I fucking hate subscription services that start with a free month but still require you to input your credit card information.

"It's just so we can bill you for the following month! You can still cancel the subscription before the following date to not be billed anything."

No, there's no reason why you can't offer a free month WITHOUT having my credit card information. The REAL reason is because you're hoping I'll forget to cancel. Fucking predatory bullshit.

Yep, I like that MeetAlfred doesnt require credit cards

Amazon prime fucked me once,
I even cancelled the subscription and bam - 12 months renewed anyway.

Had to fight to get a 2 days of prorata subscription back since they wanted to keep that too.

@C0D4 Stories like that keep me from using subscription services. It's bad enough credit cards don't have passwords of any kind, but companies actually keeping that data? I don't like it.

I feel it's more secure when used as a debit card, where it needs me to input 1 to 3 additional passwords inside a payment gateway every time I use it.

@nitnip totally agree with that. Credit card data and authorisation tokens should be destroyed when no longer needed.

@C0D4 I remember the last time I implemented a payment gateway for a commercial website, including the database tables and models.

I got to see what data the company would keep. Even when processing the payment through a gateway.

If someone paid using card 1234 5678 9012 3456, the gateway allows the company to keep the last 4 numbers.

The documentation for the payment gateway stated that this was the case "for most clients" which led me to think that some of their clients actually get to keep the entire card number. That's awful.

@nitnip depends on the payment gateway.

Most allow for a masked card where half the card is returned as *****, others allow to keep only last for digits and card type or both, I refuse to keep any of it, however it can be viewed on the processors portal.

The other side of this, is an Auth Token, where they can reuse the card indefinitely without capturing the data again but they don't "usually" store the credit card details on file.

Think pre-orders or subscription payments.

But if it's some homebrew gateway, then there's a high chance they can capture and keep the entire card before passing it onto the processor.

In general people have really shifted away from demanding ownership towards renting. It sucks for me because I want to pay once, but I'm the minority I guess. Companies deliver what people are willing to pay for and the renters are absolutely demolishing the buyers. On iOS when you get a subscription for 1 month you can immediately cancel it right after buying and keep the service for 1 month, so then at least you can't forget to cancel. Kind of absurd that this is what I find myself doing.

The nice thing about the subscription model is that it gives companies an incentive to keep serving you after you paid I guess...

That's why I don't feel bad about taking their free stuff.

"there's no reason why you couldn't offer a free month Without..."

Well, look at it this way:
If a law was passed stating free trials had to be done without cards - most companies would stop doing them entirely.

A big reason this nice feature even exists is that there's an upside for companies.

@jiraTicket still doesn't justify it. They already get to spam my mail account and share it with other spammers. No thanks to giving them my credit card information.

I have a shiny, valid, prepay Visa card …. I think there’s about $0.03 left on it. It works on *most* basic sites for signups ;-) then if I like the service I put the real one in before renewal date. And if I don’t, I cancel. If they don’t accept my cancelling… I believe the term is “bite me”?

Try to use paymaya but yeah I hate that kind of predatory subscription too