Bit of a rant here, but I am currently subscribed to a game development related Patreon because I wanted to follow the development of a project that was interesting to me. The reason I covered the name is that the developer is doing a fantastic job with the project, posting regularly and providing interesting and informative posts, but the main advantage of Patreon is simply that he also provides builds which I was interested in checking out.
Patreon rebilled at the beginning of the month and I thought “Fine I guess, but I don’t really want to pay $6 a month to get test builds of this game” and tried to cancel, assuming it would simply not rebill next month, but instead of cancelling rebilling, Patreon says I will immediately lose access to everything I can currently see on Patreon and new posts for this month, even though it billed me for this month literally three days ago.
There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month, but they are clearly hoping I’ll be scared to lose access to what I’ve paid for and will forget about cancelling later in the month, which would be the better time to do it, since I would benefit from access to more posts and development builds. There are a few other subscriptions I’ve used in the past that remove access to everything the instant you cancel, but even Amazon lets me continue free trials of Prime until the end of the trial period when I cancel it.
There are presumably no laws against this, or it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up, but I do think that there should be a law that forces providers of subscription services to allow users to access their subscription for the entire period for which they have paid, regardless of whether they cancel their subscription if no refund is due.
13.7 Cancelled Merchandise/Services
[…]the customer misunderstood or was never clear on the return policy.
That’s not to far off from “paying for a month of service, but receiving only two days”, don’t you think?
It’s hard to tell, because OP states that they did not want to reveal the name of the creator they’re subscribed to, so we don’t know the type of subscription they actually have. Creators on Patreon can set various subscription types, and not all of them are purely time-based. Some of them are on a per-update basis, in which case there isn’t a true “end of billing cycle” state, so cancelling the sub would just simply be an immediate cancellation.
From the 13.7 details page:
Reason code 13.7, however, specifically refers to non-processed credits that were due from a cancelled service (including subscription services) or returned merchandise.
This can be the result of a merchant error. If a cardholder had a valid reason to request a credit, but didn’t receive one, then the merchant is liable for the chargeback. Of course, it’s also possible that this could be a case of friendly fraud.
So if we assume that the creator is on a time-based subscription model, OP would be entitled to a prorated refund, which Patreon would automatically process upon cancellation, and OP could then feasibly issue a chargeback if Patreon fails to process that prorated refund. But if it’s a per-update model, then OP is not necessarily entitled to any refund at all, and a chargeback would be invalid, and thus fraudulent in and of itself.
I only knew about the time-based subscription and have never encountered a per-update or other subscription. In this case, patreons text is more clear (at least why it is worded like this), but hard to tell, how they handle it.
What I would expect:
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Time-based - I get access until the end of my current billing cycle.
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Per-Post - I might still get access to all posts, that I “bought”, but only those
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Other types - depends
Judging from the wording in OP’s screenshot, they’d be getting a prorated refund since it seems like they don’t allow you to ride out the end of your time-based subscription and instead do an immediate cancellation. I believe that’s still largely up to the creator’s discretion, though.
EDIT: Misread the color code in Kbin, thought you were OP. Changed pronouns.
