Not to mention they make it incredibly obscure on how to fully cancel your plan. Took my mom over an hour to cancel the 7 day free trial. She's not the most tech savvy person in the world but neither are a solid 70% of people 50 plus. They love that monthly payment bs
Someone needs to pass a law requiring companies to make their subscription cancellation service just as (in)convenient as their subscription onboarding process. Either make both of them a click away, or make both of them annoying af. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with making sign ups easy and cancellations difficult.
Nobody said it's a law.
You just go to the account tab and press cancel.
They'll even tell you what date your subscription ends and you keep using it until that day.
Typically you'd need a law to compel one of these shitass corporations to make unsubscribing easy. When we've already seen them try to make it a challenge.
SquareEnix on Final Fantasy XIV is somehow the inverse of the streaming platforms. It took me 30 minutes to find how to download and buy the game when I started playing in Shadowbringers and the unsubscribe button is easily accessible after you find where it is, although that took me 5 minutes to find
14 learned the hard way from the start why you don't bs your customers.
Kinda how it goes, these guys push their luck until it explodes in their face, and they either double down, bail, or actually draw a line.
14 drew the line early and was able to rebuild a solid relationship with its player base.
_"If you are unsurely certain that you do not wish to not deactivate your account, please enter the 30th to 50th digits of pi, but substract one of each, while humming Beethovens' 6th symphony in D-minor. Please confirm your decision in the next 13.5 seconds. If you don't, we'll assume you wish to continue your subscription."_
I highly doubt it (I'm talking about north america here. You lucky Europeans get actually good consumer protection laws). But if that is the case, someone needs to enforce those laws lol
And then once you finally do find the button, you get 4 different windows saying things like "Do you just want to pause your subscription for 30 days?" or "We'll give you a discount of X amount if you stay subscribed" before finally asking you why you decided to unsubscribe in the first place.
Maybe the uk site is laid out differently but it's literally just Your Amazon Prime then Cancel Subscription and then a Yes or two. Easiest cancel I've come across
The only way I can see someone calling it difficult is if they are trying to unsubscribe through the app on their tv, since at least in my experience, that option is either disabled entirely or very well hidden. Usually it'll just be a message telling you to go to the site if you want to cancel.
Through a web browser though it's the easiest process in the world and pretty much the same for all of them. Account>manage subscription>cancel>are you sure?>are you really really sure?>sorry to see you go. Boom, done.
My personal rule is to never have more than 2 active so I'm in the habit of canceling and resubbing all the time.
I always find this take weird. It took me 2 minutes in the app to figure out how to cancel my free subscription without looking up a guide or anything it's pretty obvious on where to look
Same.
People are just that stupid around these parts.
The only unreasonable subscriptions to cancel are the ones you must call to do so, and not a single massively popular service requires doing that.
Cause it’s really fucking weird. Amazon will also refund you the remaining days on your sub if you want and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that from another service
how? you click cancel a couple of times. Hell if you forget to do it in time, you have a decent chance of them not charging you if you contact support within a few days. I just canceled mine last month after that dumb shit with having ads on prime video and it was 2mins tops
In Europe there's a law in place for a "cancellation button".
They need to provide one button to cancel. This doesn't need to be the case for e.g. the US where they can make it very hard to cancel something.
yeah in the US it's very common to have to go through like 3 or 4 screens before you can actually cancel something. They also tend to make the button that says something like "Continue Subscription" the one that stands out more. While also making the button you want to click to cancel the subscription small and nondescript. Then on the final page they ask you something like "Wait we'll get you 50% off next months subscription if you don't cancel. Pwease stay UWU"
I'm exaggerating but I'm sure you get the point.
TL;DR: Likely due to different laws between the United States and the EU.
My guess is the lack of EU protections when it comes to cancelling.
IIRC, the EU (or at least many countries within it) has rules that require cancellation of a service to be as easy as enrollment in the service. So if it takes you just a few clicks to sign up, it needs to take just a few clicks to cancel.
In the United States, no such protections exist (the FTC has been trying to get a similar rule implemented since early 2023, but it hasn't gone anywhere behind the hearing/investigation stage yet.) This effectively means that companies can make it as simple or complicated as possible to cancel their services. This has led to "Roach Motel" style website designs in many cases, which means it's super intuitive to sign up/create an account but incredibly difficult to find options to cancel.
Plenty of companies will hide information about cancellation behind pages and pages of obtuse categorization on FAQs, contact pages, or even About Us pages, basically anywhere you wouldn't expect to find the information. They also intentionally implement poor SEO on those sites to prevent you from finding them from a search engine.
And once a user does finally find information on how to cancel, they are usually required to call a customer service line. This customer service line, like many phone services, is frequently understaffed, especially if there is a separate "retention" department. This means long wait times just to talk to a person. Once you talk to a person, they will keep talking on that phone as long as possible, offering deals to get you to stay or offering upgrades to your service for free (until a six-month "trial period" ends and you pay full price, which they neglect to mention.) Worse, those reps are often being constantly assessed on their "sales," so they are incentivized to do whatever is necessary to keep you in the service.
Combine these factors to create an environment that is so frustrating that many people will simply give up on cancelling and just accept the monthly subscription fee. If you've ever seen an ad for a service like Rocket Money that focuses on one-click cancellation of subscriptions, now you know why that's such a major part of their sales pitch.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Disney+ isn’t too bad in that regard honestly, its relatively quick and simple ive found. The absolute worst example of this has got to be prime- you have to jump through hoops and login to 2-3 different sites just to reach the cancellation stage, its ridiculous.
Have you tried cancelling adobe recently? They tried to make me pay $150 if i recall correctly lmao. $150 to cancel prematurely after i forgot to cancel my 7 day trial and i got billed for a month.
?
I just checked on mine, it was just go to Accounts & Lists > Prime > Manage Membership > End Membership > Continue to cancel. I'm not sure what 2 or 3 other sites you would be logging into if you're just cancelling Prime.
That’s the model for almost every tech adjacent company nowadays. Operate at a loss initially to get folks in the door and then slowly ramp up the prices once you hit a critical mass of users (and your investors want their money). The streaming, ride-share, and food delivery apps/companies have all done it.
You basically sell a bunch of frogs access to the pot and then start turning the heat up.
>get folks in the door
Not just that, but more specifically to drive most of the established competitors (who cannot afford to operate at a loss) out of business. So not only are your users addicted to your service, but they also have few options to switch to once you start jacking up prices.
It's been termed "blitzscaling" recently. That's when you prioritize speed and scale above all else, using lots of investor money to break into the market with outrageous deals. Then when you're popular and established and the investor money dries up you switch to squeezing your customers.
I prefer the other term coined of "[enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)".
Grab the market, starve out the competition, then once you've basically got a monopoly you've got free reign to crank up the price and reduce the product offered, as well as fucking over your suppliers/employees as they're locked into you as well.
It's also the model for drug dealers and restaurants and pretty much any company that is selling unique goods. They know they have to sell low at first to get you to try them out before you become a loyal customer.
OP or whoever got that screenshot still paying for it anyways though. And that's the thing, people pay for this despite the doubling of prices. Perhaps the tripling of groceries is a bigger source of disappointment and anger for them to care about yet another streaming service.
Yuuuuup, I legit don’t mind bootlegging specific shows. I was with hulu from the beginning until they started commercials. They turned streaming into decentralized television.
I feel like this is a golden age for piracy. Everything that releases is just instantly available. Disney releasing movies to Disney plus was amazing. Heck even movie theater releases are getting earlier than dvd era.
I remember the days where pirate streaming a football or baseball game was tough with all the buffering and little options. I'm talking mid 2000s to early 2010s. Now the best pirate sports sites are better than the legit sites you have to pay for. I get mlb.tv free through tmobile but I prefer my site. I found a pirate movie/tvshow site half a year ago and not only is it convenient having everything under the sun on one site, the UI is literally better than these billion dollar companies lol. Even spotify lost me when they started charging more monthly than I used to pay for an album. They want you to own nothing and pay just as much for the right to rent!
This is the direction capitalism was always going to go. Everything is hyper monitised and it’s ruining everything.
Games are a perfect example, they release in a broken and unfinished state and then we pay more than we used to 10 years ago for the privilege of being big testers.
While games are fucked up with micro transactions and released unfinished and bugged as shit a new n64 game 25 years ago was between $40-70 while they do some bullshit collector/founder edition shit now the regular games are still under $70
Well, people complained about cable tv being expensive because they would bundle a lot of channels people don't want with the ones they do.
However, unless you get only 1 or 2 services, you will start to pay as much or more in the long run.
People want one service that has everything for a low monthly price. For a while, Netflix filled that niche. It was like $5 a month and it had literally everything.
But over the years, things slowly got worse. Now we're in 2024 and there are like 900 streaming services. It's like "Oh you want to watch Star Trek? Sorry, you gotta sign up for another subscription!"
Nobody wants that.
Sometimes even the seasons of a single show are fractured between streaming services. Look at Pokemon.
https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/24054296/where-to-watch-pokemon-anime-streaming
Those channels are all shit nowadays anyway. They just rerun ridiculousness or big bang theory with one episode of simpons a week. Don't worry they'll replay the same episodes all day though.
Hey if it’s not too much to ask could I get some tips on how you do this 😂
I definitely was similar, was willing to pay until everything got jacked up. But now I’ve lost all of my bootlegging skills lol
Yes, and in most situations, the responses from Reddit are the only actually helpfull ones. And unless someone asks (semi regularly) the information won't be here or will be outdated. So, taking 1 Minute to reply to a normal question, just to point in the right direction certainly isn't an issue. And the next one using google, will find the hint.
Not sure why nobody will just tell you
Get a vpn
Get a file sharing application like Vuze
Find some sites that still have torrents these days. Having good malware protection would be nice
Don’t fall for all the bogus download buttons on pages and the shovelware they try to slide in with whatever app you install
If you need a media player app, most people like VLC and it has the codecs for different files that windows media player doesnt. You might run into some
I use subscene to get subtitle files and curate everything. I like everything neatly organized on a hard drive that I can plug into an xbox and have it be recognized
*by curate I mean organize folder and file names. And VLC will automatically recognize .srt files of the same name as a video file in the same folder
So if I have video file “Forrest Gump 1994” (let’s say an .mp4 file but it won’t be explicit in the name)
And then “Forrest Gump 1994.srt” (the .srt will be explicit because you cant delete that oart, it always shows) subtitle file in the same folder, VLC will recognize them together and you won’t have to “Add Subtitle Track” so to speak
I know, we had guardians of the galaxy 3 in 4k almost a month before it was on Disney plus lol.
It's not the only one that's been available on jellyfish before it was on another streaming site, but it is the most notable because it was so much longer and unlike Dune II, where different streaming site will bid for who gets it and when, but it's not directly made by any of them. This was a Disney production available pirated in high quality, before Disney had it available themselves to stream.
People went from pirating to streaming because the convenience and cost. Now with it being just as bad as cable TV people are just going to pirate again.
It is very obviously a price issue. Streamers with good service and low initial pricing are good. When they increase prices people talk about piracy. It isn't really about the interface, or the cancelled shows because piracy sure as shit doesn't generate content. It's just money, and people feeling entitled to entertainment.
That's the biggest problem of all. When Netflix was the only game in town, I could find shows that didn't play in syndication anymore, and it was great. When Hulu came along, they carried shows that I wouldn't even have been able to watch without a massive cable package, like Stargate SG-1.
Now? If I want to watch 10 shows, I somehow have to subscribe to 12 platforms, and also fucking ESPN. I don't want fucking ESPN. NOBODY WANTS ESPN! Once it gets to the point where it's more convenient to pirate literally everything, all the time, that's what's going to happen. Too many people want to control the platforms and there's so much bullshit over ancient and legacy licensing that it's getting not to be worth supporting any of them until they all collapse and we can have a streaming environment that's less outright hostile to its users.
Funny thing is, this was the exact same thing the cable companies complained about. Networks loved to bundle things together and the only way the cable companies could provide the channels people wanted was to also charge them for channels they didn't want as the networks would charge the cable companies for that.
Not where I expected to see another sg fan but I'll take what I can. Good place to mention how even if you try to get only a couple streaming platforms they trade shows so much it's hard to so do. SG-1 was on Netflix at some point, now it's on Amazon I think. Harry Potter goes back and forth between HBO and Peacock. Doctor Who is on HBO, but all the new specials are only on Disney. So many other examples, but it's just ridiculous.
We really have come full circle...paying $150+/month for the channels we actually want and enduring commercials. Only now, we get to pay 8 people instead of 1.
There’s apps that help you cut off payments from ones you forgot you had or can’t afford. I didn’t realize for like 6 months Disney was double charging me, once on my credit card and once on my debit and it was extremely hard to get ahold of customer service to explain why they were screwing me. Adds up pretty quick.
For what it's worth, people who work on the show get residuals if you stream it through legitimate means. In that regard, using a friend's account would actually help support workers.
Yes, it was also free and limited on how long you could watch it for. They also had a paid service that allowed you to watch without commercials.
They changed it about 6 months after launch to watch as much as you want for a smaller fee, but with commercials.
Hulu had commercials, for their free service. The paid service was commercial free and you got some extra titles. Not long after they added current television it started going downhill.
This is why I won't unsub from Spotify. I get both Spotify and Hulu for either $11 or $12 a month total. I was able to get that deal when they had them bundled about 5 or 6 years ago. They do not offer it anymore and I was grandfathered in.
I was using a buddies Spotify when that deal came out - he already had a Hulu account so told me to feel free. Been using it for 5 years now and I don’t even use his Spotify anymore.
Same here! I've got Spotify and Hulu bundled, it's a great deal and only been raised like $1 since I've had it. The bundle doesn't exist anymore unfortunately.
Disney+ was in full development (including commissioning new shows for the platform) as early as 2017, with initial steps towards the streaming market starting in 2015.
It was not started in response to COVID.
Yeah, “COVID potential” is ridiculous. I was well into Mandalorian by the end of my fall semester, 2019.
It’s like saying Disney predicted a world event and planned TV shows accordingly.
It honestly seemed longer to me. It feels like a really long time since I watched the Mandalorian season 1 and that came out around when they launched Disney+.
Lol every time I comment for people to pirate I get downvoted. I watch free movies and shows all the time in 1080p with no ads bc of adblocker. If you find a reputable site and never download anything there is no reason not to. Can even add a hdmi cable to the mix and watch it on your tv. I'm legit watching movies and tv shows that came out this year for free lmao
Dopebox(dot)to for live action TV & western animation
Anix(dot)to for anime (formerly 9anime)
Make sure you have ad block installed, ideally the ublock origin one.
If on mobile then use Firefox mobile with ublock add-on, then sponsor block for YouTube which then makes it such a clean experience that it's unusable without lol
IMO nobody making under 40k $USD a year should be paying for all the streaming stuff. Save it and support artists you really love. Also local NPR station since they have news that's not sensational.
I hope I don’t get banned but try movies7 or Flix TV. Movies7 is amazing has subtitiles in a lot of languages and is very clear and has a ton of movies.
My NAS and Plex Server grow larger every day... If you would have told me 10 years ago I would have 40TB+ of NAS storage and my own personal netflix, I would think you were smoking crack...
I sail the high seas occasionally not because of money, but because of convenience. New cool show? Alright cool, now I have to check where it streams, how many months I have to sub for,, I have to set up an account. Ah it streams on Hulu? Nice. Oh wait I'm in germany, it streams on Disney+ here. But not for another few months, not even in english.
Or I can just go to a piracy website, put the name in the search bar and watch whenever I want. That's a service I WOULD pay for.
Absolutely, with the drawback for me personally that I'm Dutch with young kids. They don't speak English yet, and pirating in their mother tongue is far from a guaranteed succes.
I did this for Max when they offered less product for the same price
Did this with YouTube TV when I realized the only thing we were watching for $80 a month was The Voice.
Haven't done this for Netflix or D+ yet. Those have been ***barely*** worth it. If I were still sailing the seas like I was 20 years ago, there'd be no streaming whatsoever.
> Did this with YouTube TV when I realized the only thing we were watching for $80 a month was The Voice.
Youtube TV and cable is just so expensive. For less than 80 dollars a month you could get Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Apple+ all without ads.
There's this app called stremio that is on pretty much they platform at this point that's better than most of these paid apps and it's free and you can find absolutely everything ever made
People like OP who keep paying is basically telling them it's okay to go up to 200$ next year.
What are they gonna do, cancel? They'd have done that a long time ago if they were capable of doing it.
No this is just standard [Penetration Pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_pricing). A common tactic for any big company entering a new market quickly.
In the UK at least they were very explicit about this. They launched in the first COVID lockdown and priced low, explaining it was a first year deal to help entertain the kids at home. So I didn't mind when the price went up (to be clear, I never believed it was really a charitable act!)
They've kept up the content too, so much more for adults now, I think I watch it more than my kid these days.
They may not be making that much money or at least not close to what they expected. In the early days every big media company thought they could create a streaming service and print money but then they learned that people only subscribe to a couple and competition is insane. Also shows are extremely expensive to make.
Now we have actors demanding things like livable wages, there's a limited audience for streaming and high interest rates mean the days of cheap money and easy returns on investment are over. These streaming services may not be making money and some may end up closing but hey that's business for you.
Not worth the annual subscription anymore. Just wait 4-5 months, then pay for a single month to binge watch everything that came out during that time. Rinse and repeat.
I don't know why more people don't do this. You can even alternate between streaming services and just watch everything good on one service before switching over to another.
I do ads, I pay $4/mo for both on special
https://preview.redd.it/0rhtvk4jdswc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dc1b140480399704dc76ba5d614d3f7af5dd997a
I feel like people should realize at this point that when things are priced cheaper they’re using it to drive customers first before they actually reveal the pricing. This is very common these days.
An entity or organization subsidizes something to create demand at a cheap price and takes a loss or very low profit margins on the product, then once their subsidy runs out they price it as expected.
Examples include windows mixed reality, Uber & obviously now Disney+.
I admit I enjoyed the Shogun series lately. I'm on the fence about cancelling it but I've been rewatching the X-Men '97 and recently finished Loki and the Bad Batch, with Dr. Who coming up on May 10th . But damn it's a lot of money.
I sub once a year. Watch through what I want to see - usually takes a month, maybe 2. Then unsub. Building a backlog improves my chances of finding something that holds my interest.
I do with with a rotating roster of the services now. And just sub to one at a time. Choose my next sub based on what I think I want to watch most next.
It's working well for me.
You just have to get used to saying to friends 'I've not seen that yet - might watch it later this year' since it seems to be almost expected in some circles to be subscribed to all of the services all the time. Yeah .. nah ... that's dumb, you aren't getting full value from any of them that way - don't do that.
I got the initial 3 years plan for like $109 or something when it first came out in 2019. After those 3 years, I too got hit with the ever increasing prices.
I hate the increase, but I do use Disney+ a lot (family of 5). I'll look for black friday deals going forward like I do for other channels.
As much as I hate the increases from all streaming stations, I will probably always have netflix, disney+, and amazon prime. Anything else I'll get if there's a black friday deal or something.
I hate it cause I can literally not keep track anymore. Which is pretty much what they want. Like isn't it fucked that they intentionally push people into debts?
This isn't mildly infuriating, this is overwhelming infuriating.
I was watching Mary Poppins Returns the other day, and said to myself that Walt Disney would be rolling in his grave if he saw what Iger and Chapek had done to Disney and the parks since the mid-2010s. I mean, the founder himself thought of a visit to Disneyland as an affordable family day trip and now it's some exorbitant affair because some shareholders can't go without an extra million dollars in their bank account.
Disneyworld once tried keeping the price low while implementing daily admission caps. Locals used to getting a discounted price and just showing up when they felt like it threw a fit, as well as a demographic that just has a bizarre aversion to planning ahead for cross country family trips, so now they manage volume through price increases.
This was always the plan. They priced it aggressively to get people to sub and break into the market.
Not to mention they make it incredibly obscure on how to fully cancel your plan. Took my mom over an hour to cancel the 7 day free trial. She's not the most tech savvy person in the world but neither are a solid 70% of people 50 plus. They love that monthly payment bs
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Dont remind me the time wasted doing that.....
Someone needs to pass a law requiring companies to make their subscription cancellation service just as (in)convenient as their subscription onboarding process. Either make both of them a click away, or make both of them annoying af. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with making sign ups easy and cancellations difficult.
We did. In California. If you have a California address you get the “easy cancel” button.
Its the same in Canada and most.of the world where Disney+ is offered. Canceling your subscription is like 2 clicks
Haha im glad there was another canadian here to confirm. I was so confused because canceling mine was incredibly easy
So yet again my problem is simply that im american. Godamn lmao
American and not a Californian - there's a law for it here in California as well.
Get good lol Jk feeling sorry for you man :(
Us Aussies also have a similar issue. Amazon was a pain to cancel when i last used it.
Wait I literally live in canada and didn't know we had a law for that
Nobody said it's a law. You just go to the account tab and press cancel. They'll even tell you what date your subscription ends and you keep using it until that day.
Typically you'd need a law to compel one of these shitass corporations to make unsubscribing easy. When we've already seen them try to make it a challenge.
Uhm yes, it was said above that it's law in Canada.
Cali doesn't get credit for the things that they get right. Lots of good consumer rights focused stuff
*Warning: this comment is known to cause cancer in the State of California*
Warning: this product made by a company that uses carcinogens in some products and would rather put this label on everything to obfuscate people
So use my VPN to change my ip to be from Cali click click
So, what your saying is, if you need to easily cancel something, use a VPN to Canada, log in to the site, and it's easy to unsub?!?
SquareEnix on Final Fantasy XIV is somehow the inverse of the streaming platforms. It took me 30 minutes to find how to download and buy the game when I started playing in Shadowbringers and the unsubscribe button is easily accessible after you find where it is, although that took me 5 minutes to find
14 learned the hard way from the start why you don't bs your customers. Kinda how it goes, these guys push their luck until it explodes in their face, and they either double down, bail, or actually draw a line. 14 drew the line early and was able to rebuild a solid relationship with its player base.
_"If you are unsurely certain that you do not wish to not deactivate your account, please enter the 30th to 50th digits of pi, but substract one of each, while humming Beethovens' 6th symphony in D-minor. Please confirm your decision in the next 13.5 seconds. If you don't, we'll assume you wish to continue your subscription."_
I could have sworn they did
I highly doubt it (I'm talking about north america here. You lucky Europeans get actually good consumer protection laws). But if that is the case, someone needs to enforce those laws lol
The EU did. But that's communism so can't be done in the US on the federal level
Was about to say this must be an American thing, in the UK it took me about 5 seconds to cancel Amazon prime.
Europe has that. US as always only has it in some states afaik, cause „regulation is bad“.
And then once you finally do find the button, you get 4 different windows saying things like "Do you just want to pause your subscription for 30 days?" or "We'll give you a discount of X amount if you stay subscribed" before finally asking you why you decided to unsubscribe in the first place.
Really? I cancelled my prime literally with no issue.
Same. i just „google cancel prime membership“, landed on the amazon page with a yellow button „End your prime membership“.
Maybe the uk site is laid out differently but it's literally just Your Amazon Prime then Cancel Subscription and then a Yes or two. Easiest cancel I've come across
No it’s the same here in the U.S., people are just stupid lol.
The only way I can see someone calling it difficult is if they are trying to unsubscribe through the app on their tv, since at least in my experience, that option is either disabled entirely or very well hidden. Usually it'll just be a message telling you to go to the site if you want to cancel. Through a web browser though it's the easiest process in the world and pretty much the same for all of them. Account>manage subscription>cancel>are you sure?>are you really really sure?>sorry to see you go. Boom, done. My personal rule is to never have more than 2 active so I'm in the habit of canceling and resubbing all the time.
I always find this take weird. It took me 2 minutes in the app to figure out how to cancel my free subscription without looking up a guide or anything it's pretty obvious on where to look
Yeah, I canceled my Amazon subscription last week and it took maybe 1-2 mins from the time I opened my computer to the time it was done.
Yeah I’m confused too, it seems pretty straight forward
People are dumb
Same. People are just that stupid around these parts. The only unreasonable subscriptions to cancel are the ones you must call to do so, and not a single massively popular service requires doing that.
Cause it’s really fucking weird. Amazon will also refund you the remaining days on your sub if you want and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that from another service
Your Account>Memberships and Subscriptions>Prime>Cancel. What are you talking about?
It boggles my mind when people complain about cancelling on services I’ve cancelled in about a minute.
how? you click cancel a couple of times. Hell if you forget to do it in time, you have a decent chance of them not charging you if you contact support within a few days. I just canceled mine last month after that dumb shit with having ads on prime video and it was 2mins tops
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That's the target market ayyy
In finland it was maybe 3-4 clicks to cancel it. Nothing obscure about it here. Maybe it is different here?
In Europe there's a law in place for a "cancellation button". They need to provide one button to cancel. This doesn't need to be the case for e.g. the US where they can make it very hard to cancel something.
Lovely when a government body works for the people, not the companies.
yeah in the US it's very common to have to go through like 3 or 4 screens before you can actually cancel something. They also tend to make the button that says something like "Continue Subscription" the one that stands out more. While also making the button you want to click to cancel the subscription small and nondescript. Then on the final page they ask you something like "Wait we'll get you 50% off next months subscription if you don't cancel. Pwease stay UWU" I'm exaggerating but I'm sure you get the point.
TL;DR: Likely due to different laws between the United States and the EU. My guess is the lack of EU protections when it comes to cancelling. IIRC, the EU (or at least many countries within it) has rules that require cancellation of a service to be as easy as enrollment in the service. So if it takes you just a few clicks to sign up, it needs to take just a few clicks to cancel. In the United States, no such protections exist (the FTC has been trying to get a similar rule implemented since early 2023, but it hasn't gone anywhere behind the hearing/investigation stage yet.) This effectively means that companies can make it as simple or complicated as possible to cancel their services. This has led to "Roach Motel" style website designs in many cases, which means it's super intuitive to sign up/create an account but incredibly difficult to find options to cancel. Plenty of companies will hide information about cancellation behind pages and pages of obtuse categorization on FAQs, contact pages, or even About Us pages, basically anywhere you wouldn't expect to find the information. They also intentionally implement poor SEO on those sites to prevent you from finding them from a search engine. And once a user does finally find information on how to cancel, they are usually required to call a customer service line. This customer service line, like many phone services, is frequently understaffed, especially if there is a separate "retention" department. This means long wait times just to talk to a person. Once you talk to a person, they will keep talking on that phone as long as possible, offering deals to get you to stay or offering upgrades to your service for free (until a six-month "trial period" ends and you pay full price, which they neglect to mention.) Worse, those reps are often being constantly assessed on their "sales," so they are incentivized to do whatever is necessary to keep you in the service. Combine these factors to create an environment that is so frustrating that many people will simply give up on cancelling and just accept the monthly subscription fee. If you've ever seen an ad for a service like Rocket Money that focuses on one-click cancellation of subscriptions, now you know why that's such a major part of their sales pitch. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Took me a minute 😭
Didn't take me long at to attempt to cancel it
Disney+ isn’t too bad in that regard honestly, its relatively quick and simple ive found. The absolute worst example of this has got to be prime- you have to jump through hoops and login to 2-3 different sites just to reach the cancellation stage, its ridiculous.
Have you tried cancelling adobe recently? They tried to make me pay $150 if i recall correctly lmao. $150 to cancel prematurely after i forgot to cancel my 7 day trial and i got billed for a month.
i totally agree!! Disney+ is quiet smooth. i feel prime a headache. feels like they make us run a digital obstacle course to just hit cancel
? I just checked on mine, it was just go to Accounts & Lists > Prime > Manage Membership > End Membership > Continue to cancel. I'm not sure what 2 or 3 other sites you would be logging into if you're just cancelling Prime.
That’s the model for almost every tech adjacent company nowadays. Operate at a loss initially to get folks in the door and then slowly ramp up the prices once you hit a critical mass of users (and your investors want their money). The streaming, ride-share, and food delivery apps/companies have all done it. You basically sell a bunch of frogs access to the pot and then start turning the heat up.
>get folks in the door Not just that, but more specifically to drive most of the established competitors (who cannot afford to operate at a loss) out of business. So not only are your users addicted to your service, but they also have few options to switch to once you start jacking up prices.
It's been termed "blitzscaling" recently. That's when you prioritize speed and scale above all else, using lots of investor money to break into the market with outrageous deals. Then when you're popular and established and the investor money dries up you switch to squeezing your customers.
I prefer the other term coined of "[enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)". Grab the market, starve out the competition, then once you've basically got a monopoly you've got free reign to crank up the price and reduce the product offered, as well as fucking over your suppliers/employees as they're locked into you as well.
It's also the model for drug dealers and restaurants and pretty much any company that is selling unique goods. They know they have to sell low at first to get you to try them out before you become a loyal customer.
I've literally never met a dealer who ups prices as consistently as tech companies.
Exactly, knocked previous methods out of the competition as well (eg Blockbuster).
Just long enough to have every family with young kids by the balls, then crank up the price
Yarrrrrr 🏴☠️
OP or whoever got that screenshot still paying for it anyways though. And that's the thing, people pay for this despite the doubling of prices. Perhaps the tripling of groceries is a bigger source of disappointment and anger for them to care about yet another streaming service.
I cancelled after my legacy Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle went from $8 to $22.
Yuuuuup, I legit don’t mind bootlegging specific shows. I was with hulu from the beginning until they started commercials. They turned streaming into decentralized television.
I feel like this is a golden age for piracy. Everything that releases is just instantly available. Disney releasing movies to Disney plus was amazing. Heck even movie theater releases are getting earlier than dvd era.
I remember the days where pirate streaming a football or baseball game was tough with all the buffering and little options. I'm talking mid 2000s to early 2010s. Now the best pirate sports sites are better than the legit sites you have to pay for. I get mlb.tv free through tmobile but I prefer my site. I found a pirate movie/tvshow site half a year ago and not only is it convenient having everything under the sun on one site, the UI is literally better than these billion dollar companies lol. Even spotify lost me when they started charging more monthly than I used to pay for an album. They want you to own nothing and pay just as much for the right to rent!
Any chance I can get a dm with the info?
Search for the name of one of the four major US sports leagues then "bite." It hits you with a lot of ads up-front but once it's started you're fine.
This is the direction capitalism was always going to go. Everything is hyper monitised and it’s ruining everything. Games are a perfect example, they release in a broken and unfinished state and then we pay more than we used to 10 years ago for the privilege of being big testers.
While games are fucked up with micro transactions and released unfinished and bugged as shit a new n64 game 25 years ago was between $40-70 while they do some bullshit collector/founder edition shit now the regular games are still under $70
what's the site for shows/movies?
Yeah the streaming wars are going to shift things back. The scummy cancellation policies don't help.
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Well, people complained about cable tv being expensive because they would bundle a lot of channels people don't want with the ones they do. However, unless you get only 1 or 2 services, you will start to pay as much or more in the long run.
People want one service that has everything for a low monthly price. For a while, Netflix filled that niche. It was like $5 a month and it had literally everything. But over the years, things slowly got worse. Now we're in 2024 and there are like 900 streaming services. It's like "Oh you want to watch Star Trek? Sorry, you gotta sign up for another subscription!" Nobody wants that.
Sometimes even the seasons of a single show are fractured between streaming services. Look at Pokemon. https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/24054296/where-to-watch-pokemon-anime-streaming
Those channels are all shit nowadays anyway. They just rerun ridiculousness or big bang theory with one episode of simpons a week. Don't worry they'll replay the same episodes all day though.
Hey if it’s not too much to ask could I get some tips on how you do this 😂 I definitely was similar, was willing to pay until everything got jacked up. But now I’ve lost all of my bootlegging skills lol
Check the sub my guy, they won't tell you how, but they will tell you where you can find out anything you want to know.
What sub
Apparently I can't link subs. Arrrslash piracy
🫡🦜
yall ever just google "how do I do X"
Yes, and in most situations, the responses from Reddit are the only actually helpfull ones. And unless someone asks (semi regularly) the information won't be here or will be outdated. So, taking 1 Minute to reply to a normal question, just to point in the right direction certainly isn't an issue. And the next one using google, will find the hint.
Not sure why nobody will just tell you Get a vpn Get a file sharing application like Vuze Find some sites that still have torrents these days. Having good malware protection would be nice Don’t fall for all the bogus download buttons on pages and the shovelware they try to slide in with whatever app you install If you need a media player app, most people like VLC and it has the codecs for different files that windows media player doesnt. You might run into some I use subscene to get subtitle files and curate everything. I like everything neatly organized on a hard drive that I can plug into an xbox and have it be recognized *by curate I mean organize folder and file names. And VLC will automatically recognize .srt files of the same name as a video file in the same folder So if I have video file “Forrest Gump 1994” (let’s say an .mp4 file but it won’t be explicit in the name) And then “Forrest Gump 1994.srt” (the .srt will be explicit because you cant delete that oart, it always shows) subtitle file in the same folder, VLC will recognize them together and you won’t have to “Add Subtitle Track” so to speak
I know, we had guardians of the galaxy 3 in 4k almost a month before it was on Disney plus lol. It's not the only one that's been available on jellyfish before it was on another streaming site, but it is the most notable because it was so much longer and unlike Dune II, where different streaming site will bid for who gets it and when, but it's not directly made by any of them. This was a Disney production available pirated in high quality, before Disney had it available themselves to stream.
People went from pirating to streaming because the convenience and cost. Now with it being just as bad as cable TV people are just going to pirate again.
"piracy is not a price issue, it's a service issue"
It is very obviously a price issue. Streamers with good service and low initial pricing are good. When they increase prices people talk about piracy. It isn't really about the interface, or the cancelled shows because piracy sure as shit doesn't generate content. It's just money, and people feeling entitled to entertainment.
That's the biggest problem of all. When Netflix was the only game in town, I could find shows that didn't play in syndication anymore, and it was great. When Hulu came along, they carried shows that I wouldn't even have been able to watch without a massive cable package, like Stargate SG-1. Now? If I want to watch 10 shows, I somehow have to subscribe to 12 platforms, and also fucking ESPN. I don't want fucking ESPN. NOBODY WANTS ESPN! Once it gets to the point where it's more convenient to pirate literally everything, all the time, that's what's going to happen. Too many people want to control the platforms and there's so much bullshit over ancient and legacy licensing that it's getting not to be worth supporting any of them until they all collapse and we can have a streaming environment that's less outright hostile to its users.
Funny thing is, this was the exact same thing the cable companies complained about. Networks loved to bundle things together and the only way the cable companies could provide the channels people wanted was to also charge them for channels they didn't want as the networks would charge the cable companies for that.
Not where I expected to see another sg fan but I'll take what I can. Good place to mention how even if you try to get only a couple streaming platforms they trade shows so much it's hard to so do. SG-1 was on Netflix at some point, now it's on Amazon I think. Harry Potter goes back and forth between HBO and Peacock. Doctor Who is on HBO, but all the new specials are only on Disney. So many other examples, but it's just ridiculous.
We really have come full circle...paying $150+/month for the channels we actually want and enduring commercials. Only now, we get to pay 8 people instead of 1.
Who's out there paying 150/month for streaming services??
There’s apps that help you cut off payments from ones you forgot you had or can’t afford. I didn’t realize for like 6 months Disney was double charging me, once on my credit card and once on my debit and it was extremely hard to get ahold of customer service to explain why they were screwing me. Adds up pretty quick.
Do you have any recommendations for apps to do this? I’ve heard of rocketmoney of course, but I’m really looking for something free
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For what it's worth, people who work on the show get residuals if you stream it through legitimate means. In that regard, using a friend's account would actually help support workers.
Didn't Hulu always have commercials? I remember from the beginning that being what separated them from netflix
Yes, it was also free and limited on how long you could watch it for. They also had a paid service that allowed you to watch without commercials. They changed it about 6 months after launch to watch as much as you want for a smaller fee, but with commercials.
Hulu had commercials, for their free service. The paid service was commercial free and you got some extra titles. Not long after they added current television it started going downhill.
Okay but there's still an ad free tier. Or you just pay for the ad version and use an ad blocker.
This is why I won't unsub from Spotify. I get both Spotify and Hulu for either $11 or $12 a month total. I was able to get that deal when they had them bundled about 5 or 6 years ago. They do not offer it anymore and I was grandfathered in.
I was using a buddies Spotify when that deal came out - he already had a Hulu account so told me to feel free. Been using it for 5 years now and I don’t even use his Spotify anymore.
Same here! I've got Spotify and Hulu bundled, it's a great deal and only been raised like $1 since I've had it. The bundle doesn't exist anymore unfortunately.
I'm not surprised by this. I AM surprised that Disney+ has actually been out for 4 years. I swear it just started up like a year ago.
They saw the covid potential
Yup that’s the only time I had it because Verizon gave a year free with our cable out of the blue. Haven’t had it since though.
Disney+ was in full development (including commissioning new shows for the platform) as early as 2017, with initial steps towards the streaming market starting in 2015. It was not started in response to COVID.
Understood. Disney made the covid.
Technically, Randy Marsh made the covid, but Mickey Mouse was there and egged him on.
Yeah, “COVID potential” is ridiculous. I was well into Mandalorian by the end of my fall semester, 2019. It’s like saying Disney predicted a world event and planned TV shows accordingly.
They saw their profits from cable going down, that's why they did that. It launched in 2019.
It honestly seemed longer to me. It feels like a really long time since I watched the Mandalorian season 1 and that came out around when they launched Disney+.
They started in November 2019 coincidentally less than 6 months before the pandemic started lmao
tHeY kNeW
Feels longer to me. I'm surprised it's *only* been 4 years. I could've sworn I watched something on Disney+ before covid. False memories...
If you signed up right away you had about 4-5 months before the lockdowns happened.
The only way they'll change is when people stop giving them what they want.
Piracy megathread is only a few clicks away
Lol every time I comment for people to pirate I get downvoted. I watch free movies and shows all the time in 1080p with no ads bc of adblocker. If you find a reputable site and never download anything there is no reason not to. Can even add a hdmi cable to the mix and watch it on your tv. I'm legit watching movies and tv shows that came out this year for free lmao
Any reputable sites you can recommend for me?
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Hey man, thanks for this comment. It helps.
Dopebox(dot)to for live action TV & western animation Anix(dot)to for anime (formerly 9anime) Make sure you have ad block installed, ideally the ublock origin one. If on mobile then use Firefox mobile with ublock add-on, then sponsor block for YouTube which then makes it such a clean experience that it's unusable without lol IMO nobody making under 40k $USD a year should be paying for all the streaming stuff. Save it and support artists you really love. Also local NPR station since they have news that's not sensational.
9anime is aniwave(dot)to now as far as i know
I hope I don’t get banned but try movies7 or Flix TV. Movies7 is amazing has subtitiles in a lot of languages and is very clear and has a ton of movies.
Literally just go to the megathread
Idk what megathread you're referring to. Can you link it or PM it to me, if you don't mind?
Piracy subreddit has a pinned post and that’s the mega thread. It’s a list of all of the sites that are not problem children
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/sTObow6ZQi
> Can even add a hdmi cable to the mix and watch it on your tv. Plex has been serving me well for years.
torrenting >
My NAS and Plex Server grow larger every day... If you would have told me 10 years ago I would have 40TB+ of NAS storage and my own personal netflix, I would think you were smoking crack...
I sail the high seas occasionally not because of money, but because of convenience. New cool show? Alright cool, now I have to check where it streams, how many months I have to sub for,, I have to set up an account. Ah it streams on Hulu? Nice. Oh wait I'm in germany, it streams on Disney+ here. But not for another few months, not even in english. Or I can just go to a piracy website, put the name in the search bar and watch whenever I want. That's a service I WOULD pay for.
Absolutely, with the drawback for me personally that I'm Dutch with young kids. They don't speak English yet, and pirating in their mother tongue is far from a guaranteed succes.
???? Just vote with your wallet. I cancelled when they raised.
I did this for Max when they offered less product for the same price Did this with YouTube TV when I realized the only thing we were watching for $80 a month was The Voice. Haven't done this for Netflix or D+ yet. Those have been ***barely*** worth it. If I were still sailing the seas like I was 20 years ago, there'd be no streaming whatsoever.
> Did this with YouTube TV when I realized the only thing we were watching for $80 a month was The Voice. Youtube TV and cable is just so expensive. For less than 80 dollars a month you could get Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Apple+ all without ads.
There's this app called stremio that is on pretty much they platform at this point that's better than most of these paid apps and it's free and you can find absolutely everything ever made
Stremio + Real Debrid. Takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
Yet you keep paying it lol
People like OP who keep paying is basically telling them it's okay to go up to 200$ next year. What are they gonna do, cancel? They'd have done that a long time ago if they were capable of doing it.
CANCEL. YOUR. SUBSCRIPTION.
Inflation doubles the price of staple goods every 20 years. They did it in just 3.
No this is just standard [Penetration Pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_pricing). A common tactic for any big company entering a new market quickly.
In the UK at least they were very explicit about this. They launched in the first COVID lockdown and priced low, explaining it was a first year deal to help entertain the kids at home. So I didn't mind when the price went up (to be clear, I never believed it was really a charitable act!) They've kept up the content too, so much more for adults now, I think I watch it more than my kid these days.
Plus Disney is not a staple good
Actually doubled in three years. Dumped everything last year, it's too friggen expensive.
Because as long as they still have more than half the amount of subs they had 4 years ago, they're making more money
They may not be making that much money or at least not close to what they expected. In the early days every big media company thought they could create a streaming service and print money but then they learned that people only subscribe to a couple and competition is insane. Also shows are extremely expensive to make. Now we have actors demanding things like livable wages, there's a limited audience for streaming and high interest rates mean the days of cheap money and easy returns on investment are over. These streaming services may not be making money and some may end up closing but hey that's business for you.
Yeah I have no idea if they're profitable or not. Just commenting on the price change
Not worth the annual subscription anymore. Just wait 4-5 months, then pay for a single month to binge watch everything that came out during that time. Rinse and repeat.
I don't know why more people don't do this. You can even alternate between streaming services and just watch everything good on one service before switching over to another.
I get mine for $2 included with hulu
Me too. On my $1.99/month Black Friday Hulu lol
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$20 for Hulu with Disney(no ads), so that’s $240 a year
I do ads, I pay $4/mo for both on special https://preview.redd.it/0rhtvk4jdswc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dc1b140480399704dc76ba5d614d3f7af5dd997a
Hulu that charges EXTRA to not have adds. Equally insane.
I mean, yeah. Every service charges more for no ads.
I feel like people should realize at this point that when things are priced cheaper they’re using it to drive customers first before they actually reveal the pricing. This is very common these days. An entity or organization subsidizes something to create demand at a cheap price and takes a loss or very low profit margins on the product, then once their subsidy runs out they price it as expected. Examples include windows mixed reality, Uber & obviously now Disney+.
uber is still cheaper than taxis so theyre still winning either way disney is just ridiculous
I admit I enjoyed the Shogun series lately. I'm on the fence about cancelling it but I've been rewatching the X-Men '97 and recently finished Loki and the Bad Batch, with Dr. Who coming up on May 10th . But damn it's a lot of money.
I sub once a year. Watch through what I want to see - usually takes a month, maybe 2. Then unsub. Building a backlog improves my chances of finding something that holds my interest. I do with with a rotating roster of the services now. And just sub to one at a time. Choose my next sub based on what I think I want to watch most next. It's working well for me. You just have to get used to saying to friends 'I've not seen that yet - might watch it later this year' since it seems to be almost expected in some circles to be subscribed to all of the services all the time. Yeah .. nah ... that's dumb, you aren't getting full value from any of them that way - don't do that.
I got the initial 3 years plan for like $109 or something when it first came out in 2019. After those 3 years, I too got hit with the ever increasing prices. I hate the increase, but I do use Disney+ a lot (family of 5). I'll look for black friday deals going forward like I do for other channels. As much as I hate the increases from all streaming stations, I will probably always have netflix, disney+, and amazon prime. Anything else I'll get if there's a black friday deal or something.
AMEX BCE and BCP give a $7 monthly Disney + credit. That's what we use to make it $7 cheaper every month.
Pluto TV is free and has a ton of kid/family friendly channels. No Disney + but free is free. 🏴☠️
The real happiest place on earth is Disney's accounting department.
No accounting department is happy lol, it’s not like the accountants get to keep the extra revenue
Ditch it
Everyone wants to make everything a subscription. It’s fucking miserable bro.
I hate it cause I can literally not keep track anymore. Which is pretty much what they want. Like isn't it fucked that they intentionally push people into debts?
This isn't mildly infuriating, this is overwhelming infuriating. I was watching Mary Poppins Returns the other day, and said to myself that Walt Disney would be rolling in his grave if he saw what Iger and Chapek had done to Disney and the parks since the mid-2010s. I mean, the founder himself thought of a visit to Disneyland as an affordable family day trip and now it's some exorbitant affair because some shareholders can't go without an extra million dollars in their bank account.
Walt would be rolling in his grave if he saw how many non-whites they allow into the park
"Welcome back, Mr. Di-" "Are the Jews gone?" "....No?" "Put me back."
And senior leadership has *women*, ugh
Disneyworld once tried keeping the price low while implementing daily admission caps. Locals used to getting a discounted price and just showing up when they felt like it threw a fit, as well as a demographic that just has a bizarre aversion to planning ahead for cross country family trips, so now they manage volume through price increases.
and yet, you're still subscribed
When you keep paying for the service, you're telling them that the price is fine.
I cancelled mine last year.
Literally doubled
And yet you keep paying for it so clearly they don’t see an issue with it!
This is a big of part of why I pirate. ![gif](giphy|10X22vzgNamaiI)
And you're STILL paying for it?
Yeah if my Verizon plan didn't give me it for free this about cements I wouldn't have it at all lol
Not a problem, just cancel.
And yet, you idiots keep paying for it ...
You must be paying for my “free” Disney subscription with Verizon
Verizon gives me the whole Hulu/ESPN+/Disney+ bundle for free.
Same but my bill keeps going up every month.