I don’t see any downsides or arbitrariness of this suggestion, I mean, there are some services I will use for one month, and I intend to use it for that month, but it happened before where I would forget to cancel it, and this has happened to other users too, by default, auto-renew should be off, I don’t really know any strong arguments that can go against this point, I mean, auto-renew can be useful, but there are many cases where it could be harmful and even though people do forget it, it might be a tiny bit deceptive in some cases.
It should be law that you cannot have a “free trial” demand payment details before starting
Without that it would be quite easy to abuse the trials, no?
But certainly moving to paid subscription should require an active action from the customer.
how would offering a free trial (eg: not requiring payment) be abusing a free trial?
I believe the theory is that without unique payment information being provided each time, one could simply sign up for a new free trial every time the previous one expired.
In a universe with routine machine fingerprinting and phone apps, i find this a rather dubious argument
It is a good self-serving excuse, not a good argument.
And how about web-based services? Fingerprinting goes only so far. Good for statistics, not good for preventing people from a free trial.
You know you don’t have to even offer free trials, right.
I’m talking about a predatory practice that literally relies on taking advantage of people’s poor memories for profit and you’re all falling over yourselves crying about how if they can’t do that then people might steal from them
Personally I believe free trials are a great idea, and businesses should be able to offer them eithout the risk of losing actual business to it l, while at the same time I believe people should be able to make an informed decision before entering a payment (even more so to a recurring one).
This could be arranged by a simple request from the vendor that confirms you wish to pay or not when the trial ends.
To me this sounds like a perfectly reasonable requirement that doesn’t try to trick either side of the transaction.
I never said it was a good one! I doubt they’d bother if it didn’t make it easier for them to start charging you. Plus, card providers often have virtual card services nowadays anyway, so it probably doesn’t work very well.