Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their account, but still allowed monthly fees to be charged, they were labeled as a “sleeping giant” in the database. Once in this state, they would not be contacted by the site for any reason until they logged in again by their own initiative. The site had determined that, on average, contacting these users had a net-negative effect on retention — i.e., they would be reminded that they were paying for an unused service and cancel.
For those in the chat who react by saying “this should be law!”<p>Laws have unintended consequences.<p>Also I subscribe to a number of services I barely ever use, generally because I got in with an account very early on, and the price I’m paying is usually 1/5 or less of the current retail price. I do not want companies to proactively cancel my service.<p>“Thats Absurd!” You may say... well for about 10 years I kept my original AT&T unthrottled and unlimited plan goong on an iPhone, then iPad, until my credit card expired and the payment lapsed. Of course my account want instantly closed and my grandfathered plan unavailable.<p>Did I use more than 30 GB a month? No. Could i buy that plan again around 2017-2018? Nope. I was happy to secure that for $20/mo.<p>Do I want companies to have more red tape and penalties, such that they proactively shut down accounts from legacy plans? Absolutely not, get off my lawn.
Netflix impressed me recently with how easy they made it for me to cancel my subscription. It means I will have no hesitation to re-subscribe in future, should I feel the urge.<p>I just wonder how long it will last. It sometimes feels like all the big successful consumer companies become accountancy-driven scumbags sooner or later. Fingers crossed Netflix can buck the trend and stay a nice company to deal with.
I always wonder when a company does this if it is completely altruistic or if something else is going on behind the scenes.<p>Maybe notifying customers gets them to reactivate, maybe if they resubscribe later they can charge more, maybe it’s better for financial reporting and projecting subscriber counts.<p>On the other hand it could just be a rare moment of a company doing right by the customer.
A few years back I started to get a $12 charge from Lastpass on my Paypal account. I cancelled my account at Lastpass over 6 years ago so was puzzled why, especially since they don’t offer any sort of $12 service.<p>It took a lot of emails and complaining before Lastpass told me that it was due to me being an Xmarks (bookmark sync service) customer in 2009! Apparently they owned Xmarks briefly. Why the charge started a few years ago they have no idea.<p>Despite repeated attempts to cancel the charge via Lastpass and Paypal it still happens every year. Apparently neither company can stop it - so every year I complain, get the charge refunded and have to swallow the exchange rate fees on my credit card. Maddening and leaves me with zero good will towards either of these companies.
I don’t understand how people leave subscription or renewal charges unchecked in their credit cards. I can understand keeping a subscription unused but still acknowledging and paying for it (for whatever personal reasons), but having a charge in your credit card without knowing what exactly it is or why, sounds a bit strange to me. Could be that I’m not rich enough and I’m still paying attention to every single €/$/£ being charged :-)
It would have been better if they don't collect the charges for a month if you haven't watched even a single thing on Netflix for that month.
It's so funny to see this at the top of HN when right below it I saw this thread:<p>"Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837</a><p>White Pattern? vs. Dark Pattern
If I pay for something, I want to own it. Revocable-access[1] subscription-based services are just a form of rent-seeking, and I'm deeply concerned about how this affects our society. As such, I'm not a direct customer[2] of Netflix and likely never will be.<p>That said, I think it's important to acknowledge when people you disagree with do good stuff--this is how we make sure that our disagreements are based on principles and logic rather than grudges.<p>Of the subscription services out there, it's my impression that Netflix is one of the best. They avoid a lot of dark patterns, and this latest action of not charging customers who don't watch is a very upstanding action, especially since it cuts into their profits in a really direct way.<p>There are still complaints I have about Netflix[3], but the real heart of the issue is that this <i>cannot</i> last forever. There's simply too much counter-incentive for a company to walk away from a revenue stream like this. And with a subscription business model, there's nothing to keep them honest, because Netflix has all the control.<p>[1] This is a term I'm basically inventing on the spot, based on something I've been thinking about lately. Physical print newspapers were subscription based but they weren't revocable-access: you received the newspaper on subscription, but once you received it, you owned it. This differs fundamentally from web-based subscriptions. With web-based subscriptions, if you let your subscription lapse, the site revokes your access to content which you previously had access to.<p>[2] Most people around me have Netflix subscriptions, so I end up watching a lot of Netflix with people, despite not having an account myself.<p>[3] a) Patterns that manipulate dopamine response. b) Glossing over credits so content creators don't get credit. c) Monopolistic practiced with regard to tethering content creation and content distribution together.
It is not just ”altruistic”. The idea is clever: they loose <0.1% inactive users but will win new ones blocked now behind worry ”what if I will not really use it”. Their bet is that the second group could be larger than first, and by order of magnitude. And if not, then it is still not so expensive marketing. I wish ’use only if you really use’ would become norm.
Link to the Netflix blog post: <a href="https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/helping-members-who-havent-been-watching-cancel" rel="nofollow">https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/helping-members-wh...</a>
In the UK at least, Netflix is often used by fraudsters to check stolen credit card numbers. I bet Netflix were fed up with expense of dealing with all the fraudulent transactions. Or if not the expense, Netflix doesn’t want the negative press that they’re profiting from all these unsuspecting victims.
Could this feasibly be law? what are the potential down sides? That is a company has to stop charging for a service if the service isn't used for a specified amount of time, 12 months or so etc. Like a gym couldn't just keep charging you if their records show you never turned up.
I just got an email saying that account was cancelled. For some reason I signed up for a second account, so I could get DVD service, received the DVD and never cancelled. Should probably return the disk... if I can find it.
This is why Netflix is a honest company.
1. Reasonable prices for subscription (when you watch).
2. Does not "charge/steal" from customers.<p>In contrast, I an older article how this one phone company charged an elderly women in rent for a rotary phone.<p>> <a href="https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483100/at-t-charges-elderly-widow--14-000-in--rent--for-rotary-phone.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483100/at-t-charges-e...</a>
> Netflix says it will now start to cancel accounts that have watched nothing in more than a year, but have still been paying subscription fees.<p>> Netflix said less than half a percent of its user-base falls into that category.<p>> Almost 16 million people created accounts in the first three months of the year, nearly double the new sign-ups it saw in the final months of 2019.
It's also a good security practice - their payment, account and other personal data can be offloaded to cold storage. Both harder to damage and harder to take over.
Credit cards only last a few years before theyre expired and replaced. I'd think only very few accounts are unwatched, after 24 months I'd think more than half of CCs would have expired anyway.
It's a really weird problem to have, I've had it in one of my products. Someone signed up and I was super happy to have a paying subscription. The first month or so I could see they hadn't yet made use of the service. No worries, maybe they just hadn't got around to it. Couple more months, still no use, what to do? Could it be fraud, but how does that work? No one gets anything from me, and I get all the money?<p>Do I cancel their subscription? Is that the right thing to do from a customer service perspective? I have no idea. Sending an email that says "Hey, um, did you do this accidentally?" is a bit unprofessional. I tried contacting them to no avail, to see if they needed help setting up to keep it professional but still remind them they have this recurring subscription they might not want. Eventually I ended their subscription and left a professional sounding "We noticed you're not using our service, so we have paused your subscription." email and ended it.<p>I still sometimes wonder if it wasn't a friend or friendly stranger who wanted to support me, and if it was I must sincerely thank them.
Good on them.<p>I spent ~five years with a Netflix subscription that I never watched. I'd joke that I ought to get a Christmas card from them, because I was one of their very best customers.<p>Even now, I'll flip back and forth between paying and not paying, because I only use the service occasionally. I suspect it's less hassle for them to keep people like me on the books than have us fade in and out.
Can we talk about Apple subscriptions please... I understand the desire to make money by Apple but these trials that no one uses and then being charge a hundred quid for a year’s subscription... even if Apple makes a lot of money operating the racket it’s deeply wrong.<p>Well done to Netflix on this I really cannot see an upside apart from the awesome brand loyalty they increased by doing this!
Ha! I have to go cancel my Webfaction account.<p>They're a decent service but they were acquired by GoDaddy (who I think are douchebags) so I stopped using the service. But I have been forgetting to actually cancel it for <i>years</i> now.<p>For a while they were changing me ~$10/month. Nice for them and not painful enough for my lazy ass to jump though whatever hoops they may have set in place to cancel.<p>Then one day I let the balance on the debit card they have on file for me fall to zero, so their auto-debits were failing. Eventually they sent me an email saying that they would stop charging it, but... They will (and do!) try again from time to time. Just to see if it will work.<p>Rather than just cancelling the service (that I haven't touched in at least 4-5 years) they leave my account in a zombie state and periodically attempt to harvest it again.<p>(EXPLETIVE DELETED) cheeky bastards, eh?
For those reading at Netflix, thank you!<p>I worked for a game company and we had a small number of folks who bought lots of games and never activated them. I lobbied management that it was unethical to keep these peoples' money, it was unethical, I was laughed at.<p>Now that that is out of the way, can we talk about parental controls?
They know how to treat their customers. Meanwhile, cancelling a Wall Street Journal subscription online is simply impossible, they have you call their hotline. Unless you're in California, in which case you can cancel online. It's ridiculous and frankly should be illegal.
This is a good move, but still fairly lax (I'd personally like a reminder after as little as 2 months). This difference in preference by users and the top comment with an example of the reversed strategy used by a shady dating site, surface the point that pushing this responsibility to the providers doesn't scale.<p>What we need is good UX for users to manage their various recurring payments, and cancel them by easily blocking payments to specific companies. That's one thing Paypal for instance does right with its "automated payments" dashboard.<p>The current system of customers having to trust companies by default doesn't work in a market where antisocial behaviour is not more heavily punished.
If I have to give out my card details anywhere especially for a subscription based service I look beforehand on how I can cancel it. Companies have no shame in leaving you forget a subscription going on forever. That should be punishable by law.<p>Also my main bank is now Monzo (based in the UK) and there I get a notification on my phone for every transaction I make. I also see a list of all the committed spending for a month which includes all subscription based services I have (some of them I had to mark myself as such because Monzo can't distinguish if they are recurring or not). To be honest I think every mobile bank application should offer this out of the box. It's 2020...
If you send the message that “<i>don’t worry, if you don’t use your account, you won’t be charged</i>”, it has the effect of making people think of Netflix as an account they can just keep forever.<p>My guess is that they put together data internally that showed e.g. 3% of users become dormant for longer than a quarter, while 5% of people cancel their accounts after a quarter or two of low or no usage, due to the feeling of not getting enough value out of it.<p>Imagine being able to reduce those cancellations at little or no cost to the bottom line, and turning it into positive PR.
LPT: each year order a new card.<p>Been doing this for many years. If something that unexpectedly gets charged, I know right away or I just goes away. This way I have to some degree regained control.
I have a DVD and a streaming subscription. I use the DVD fairly often, but the streaming rarely. There’s very little I want to watch available on streaming. I really should cancel.
Misleading title. Here I thought I could be charged by the hour. That would actually make me get netflix, finally.<p>But I don't think it's worth 5 euro or 11 euro a month because I only enjoy a very small portion of media.<p>So far it's easier to pirate.<p>And I'm far too used to the situation where a friend wants to put something on from netflix and it's not available. What's the point of paying 11 euro a month when you're restricted to such a small library?
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #188: "A fool and his money are the best customer". Kudos to Netflix for doing this, but I can entirely understand that they are the exception rather than the rule here. After all, if people don't care about a sum of money they pay monthly without getting anything for it, the only reasonable explanation is that they earn more than enough, so they can probably afford to continue paying it...
Wouldn't a better model be to not charge the user for that month if they haven't watched anything? So you would only pay for months where you actually watched things on Netflix, and you wouldn't find that your account was suddenly deleted.<p>Also, maybe the title should be "Netflix will delete the accounts of customers who never watch", because that describes what Netflix will be doing more accurately.
Those are most likely accounts made for the free 30-day trial
They're <i>very</i> common and they're given away to on social media sites etc.
I cancelled my Netflix account after almost never watching it and now they keep sending me emails to reactivate my subscription for the low low price of 7.99 euro a month. For some reason they think that I want to come back to Netflix to watch shows at standard definition since for 7.99 you can't even get 720p, even though when I was subscribed, I had the 4K plan.
I'm so eager to know how will people start to think of some bundled call phone plans such as a T-Mobile's family plan that I used for a couple of years. The Netflix subscription is offered "for free" with a "1? dollar value" but of course there is no refund if I don't watch it. Oh wait that's how mobile plan always worked.
I remember during the last recession (2008) everyone I knew was going through their credit card statements and removing subscriptions/unneeded charges from their bills. It makes me think that Netflix has the foresight to see this next recession as quite bad and create some good press and become the good guy. Who wants to cancel the good guy??
I subscribed to the NYT crossword app at some point in the past as I used to enjoy doing the puzzle on my commute, but I don't know how to unsubscribe now that I'm working remote.<p>I'm from the UK and pay the sub via Paypal, it's only £4 a month. I'm half tempted to just cancel the payment on Paypal and hope they don't sue me? Can they?
Reading this I kept thinking "What? What? Why would you do this?!"<p>Less than half a percent isn't that much relatively, but those are still many millions.<p>It'd be hard to convince me that they did it because they're nice, they have share holders who are not interested in that stuff.<p>So what could have pressured them to do this? Regulation?
This reminded me to cancel my cable subscription, I only had it for the EPL and F1 and they did not make any concessions for the fact they are not playing live sports. I also put my mobile plan to cheapest possible because where I am (Singapore) I can't really leave my place for past 2 months
If you don't follow you finances and continue to pay Netflix for a year of service without use, I personally don't think they have any obligation to cancel your account. As somebody who has run SaaS services and seen countless baseless e-mails (even worse chargebacks) come in from users who "forgot" to cancel service and then were irate about it, this doesn't help the customer "entitlement" problem I see. Let me explain what I mean in terms of customer "entitlement". A few of my friends will go out of their way to call and complain to companies for mistakes they themselve make, demanding refunds, discounts, reward points, and often they get compensation. As a business owner, this sort of behavior really infuriates me. These types of users are taking advantage of situations because of their own failing, and thus are now blaming the companies expecting something in return.
That is shocking. In my experience, well over 20% of all revenues of an online subscription service can come from stale users who keeping paying but never login anymore. They're gold to the bottom line.
A reasonable strategy would be to stop charging customers who haven't watched in a while, but leave them enrolled as subscribers. If they start watching again, start charging again.
I think this would be a good thing to try -- hopefully it will remove one barrier to subscription the fear that you'll be paying every month whether you use it or not.
Given there is no cancellation nor sign up fee for Netflix I just cancel it every time that I sign up, so I buy a month of access instead of keeping a live subscription
This is absolutely ridiculous. As a profitable company the duty of the company is to make money for the share holders and board members. The customer is a dumb expendable resource to be exploited. Netflix stock price is down because of this. Not only should Netflix not do this, it should charge pregnant women extra because they are watching with an extra person /s
Wow I love atruistic corps. So lovely to see this. [read with a sarcastic Ricky Gervais voice] [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/korFaq7ZxVw?t=1020" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/korFaq7ZxVw?t=1020</a>
Be careful, exactly 10 years after I cancelled my Netflix, Netflix started to charge my card again. I contacted Netflix, but they cannot did anything about it. I ended up having my card issuer to issue a new account number to me.