[gravitas]

You get up to 200 books at LibraryThing for free, then it's either a $10/yr or $25/once for life. If you're using the service to that degree (>200 books) then you know the value of the service and should be willing to pay a little in return. TANSTAAFL

[caiocaiocaio]

I wouldn't think twice about buying something nice from a store for $25 dollars.

Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.

That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.

[gravitas]

Understood, perhaps my experience will help. I have had an account since 2014 according to their site, and I think I purchased my $25 lifetime in Jan or Feb 2014 (fuzzy memory - might have been cheaper back then? sale?) as I had more than 200 books I wanted to import from Goodreads, that I do remember. (I'm a very lightweight user by book nerd standards, only about 450 books as of today)

I've had no negative fallout from purchasing a subscription, and they have very good privacy controls for those who don't want the social aspect (so you can basically turn off other user interactions in many ways). It's there when I need it, doesn't seem to spam me and I probably paid with Paypal (I use Paypal as a way to not give 3rd parties my CC info, a proxy if you will) like most things.

It may look old school and appear at a glance like it's not maintained, but it's updated and run actively, there are a bajillion people using LibraryThing. Logging in to look at my account, there's a link on the right for the latest news posted today about "The January ER Batch is up! We've got 2,960 copies of 89 titles this month." (early reviewer books) https://www.librarything.com/er/list

[djrogers]

> Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.

I've had incorrect subscription charges on one of my cards, and while it was minorly annoying (a search on the card website, fill out a form, repeat one more time the second month it happened) I can't imagine a scenario where it would be "enormously stressful and difficult".

Your card issuer is required to respond when you report fraudulent charges, and if they don't you need a new bank.

[thiagomgd]

you're assuming that based on your case. Maybe on countries outside US it can be a pain to do that?