[pmontra]

I agree but I don't want that place to be tightly tied with the maker of my phone. I want to be able to change phone and not loose anything. Phones are commodities to me. Who makes them is as important as the brand of gas I put in my car. Browser, mail client, WhatsApp, camera, maps, banking apps are about all I need. The subscription management service should be a third party.

[oblio]

It should actually be a banking service and it should be portable between banks. There should be a banking standard for this.

[pmontra]

Some of them are portable between banks, at least where I live (Italy). Anything I authorize to be paid for automatically (usually periodically) from my bank account can be ported to another bank (utilities, etc.). I give the authorization to the new bank and they do the work because it's in their best interest. I expect this to work in most of the EU and/or the SEPA area because the regulations and the tools are the same.

Handling periodical billings on my credit cards is probably a pain, I'd have to go through all those services and update them. It would be nice if VISA or MasterCard would do that for me. Luckily all those services send me mail when my credit card expires and I get the new one.

[qz2]

This is an excellent point and perhaps the right answer.

Most of these problems exist because the one place we trust to manage our resources never pivoted on these things. In fact most banks are barely crawling out of the dark ages.

[bilbo0s]

But you can have a third party if you want. (Though my personal preference would be NO party. I want total control over it myself with zero privacy leaks. But that likely won't happen.) In any case, the point is that you could buy something other than an Apple phone if that's important to you. I mean why buy a horridly overpriced phone that can't do what you want it to do? I wouldn't buy a Ferrari to haul farming implements around the back roads of Wisconsin.

[theshrike79]

Paypal can be used as a third party, but they're not a bank so it comes with risks.

The other option is to use a different virtual credit card for each subscription and just cancel the number when needed.