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.
There are presumably no laws against this
For the United States, that is correct. It is up to each business to dictate how this works.
it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up
Yes it was. Patreon’s Terms of Use
You may cancel your free trial or recurring payments at any time, as described above. For monthly and annual memberships, canceling or lowering the tier support of your membership will impact your next recurring charge
Canceling your membership or lowering the tier support below the applicable threshold may result in your loss of access to membership subscription benefits, including a creator’s patron-only posts and other benefits. You may also lose access to offerings you’ve purchased and membership subscription benefits
There are two things being discussed here. The service and the payment. The first statement indicates that a change between you and Patreon on terms will affect the payment on the next cycle, so if you were billed monthly on the next month. But a change between you two will affect the service immediately.
There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month
There is a distinct possibility that they actually cannot do this because they’ve never asked their programming team to write such a thing in their payment processing. Can their programming team write such a thing? Oh absolutely. But if they’ve not actually written such a thing, then they cannot technically do it because it just simply does not exist. I written software for some time now, and this kind of technical, has actually happened to me where the dev team asked if such should be programmed and higher up indicated specifically that such SHOULD NOT be written for pretty much the reason that it thus prevents such from ever being a possibility to be offered to customers. So just FYI, their software might not be able to do this by purposeful omission of such. It would not be the first company to have done this.
I think this kind of practice is shit. And the “free but if you don’t cancel becomes a monthly subscription” kind of stuff the FTC is looking to add to their list of dark business patterns. I won’t bore you with details but the FTC is pretty hit and miss with their regulations and Congress is constantly in a back and forth of giving it super charged powers and making it toothless. So companies that can, usually litigate the FTC until a new President or Congressional composition comes into play that will pull back the FTC.
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
You know what’s really crazy is in other industries, things like pro-rated and payment terms must match service terms, all of that is required under law. I’m in an industry now that has such regulations and boy if the law didn’t require it, they sure as shit wouldn’t do it. There’s nothing stopping these same tried and tested laws from applying to online services, outside of lobbyist “asking” Congress and State Assemblies to not do such. So I agree with you there, this kind of pattern in online services is shit. But they are absolutely legally allowed to do this kind of bullshit.
Can their programming team write such a thing? Oh absolutely. But if they’ve not actually written such a thing, then they cannot technically do it because it just simply does not exist.
Frankly, whether the code is written or not is irrelevant to whether or not Patreon could do it on a technical level. Not having the code written =/= it can’t be done, and saying it like this is just pointless pedantry. You knew what they meant.
Just want to point out that there’s no way for you to know there isn’t a technical reason they can’t achieve something.
I’m running into a lot of that with Shopify. Lots of dumb things they should support that even app devs can’t do.
For example, do you want to buy a membership but have a b2b account type? Nope. You as the customer don’t even know if you have that.
Another example - do you want to sell someone a membership over the phone? Nope. Must do it on the website only. Seems like something that wouldn’t be true, but it is. Tech isn’t perfect and can be very expensive to customize.
That said, sounds like you’ll be ok based on the comments here 😀
You are correct. It would explain the issue and I too know for a fact that this is a problem of the internet these days.
It sounds counterintuitive, but website and shop sites also run on what are basically oligopolies or monopolies on the software side. Rarely someone builds a site from the ground up for all the reasons. At the same time it is a huge problem the software most sites run on is in the hands of relatively few (and one the rest of the internet has as well). Most people are just not aware of this.
No idea who or why anyone would downvote you.
They downvote because they don’t work in this world and don’t understand tech stack compatibilities and how these ecosystems like Shopify limit businesses more than anything.
Just for your information: I only dabble in tech as a hobby and am by all accounts an utter noob.
But you can find these things out with a simple search in under a minute. That is the akward reality about you being downvoted. Not that a gazillion downvotes would matter on lemmy ever anyway.
Some companies like amazon intentionally do this for the exact reason to scare people and hope they forget to cancel.
Subscriptions as a system are fine, why and how you implement them tells you a lot about the company you are dealing with.
BUT: As mentioned in other posts, it might just be a technical issue due to bad software design/choice OR it might be a setting you can pick as the owner of the patreon, because for some types of patreons it would make a difference if it ends immediately or at the end of the period OR bad wording. Not pitchfork time quite yet.
Please keep us updated, OP.
I sign up for Patreons, watch/pay for them for awhile, and cancel several times a year.
In all cases so far, membership benefits have persisted until the end of the billing period.
Maybe the updated TOS language was to cover a future where that doesn’t happen, or it was written by somebody who doesn’t understand how the service actually works.
Have you thought of not canceling but simply removing your payment method?
I’m my experience a lot of these scammy companies won’t let you remove the payment source without cancelling.
Try some virtual cc services that you can use for each service and cancel when you don’t need it. And check with your bank as well, they might provide that service as well.
Yeah https://privacy.com is pretty good for that
Privacy.com. Use a virtual cc for this service. Then stop pitting money on it or flat out cancel the virtual cc.
I thought patreon subs were post-billed, meaning your payment is for last months usage. Check your settings to confirm.
That would only make sense if you were able to get a month of access without paying. Because they charge you upfront before allowing access, they can’t really argue that it is post-billed.
