Free trials, dark patterns and cancelling things

Subscriptions are not fraud, and some of the tactics around them are engineered by people who know precisely what they are doing. Knowing the pattern makes it much easier to get out.

The patterns

The trial that needs a card. A card is taken for a free trial and billing starts automatically. Legal, common, and it relies on you forgetting.

The reminder that never comes. Some are now required to remind you before a trial converts. Many do not, or send it to a promotional folder.

Cancel by phone only. Sign up in two taps online, cancel by ringing a queue during office hours. Deliberate.

The retention maze. Three screens of offers before the cancel button, with the real one in grey text at the bottom.

The roll-up. A £4.99 thing you forgot, times eleven, for three years.

Finding what you are actually paying for

Most people underestimate this by half.

• Bank app: most now list recurring payments in one place. Look there first.
• Apple: Settings, your name, Subscriptions. Everything bought through the App Store.
• Google Play: Play Store, profile, Payments and subscriptions.
• PayPal: Settings, Payments, Automatic payments. This is where the forgotten ones hide.
• Search your email for "your subscription", "renewal" and "receipt". Uncomfortable reading.

Then check your statement for twelve months, not one. Annual renewals are the expensive ones people miss.

Your rights in the UK

Fourteen days to change your mind on most things bought online, including many subscriptions, from the day the contract starts. If you have started using a digital service you may have agreed to waive this, so read what you clicked.

Continuous payment authority can be cancelled at your bank. You do not need the company's permission. Ring your bank or use the app, and say you are withdrawing the continuous payment authority. They must stop it.

That last one is the lever people do not know they have. A company that makes cancelling difficult can be cut off at the bank.

Cancelling the card payment does not cancel the contract, though. You may still owe money, so cancel properly as well where you can.

Cancelling something awkward

1. Do it in writing if there is any way to. Email or a chat transcript is evidence; a phone call is not. 2. Keep a record — date, time, reference, name. 3. Say it once, plainly. "I am cancelling with effect from today. Please confirm in writing." You do not have to explain, accept an offer, or answer why. 4. If they refuse or stall: complain formally, then take it to the relevant ombudsman. For broadband and mobile that is the communications ombudsman, and they take unfair cancellation seriously. 5. Then withdraw the payment authority at your bank as a backstop.

Before the next free trial

Put a calendar reminder for two days before it converts, at the moment you sign up. Ten seconds, and it is the only thing that reliably works.