[ksdnjweusdnkl21]

It's technically easy to not charge/cancel the user if they haven't used the services. But it's impossible to convince the product and business leads this is the correct thing to do. You will quickly get the "industry standard" response.

It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature since it's filled with dark patterns.

[atticora]

> It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature.

Agree. I loathe subscriptions and avoid them like Covid. But the code I write for the publishing industry is out there day and night, across continents, pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.

It's not like a pacifist writing missile guidance software, but it's sad that this is where the money is.

[IggleSniggle]

You could always work in advertising instead

[yetanother12345]

I'd suggest the GP is indeed working in advertising

   pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.

(but shh... please don't tell)

[IggleSniggle]

This made me literally lol.

Still.

At the end of the day, if you've tried to get paid for a service or product you provide, to some degree you work in advertising.

[jacobkg]

The one service I have that works this way is AT&T mobile International Calling and Data. I pay $10 USD for any day that I use the service outside the US and Canada. It is always “on” so I don’t have to worry about enabling it before trips or canceling it when trips end.

I agree it would be great if more services were like this.

[devilbunny]

This is a tangent, but I would bet that your AT&T service also covers Mexico without the $10/day fee. My wife's does, as does my Verizon. Note: AT&T didn't have a partner in Morocco on the $10/day plan when I was there in 2019, but VZW did. Do check which countries are covered.

[jacobkg]

Ah yes it does. Which I guess is another benefit of this setup. I don’t need to know which countries are included with the base plan as they only charge extra for the countries that aren’t

[jrmg]

That’s an interesting idea. I wonder if, for some services, the outcome for the supplier would be better.

I think I’d be likely to subscribe to more TV services if they only charged me on months I used them. I’d feel I could just let them sit dormant in months they had no shows I wanted to watch, but I think I’d use them without much hesitation when some new show I was interested in became available.

[jader201]

From a consumer standpoint, 100% agree with you.

From a provider standpoint, I’m guessing they would lose more revenue from existing subscribers not using it vs. what they’d gain from new (often dormant) subscribers.

[IggleSniggle]

It's a great model for any younger, relatively unknown provider for this reason. Although, the $9/mo Netflix subscription (I can't remember the actual price point, but it worked out if you watched more than 2 movies in a month) totally beat the pants off the Blockerbuster late fees / missing title fees on a $1/film/day pay-as-you-go model, from a consumer standpoint.

[marcosdumay]

I wonder how many dormant subscribers those services have. I find it hard to believe that they'll have many.

They are not like a gym where it's work to use. Instead, they are exactly the opposite.

[makeitdouble]

This is an interesting idea but would need deeper adjustements on what the user is paying for.

For instance Netflix charges you for the next month you'll be using it. So at the time of charge, it has no idea if you'll use the service within the month or not, thus only the "cancel" part could happen. Moving to a post-usage payment can be done, but it becomes weird when the payment doesn't go through and quickly transforms into an open door for fraudulent activity.

Auto-canceling could be the best option, yet it would be an issue if the user actually expected to use the service the next month. They can still resubscribe again before using it again, but that's an extra step and also means the billing date gets reset, which might not desired by the user depending on how they manage their budget.

Basically, it's looks like a simple enough idea but the devil's in the details and it requires a decent amount of work to come out with something both the service and the user can easily understand and manage efficiently.

[yetanother12345]

Idea: You pay a fixed fee at the start of the month. This is your subscription.

With it comes a right to a certain amount of consumption. Every individual item of consumption will then have a set price.

If you use all, you've paid precisely. If you use more, you'll pay a little extra next month. If you use less, you'll get refunded next month.

This way payment follows consumption, it is transparent, and it can be implemented technically.

[makeitdouble]

Yes, it becomes an in service credit system, which is pretty clear to the user and most of us experencied that at some point.

It becomes messy when you have more credits than you could ever consume, as the service will be reluctant to emit refunds (making them harder to get also pushes the user to consume them instead...yes, dark patterns...), but I think it's a good system.

I personnaly think it works better when it's not auto renewed (so not a subscription), as it engages the user in the ownership of the credit and naturally reduces the refund part. Getting new credits can still be as simple as pressing a button, so friction can be reduced.

[ksdnjweusdnkl21]

>For instance Netflix charges you for the next month you'll be using it.

Yes, and if you didn't use it for the next month you could "freeze" the subscription for the user. Basically as if the user cancelled it on the last day. It should be easy for the user to continue it since the payment method is already setup and authorized. Send an email like "Hey, we noticed you haven't been using our service lately. We went ahead and cancelled your subscription. Welcome back anytime."

For what it's worth my perspective is for a service that is free to use, but subscribers get extra "free" stuff. Basically the purpose of subscription is to get loyal customers who do not use competitors.

[makeitdouble]

Wouldn't that work the same with an email a week before renewal day, saying "Hey, you haven't used the service most of this month, would you like to pause it before renewal kicks in ? We will let you reactivate it with a month free next time when you ask to resume."

That keeps the user in control of the situation, as a service you've been transparent, and you can still issue full refunds to users who come to you after a while explaining they actually wanted to cancel but forgot.

My basic POV in all of this is, the user enters the agreement on their terms, and it's weird to have the service acting cute and unilaterally suspend itself.

As a real world example, it would feel like leasing a car and have the dealer take it back during the night and stop the lease because you didn't drive last month. Sure you could just phone and they bring back the car, but why in the first place ?

[pintxo]

You could just re-pay the subscription fee for unused months?

Even if you’d keep the transactions fees, it would still be quite user friendly.

[BobaFloutist]

I mean we could give them a "free" month as on off ramp, pay exactly the same as we do today but if you don't use it for a full month it gets paused, and that would still be dramatically better for consumers than the status quo.

[makeitdouble]

You seem to be describing something like a credit system ?

It would be weird to get billed for December on a service because you used it a few times in November; that can be explained, but with enough time between the use and the billing it would easily look like a fraudulent charge to the user, and if they decide to cancel it at that time, they'll still be stuck for a full month.

That could make more sense if you're burning through "coins" and need to purchase new ones once you don't have any.

Come to think of it, mobile data billing system would also be close to that, except mobile ISPs can afford to require KYC documents up to a legal ID which drastically reduces the potential for fraud.

[BobaFloutist]

I'm taking about exactly our same system but it pauses (payment for) the service after a full month of no use.

[makeitdouble]

You can't put it as "everything is exactly the same, but I just change the fundamental mechanism"

[BobaFloutist]

Do you feel like you don't understand my intended mechanism? Because that language was solely intended to communicate what I was thinking. Which part was unclear?

[paxys]

Slack does exactly this, but then it makes business sense for both parties because they can tell a company "buy licenses for all your employees, but don't worry we won't charge you if they send less than N messages a month". When dealing with individual consumers the service doesn't really have any incentive not to charge you.

[jonathankoren]

That’s because subscriptions aren’t about providing a product, it’s about creating stable cash flow. Literally every subscription product could be charged on a per item basis, but they don’t because they want to create stable cash flow.

Subscriptions are just the gym membership model, where they hope people forget about it. Or when it comes to SaaS, the ransomware model. (“Those are some fine files you got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to them.”)

[bombela]

Pay per use with a rate lowering proportional to the increase in usage would feel quite fair.

But it seems that a bit of ethic would kill the greedy.

[hn_version_0023]

We’d be better off without the greedy, and this method seems a lot more humane than a literal purge.

[jonhohle]

There’s a sneaky reason to suspend their service if they’re not using it: to capture some revenue by avoiding chargebacks or refunds for the entire idle period. If they fees stop getting charged, past periods are likely not going to be audited and are at less risk of claw back. Obviously, this itself is a dark pattern masquerading as beneficial to customers.