Amazon did this for me back in 2005 when they introduced Prime. I used the free trial for an order (to get it in two days), but then didn't order anything else and forgot to cancel.
They sent me an email that they weren't going to charge me because I hadn't used it, but I was free to sign up in the future if I decided I wanted it.
It was so refreshing, it made me a lifelong customer.
Amazon definitely doesn't do this now. Amazon sometimes offers me a free Prime trial and they make it fairly clear that if you don't cancel before the conclusion of the trial, they'll automatically subscribe you to Prime and charge you. I'll sometimes take the trial but I always mark my calendar to cancel before the renewal.
Personally, I consider this to be a dark pattern and it makes me reluctant to sign up for any trial or even subscription services in general. I'm glad that Amazon is upfront about it but would prefer that they didn't do this at all.
I'm pretty sure they let you disable auto-renew immediately after signing up.
What's sketchy is that Amazon's Audible deletes all your unused book credits if you unsubscribe. If you don't know what to buy with those credits and you want to unsubscribe, you face the decision to keep buying credits, or lose the credits you already paid for.
Fortunately, there are a couple of workarounds. There's the option to pause your subscription for 3 months, or you can buy a book, cancel the subscription, then return the book to recapture the credit once you find a book you actually want to read.
last i checked, they let me cancel prime effective immediately, not allowing me to continue my year that i purchased. There isn't an option to stop auto renewal.
I was in a similar situation except I didn't use it even for a single order. They kept charging me after the free trial period. After a while I realized this, and cancelled. I reached out to them requesting a refund, at least partial since I haven't used it even once. But they did not refund any.
Their Prime subscription was a pain to cancel in Belgium. I found it on the German site, even though I always use English and there for the English site.
They also use dark patterns for it, unsubscribing is very confusing.
Agreed on the dark pattern and difficulty of cancelling. Today I cancelled my Prime subscription and had to first the cancel button, then I had to click "Cancel my subscription" button three times, which I had to find it along with ambiguous, same color "Keep my subscription and pay" buttons.
On a related note -- Audible free trial seems.. offered cyclically?
I seem to sign up every year or so, spend my credits, and cancel. They keep offering it though, and now I'm considering buying (as I enjoy the medium, turns out), so I suppose it worked.
Prime does that for me too, recently it has changed from free to one-week-for-£1 now though. The great thing is if you forget to cancel at the end of the trial and they charge you, they will refund you if you haven't placed any orders in that billing period.
Shame that corporate responsibility is out the window now then.
You can't do anything on the Amazon store without being goaded into signing up for Prime and having to triple check what you are clicking on during checkout to make sure you don't sign up by mistake.
My wife already has a Netflix subscription despite Amazon's attempts to hook her on Prime (I'll take credit for stopping that). After this this news it seems it was definitely the correct choice.
Early days of EC2 were chock full of stories like this - Of kids / engineers running up their CC bill because they screwed up in some way they didn't anticipate and Amazon CS would bail them out.
I don't think this was a cynical marketing ploy designed from the top down either, it was a very natural thing for the company to be customer obsessed and trying to do right by them.
At the request of an EC2 support staff, I left some machines running to help them debug an issue where machines became unreachable within minutes of being created. I was erroneously charged for this. Throughout the years Amazon has variously said that they could not refund me because they had no records from this time period or offered me AWS credits. I expect to the situation to never be resolved.
> I don't think this was a cynical marketing ploy designed from the top down either, it was a very natural thing for the company to be customer obsessed and trying to do right by them.
It's trying to do right by the legal and finance departments, not by the customers. Going after someone for anything less than a mid to high five figure AWS bill is never worth it because the legal costs are astronomical, the defendant probably can't pay in the end, and the cost of defending will drain the customer of any more resources that could have been spent on the cloud.
It's the cost of doing business. The choice is between trying to bleed a rock or a safe bet that LTV will be higher than the marginal cost.
They sent me an email that they weren't going to charge me because I hadn't used it, but I was free to sign up in the future if I decided I wanted it.
It was so refreshing, it made me a lifelong customer.