[BossingAround]

To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).

[andai]

As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.

[myroon5]

Neither default makes sense for everyone in this case.. better enforcing explicit preference choices

[layer8]

I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.

How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.

[sureIy]

> How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement

Mind-boggling to me that you'd even have to do that. I get instant notifications for all purchases, we're in 2025.

Once they stole my number and 10 minutes later I had already contested the charge, blocked the card and requested a new one.

[squigz]

I feel like the vast, vast majority of businesses that are conducting monetary transactions with their customers are storing, at least, their last login time.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.

I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.

The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.

[zorked]

> The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.

That's fine.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.

[everforward]

This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than the occasional service that has such obvious and widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I struggle to think of examples of those services, where neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including cancelling cards because it was easier).

[hiAndrewQuinn]

>[I]t's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it

You characterize my position exactly right. I only point out there are many options people might not use Netflix for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it.

>Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions

Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.

>like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed,

Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.

> I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass

Well, I sympathize, and I've sometimes paid for subscriptions I didn't end up using too, but such is life. We don't always make the most out of what we pay for. That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.

[everforward]

> Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.

Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.

I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.

> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.

That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).

> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.

The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.

It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.

[bombcar]

By that argument the most customer-friendly action would be to force everyone in the world to subscribe to Netflix.

[stavros]

I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.

[jaza]

Robin Hood and his Merry Men would beg to differ.

[carlosjobim]

If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?