| Subscription providers will be as shameless as allowed by law. Or worse. I try to cancel subscriptions immidiately after signing up when i only want the service for a limited time. For an Italian newspaper's online subscription, after contacting them for cancellation via web form, my family was informed: you have to call a number and that cancellations will only be accepted 1 day before the end of the subscription. Let me re-state that: you have to remember, one year after signing up, to call that number within a 24 hour window (maybe less, depending on their office hours), reach somebody, and hope for their honesty in confirming the cancellation, because your have no proof that you did so.
Or you are locked in for another year. Luckily, I had used PayPal as subscription payment method, wich has a separate web interface for cancellation.
And also remembered the call after one year, for good measure. But what a disrespect for consumers! Quite surprised this was apparently legal in Italy (we don't live there, it was an educational subscription). |
Did you verify that? Because I wouldn't be surprised if it's not actually legal, but that it's just a "we'll try it and no one fines us if we break the law" type of thing. When I lived in the UK (pre-Brexit) quite a few companies broke EU consumer laws all the time, such as mandatory listing of FULL price up front, but no one really seemed to care enough to actually do something about it so loads of companies (small and large) just did illegal stuff.
From what I can find, EU law isn't super-strong on subscriptions, although most countries do seem to have national laws. For example in Netherlands automatic renewals are only allowed month-by-month after the initial contract period, and you need to be able to unsubscribe with the same communication method that you used to subscribe. Simple common-sense no-brainer stuff, really.