Fuck Subscriptions

Have you thought of not canceling but simply removing your payment method?

Pretty sure that is illegal at least in Europe.

Essentially the subscription is you and the business entering into a contractual relationship. The deal is you pay X amount of money and in exchange you get access to a particular service for a particular period of time. Is they are going to bill you in advance that's their problem, but they still have to provide you access to the service for that period of time since you've already paid, or they have to refund you.

It's like with phone contracts vs just buying a prepaid phone. When you're on contract you literally have an actual contract to pay off the value of the phone that's why you get to keep it at the end and that's why you're not allowed to just end the contract early because otherwise it would be a cheap way of getting a phone. But you can end a prepaid contract whenever you want because the phone is literally already paid for that's the prepaid bit - they also tend to include some minutes which confuses things, but what you're actually paying for is the phone.

I'm in Australia and just went to cancel a patreon subscription and it said that I will lose access to all benefits at the start of the next month, Dec 1st. US only thing maybe?

If I'm not mistaken, this is a setting that only the patreon user you're subscribed to can change: whether you're billed in advance, or billed retrospectively.

One lets you cancel and keep your benefits for the rest of the month, the other will immediately terminate your subscription upon cancellation.

Their terms describes both of these IIRC?

I thought patreon subs were post-billed, meaning your payment is for last months usage. Check your settings to confirm.

My bank lets me do chargebacks in cases like this.

Maybe they're gonna refund the paid but unused days proportionally? Try asking.

There are presumably no laws against this

For the United States, that is correct. It is up to each business to dictate how this works.

it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up

Yes it was. Patreon's Terms of Use

You may cancel your free trial or recurring payments at any time, as described above. For monthly and annual memberships, canceling or lowering the tier support of your membership will impact your next recurring charge

Canceling your membership or lowering the tier support below the applicable threshold may result in your loss of access to membership subscription benefits, including a creator’s patron-only posts and other benefits. You may also lose access to offerings you’ve purchased and membership subscription benefits

There are two things being discussed here. The service and the payment. The first statement indicates that a change between you and Patreon on terms will affect the payment on the next cycle, so if you were billed monthly on the next month. But a change between you two will affect the service immediately.

There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month

There is a distinct possibility that they actually cannot do this because they've never asked their programming team to write such a thing in their payment processing. Can their programming team write such a thing? Oh absolutely. But if they've not actually written such a thing, then they cannot technically do it because it just simply does not exist. I written software for some time now, and this kind of technical, has actually happened to me where the dev team asked if such should be programmed and higher up indicated specifically that such SHOULD NOT be written for pretty much the reason that it thus prevents such from ever being a possibility to be offered to customers. So just FYI, their software might not be able to do this by purposeful omission of such. It would not be the first company to have done this.

I think this kind of practice is shit. And the "free but if you don't cancel becomes a monthly subscription" kind of stuff the FTC is looking to add to their list of dark business patterns. I won't bore you with details but the FTC is pretty hit and miss with their regulations and Congress is constantly in a back and forth of giving it super charged powers and making it toothless. So companies that can, usually litigate the FTC until a new President or Congressional composition comes into play that will pull back the FTC.

but I do think that there should be a law that forces providers of subscription services to allow users to access their subscription for the entire period for which they have paid, regardless of whether they cancel their subscription if no refund is due

You know what's really crazy is in other industries, things like pro-rated and payment terms must match service terms, all of that is required under law. I'm in an industry now that has such regulations and boy if the law didn't require it, they sure as shit wouldn't do it. There's nothing stopping these same tried and tested laws from applying to online services, outside of lobbyist "asking" Congress and State Assemblies to not do such. So I agree with you there, this kind of pattern in online services is shit. But they are absolutely legally allowed to do this kind of bullshit.

Yep, happened to me when accessing paid content of a podcast, can't remember the platform since they switched, but I couldn't remove the auto renewal without canceling, and canceling would forfeit my access right there.

Just want to point out that there's no way for you to know there isn't a technical reason they can't achieve something.

I'm running into a lot of that with Shopify. Lots of dumb things they should support that even app devs can't do.

For example, do you want to buy a membership but have a b2b account type? Nope. You as the customer don't even know if you have that.

Another example - do you want to sell someone a membership over the phone? Nope. Must do it on the website only. Seems like something that wouldn't be true, but it is. Tech isn't perfect and can be very expensive to customize.

That said, sounds like you'll be ok based on the comments here 😀