Bit of a rant here, but I am currently subscribed to a game development related Patreon because I wanted to follow the development of a project that was interesting to me. The reason I covered the name is that the developer is doing a fantastic job with the project, posting regularly and providing interesting and informative posts, but the main advantage of Patreon is simply that he also provides builds which I was interested in checking out.
Patreon rebilled at the beginning of the month and I thought “Fine I guess, but I don’t really want to pay $6 a month to get test builds of this game” and tried to cancel, assuming it would simply not rebill next month, but instead of cancelling rebilling, Patreon says I will immediately lose access to everything I can currently see on Patreon and new posts for this month, even though it billed me for this month literally three days ago.
There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month, but they are clearly hoping I’ll be scared to lose access to what I’ve paid for and will forget about cancelling later in the month, which would be the better time to do it, since I would benefit from access to more posts and development builds. There are a few other subscriptions I’ve used in the past that remove access to everything the instant you cancel, but even Amazon lets me continue free trials of Prime until the end of the trial period when I cancel it.
There are presumably no laws against this, or it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up, 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.
I’m pretty sure you will actually keep your subscription access for the rest of the month.
It’s just misleading wording. You lose access immediately after the billing period, not immediately after canceling.
“If you cancel” implies that the “immediately” refers to the act of canceling. If your interpretation is right, it feels more like downright lying.
Which would be good but you will only realise if thats the case or not when it is too late.
Some companies like amazon intentionally do this for the exact reason to scare people and hope they forget to cancel.
Subscriptions as a system are fine, why and how you implement them tells you a lot about the company you are dealing with.
BUT: As mentioned in other posts, it might just be a technical issue due to bad software design/choice OR it might be a setting you can pick as the owner of the patreon, because for some types of patreons it would make a difference if it ends immediately or at the end of the period OR bad wording. Not pitchfork time quite yet.
Please keep us updated, OP.
I sign up for Patreons, watch/pay for them for awhile, and cancel several times a year.
In all cases so far, membership benefits have persisted until the end of the billing period.
Maybe the updated TOS language was to cover a future where that doesn’t happen, or it was written by somebody who doesn’t understand how the service actually works.
Yeah, I think you’re right… that’s how Amazon Prime words it too if you want to cancel but it doesn’t actually cancel until the billing period ends. Scummy.