Netflix, Dropbox, Evernote, the New York Times, Loot Crate, BarkBox and more. With the proliferation of the subscription economy, the list of subscription and subscription box companies is endless with new players jumping on the subscription bandwagon every week. We now subscribe to so many products and services that it’s hard to keep track of them all. In fact, we are probably paying for some subscriptions we forgot we signed up for, we didn’t realize that we’d enrolled in, or we forgot to cancel after the free trial.
A recent study done in the U.K. shows that Brits spend £338 million pounds (or $478 million U.S.) every month on subscriptions they no longer use, including everything from magazines and newspapers to gym memberships and streaming services! That’s a lot of money wasted.
In another example, Forbes reported on an American couple that spent nearly $7,500 over an 18-month period on unused subscriptions, including Experian credit tracker, Spotify, eFax, Dropbox and Disney Online for an average of $416 a month. Yikes!
But how can consumers stay on top of all of these subscriptions? Aside from keeping perfect records, subscribers can review their monthly bank and credit card statements to see which subscriptions and other charges are posted to their accounts on a recurring basis.
See a subscription you don’t want? No problem many subscription services are easy to cancel via email or updated an account online. Others require some digging – and maybe a phone call or a certified letter – to sever the subscriber-subscription company relationship. This can be a hassle, though, right? Nobody’s got time for that.
That’s what companies like Trim and Truebill are counting on. These new “unsubscribe” services help consumers identify recurring subscriptions and cancel those they no longer want. Some services are free while others charge a fee. Here is a rundown of some of those services:
Trim
Trim: Launched in October 2015, Trim calls itself a “personal financial assistant that finds ways for you to save money.” It looks at a customer’s bank and credit card transaction history to identify recurring charges that could be subscriptions or other automatic payments like renter’s insurance.
Once someone signs up for Trim, the company sends a text listing all active subscriptions. With a text reply, the customer identifies subscriptions to cancel, and Trim does the deed on their behalf. Trim cancels many subscriptions for free, but it charges $6 for hard-to-cancel subscriptions that aren’t automated yet or that require intervention via certified mail or phone. Remember Kate Hudson’s Fabletics’ subscription that was nearly impossible to cancel? This is one Trim would probably charge you for.
Here’s how Trim works. When a customer signs up to use Trim, Trim uses an algorithm to scan their credit card bill or bank statement to look for familiar merchant names like CBS All Access, Pandora, PlayStation Plus, Microsoft Office and Blue Apron. Trim looks at subsequent statements to identify recurring charges versus one-time charges, then they send customers a list via text and the users can choose who to keep and who to dump.
Trim told Subscription Insider the process is primarily automated but with enough human oversight to ensure 100% accuracy. The transaction data (date/amount of most recent transaction) is critical to authenticating the user who wishes to cancel the account. In some situations, a simple email is all it takes for Trim to cancel a customer’s subscription. In other cases, it is a “frustratingly onerous manual process.”
To use Trim, customers have to provide the company with access to their personal data. The company uses “bank-level security,” including 256-bit SSL encryption on its website, encrypted databases and two-factor authentication to safeguard your information. The company uses Plaid to securely connect to more than 15,000 financial institutions in the U.S. using its customers’ online banking credentials. Trim says customer banking credentials “never touch” their servers, which are hosted by Amazon Web Services, and the data is not stored in any way or sold or shared with a third party.
Trim isn’t offering this subscription cancellation service because it is so magnanimous, however. It sees an opportunity. Trim is providing this mostly-free service because it plans to offer a “premium, high-touch financial advising service” in the future, and this free subscription cancellation service will provide the company with warm leads in its database full of (hopefully) satisfied customers.
Truebill
Truebill: Truebill is another startup that wants to help customers find and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Truebill scans a consumer’s online bank and credit card statements to identify recurring subscriptions. It notifies the user through its online and mobile dashboards. Customers log into the dashboard to choose which subscriptions to cancel.
In many cases, this is done with one-click and the email address associated with the account to be canceled, and the subscription is automatically canceled using Truebill technology once the subscriber clicks “cancel” from within the Truebill dashboard.
In other cases, subscribers must provide additional information. This varies by subscription company. For example, Netflix requires a subscriber’s name, email address, and billing address before it can process the cancellation. While some gyms like Equinox are more reasonable in accommodating membership cancellation requests, others like 24 Hour Fitness must be done via certified mail. Truebill does this by sending the gym (e.g., 24 Fitness) a system-generated certified letter.
CEO and founder Yahya Mokhtarzada told Subscription Insider that the cancellation process is either completely automated for certain subscriptions and mostly automated in others. In all cases, prior to submitting cancellation requests to subscription companies like Hulu and Birchbox, there is human oversight and review by Truebill to be sure cancellation requests are valid and complete.
How simple the cancellation process is depends on the subscription company, and Mokhtarzada told us that how progressive the company is in its cancellation procedures is directly proportional to the age of the company. Legacy companies like newspapers, for example, often require a phone call to a customer service rep. Newer companies like Netflix, however, make the process simple. In fact, Netflix proactively refunds a customer’s money for the months they didn’t use the service.
“It’s a better paradigm for subscription companies to provide a good user experience, even for customers who are cancelling their service,” Mokhtarzada said.
Since Truebill’s launch in early 2016, approximately 30,000 people have used the free service, and 17% have cancelled at least one subscription. The average user who takes advantage of the cancel functionality saves $512 per year on average by discontinuing unwanted subscriptions. Truebill’s most common cancellations are for:
Instant Checkmate |
25.00% (of users canceled this service) |
Credit Expert |
18.06% |
Ipsy |
14.29% |
BeenVerified |
13.33% |
JUSTFAB |
13.33% |
Dreamstime |
13.04% |
American Express Credit Secure |
12.00% |
eFax |
10.81% |
American Home Shield |
10.53% |
Stamps.com |
10.19% |
myFICO |
10.00% |
Boingo |
9.76% |
What Truebill does differently is that it provides customers with monthly summaries through its dashboard. These summaries identify price changes, like rate hikes, and alert users to important subscription-related events such as double charges or charging the customer after the cancellation request has been submitted which is “astonishingly common,” said Mokhtarzada. Like Trim, Truebill claims it offers bank-level security, and it promises never to sell or share private customer data with a third party.
Unlike Trim, Truebill is a completely free service. In fact, on its website, it says it won’t ever ask for customer credit card numbers, so Truebill couldn’t bill customers even if it wanted to. So how does it make money? Mokhtarzada said it won’t charge users for the service, but it hopes to become known as a one-stop platform for subscriptions, including discovery, sign-up, management and cancellation. Within six months, Truebill wants to develop relationships with subscription companies who will pay Truebill to allow it to facilitate one-click sign-up for Truebill customers.
Billy
Billy: Billy is a new budgeting app for iOS that helps consumers manage their monthly subscriptions and bills by keeping track of fixed costs (e.g., rent, mortgage, car payment, etc.) and recurring payments like Dropbox and Apple Music, says TechCrunch. With a simple interface, users manually enter in the expenses they want to track – including subscriptions. Billy has a pre-built list of subscriptions to track, but users can enter in their own custom descriptions too. Its features include:
- Ability to add subscriptions (free)
- Get an overview of subscriptions (free)
- Receive a notification when a bill is due (free)
- Create custom subscriptions (free)
- Add more than 4 subscriptions (paid)
Billy helps consumers keep track of subscriptions, but it does not cancel them for app users. This must be done by the subscriber manually because it is a budgeting app, not a true subscription management tool. Billy, too, says personal data is completely safe. In this case, data is stored on the user’s iPhone and is included in their iCloud backup.
Billy currently uses the freemium model, so users can download the app from the App Store and add their first four subscriptions for free. To add more than four subscriptions, the user must make an in-app purchase for $0.99.
Unroll.me
Unroll.me: “Email doesn’t have to suck.” That’s Unroll.me’s pledge to users. Unroll.me is a slightly different tool than those that manage paid subscriptions. This one helps users manage their inboxes by freeing them from unwanted email subscriptions. This YouTube video explains how it works:
Insider Take:
With the explosion of new subscription services, apps and content in the subscription economy, it’s no wonder that start-ups are starting to address the issue of cancellation. We predict there will be more services like these in the near future, some will be good and some will not, but the market will shake itself out.
For consumers, these services offer an opportunity to review subscriptions, including email newsletters, to see what they are enrolled in. Consumers can make more informed decisions, and rather than ignoring services they don’t use, they can cancel them and allocate those subscription dollars elsewhere.
That said, the jury is still out on whether using these types of services will become mainstream. On one hand, these tools provide:
- Better subscription management
- Better email management
- Greater awareness of subscriptions and their costs (brand awareness for subscription companies!)
- Potential cost savings
One the other hand, these companies will need to overcome the challenge of trust with consumers:
- Will consumers trust them with their financial information, including access to personal data, banking and credit card information, and email contacts? Regardless of the level of security offered, this is scary stuff, and there are risks involved as hackers and fraudsters become more adept at getting around online security.
- Are these services ready for prime time? Maybe not. Some of the services have flawed filtering processes. This is particularly true of Unroll.me which has been blasted online (here’s one example on Benchmark) for filtering, deleting and unsubscribing the wrong emails. Yikes!
For subscription companies, the proliferation of unsubscribe services means a loss of control. With a middleman now controlling their data, their subscribers or members will no longer deal directly with them to terminate their subscription or membership relationship. This carries a lot of potential risk. Depending on the middleman, the quality of that middleman’s product, and how they work with subscription businesses, this could end up being very adversarial or beneficial to subscription companies.
Regardless, it’s imperative for subscription companies to avoid “black hat” tricks to keep subscribers. Like in SEO “white hat” best practices, subscription companies keep theirs subscribers with a great service, product or content that absolutely delights, inspires and over-delivers on expectations – and not with tricks like making it difficult to unsubscribe. Best-practice acquisition, onboarding, and retention strategies, combined with a great subscription product, should keep subscribers coming back each month and year.