and in fact very reasonable for a company to take some level of responsibility on behalf of their customers. I guess the difference in stakes do factor in somewhat: If car companies can do it when it's life or death and requires tons of R&D and manufacturing, why can't Netflix do it for something as mundane as charging their users that can be done with only software?
Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.
> What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service
Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others.
To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.
> Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.
It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.
I have no idea what you want to say. Is this what you mean when you talk about riding the personal responsibility bicycle, only this time it is the jargon bicycle?
People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you to connect with a representative over chat or phone and having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the product. Almost every subscription I have right now was started with a free trial with a few buttons, but canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+ minute task of sitting somewhere on a computer or on a phone (or worse, both) when it could be EXACTLY as many buttons.
And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it.
The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
I basically only ever sign up for subscriptions that I can cancel from either App Store or through the national system where subscriptions are listed and cancelable in my bank statement these days.
My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.
That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.
> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.
This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.
(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
We have different mental models, that's all. Is that incredible? No, we just have different life experiences that have led us to this point and how we think.
It's a perfectly reasonable point that the company has all the information necessary and has the ability to automate a system which charges you only when you actually use the service, or hell, even just a system that emails you a reminder for not using the service you're paying for (Amazon kind of does this regarding their Music service as part of Prime, and I love them for it, even though I still don't use it). They don't actually have to burden society with the expectation of monitoring subscriptions.
You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).
This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.
The average burden of the 1040 C-EZ is 1 hour 40 minutes.
If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review.
There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data.
However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.
Because with great power should come great responsibility, yet for some reason we allow giant companies who literally study your behaviors to exploit them to get away with charging you for services you didn't use, when it's trivially easy for them to know when you didn't use them.
Do you have a family, with 2-3 adult users of credit cards?
We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends.
I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.
Who cares about responsibility? I want more efficient price signaling. Bringing spending more in line with intent improves price signaling, so, gives us more utility from this whole capitalism thing. Doing this also happens to benefit and strengthen the weakest actors in the economy, and to make them more-confident economic actors.
It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?
[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?
What’s wrong with people who have no legs, can’t they just put their adulting pants and start walking?
Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well.
But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.
If you think that services should start unsubscribing people just in case they have ADHD, that seems a very odd way round to think. They're just businesses. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can know what you want or intend.
They don’t have to unsubscribe automatically, they could refund the money but keep subscription if someone wasn’t even opening their page in like 3 months.
I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely.
But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
> But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.
15 years ago I remember a colleague who'd bought a TV a month earlier get a refund for the difference from Amazon because the TV had recently come down in price. That's great service, don't get me wrong. I just don't think this sort of thing should be expected, particularly when it's not about a price drop you couldn't know about, and it's just not clicking an unsubscribe link.
Thing with returning tv would be more “I did not watch 10 days this month, reimburse these for me.”.
I don’t agree it should go this direction.
If someone did not even open list of movies for whole month or two that is a reasonable question to ask - should they get money back or at least a question via email if they really want any to keep the subscription.
They're not playing dumb, just as a magazine subscription isn't playing dumb by not phoning you up to see if you want every magazine. If you sign up to a subscription, you are saying you want it until it's cancelled. If you just want them one at a time, go buy each one in a shop.
A magazine subscription is entirely different. With online services the company can trivially monitor your usage (and likely already do to sell your data / make UX decisions)
If you use 480 hours of Netflix per month it costs the same as 10 minutes per month. S3 does not allow you to multiply your usage by 3000x with the same charge.
Gym memberships operate the same way. Planet fitness could not operate if all paying members showed up at once. This freeloading behavior that is built into the pricing model is very similar to advertising, philosophically speaking.
The deal they offer is basically unmetered use for subscribers. Why arbitrarily pick 0 for the metering unit? If I watch half as much TV as the average user, why don’t I get a discount?
This would invariably be followed up with a price increase if any meaningful number of customers have months with no use.
The company would have to cover the costs, likely split between some expected decrease in churn and the rest in a price increase.
If the service is willing to afford eating that cost today, why wouldn't they do a price decrease across the board? Surely they'd rather help those who most use their service rather than the minority that pays but doesn't use it.
this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if they still do). they only charge you for employees that have used slack during the month. though I don't know what "use" entails.
Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? Slack was bought by Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise pricing, annual contracts with user counts and “true-ups” (never “true-downs”).
The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.